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Modern European languages and universality
Hirtory of European ideas, Vol. 16, NO. 4-6, PP. 371-375. 1993 Printed in Great Britain
MODERN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
0191-6599/93 %6.00+0.00 Pergamon Press Lid
AND UNIVERSALITY
ALBERT JORDAN*
The prospect of further political integration of Europe has raised the question of a common European language. The economic arguments for encouraging such a ‘universal’ language are readily apparent. The EEC currently spends vast amounts on translation into only a few of the several languages used by the Community’s members. But beyond the looming cloud of financial urgency there is the instinctive if apprehensive reflex on the part of Europeans that any definable polity (as the Community promises or threatens to become) requires its own distinctive language. The apprehension arises from a generally shared experience that a distinctive language encompasses every aspect of an individual’s destiny, and decisively so in the vital spheres of culture and personal relationships. The prospect of one’s primary distinctive language being eclipsed by the emergence of another (and for the majority of Europeans it would indeed be another) distinctive idiom may be intellectually entertained but affectively rejected. Yet this experience of distinctive language as an all-encompassing existential reality, and a must for the viability of a definable polity, stems in no small measure from the historical fact that modern European languages are themselves triumphs of relative universality. Within their sharply defined political boundaries these languages generally reign supreme. As a sop to democratic pluralism, other languages within the same borders are tolerated or granted a privileged minority status. The present paper looks at how the ideological groundwork for the relative universality of modern European languages was laid in Renaissance Italy. Specifically, we shall be looking at the Preface to the first book of Lorenzo VaIla’s Elegances of the Latin Language, and deduce from it (a) his view that a quality language is the condition for the cultural superiority which both expresses and reinforces political dominion, and (b) his view of what constitutes a ‘quality’ language. We shall also briefly discuss how the old wine of linguistic rectitude when poured into the new bottles of national polities and fortified by print and audiovisual technologies, ferments into the heady brew of ‘distinctive’ language. One of the most influential books to come out of the Italian Renaissance, Six Books of the Elegances of theLatin Language,’ by Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was also one of the first to receive the honours of publication by means of the new technology of printing. Its celebrity was equalled perhaps only by its usefulness both for students of classical Latin and the Latin of Roman civil law. Less commented on is the paean to the Latin language in the Preface to the first book, *Universiti: Concordia, 145.5bld de Maisonneuve ouest, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8, Canada. 371
372
Albert Jordan
a paean that may be described as a paradigm of attitudes towards national languages still prevalent and potent today. Its starting point is that the Romans excelled all the other empires of history by the extent to which they propagated their language. Fraught with the culture that distinguishes civilised peoples from barbarians, Latin has an innate virtue capable even of reconciling the conquered to their conquerors. As the providers of such a magnificent language, the Romans transcended the mundane and self-interested sphere of conquest and deserved to be ranked in the heavens along with the other divine benefactors of humanity. Indeed, while these other benefactors may have revealed to humanity the means to satisfy their bodily necessities, the Latin language, just as importantly, offered nourishment to the soul. Valla surmises three reasons why Latin has been singled out for such a supernatural function. Firstly, the Romans cultivated language with as much energy as they developed their military prowess. Secondly they handsomely rewarded those who taught the language. And thirdly, Latin as spoken in Rome was the exemplar all were encouraged to follow. The divine character of Latin is attested by its having survived the death of the earthly imperium that begat it.* But the divine nature of Latin as evinced by its perdurability in time is matched by its unicity of form. Like one universal law, there is for many peoples one Roman language. What Valla means by this is a standardised language, as is clear from the context where he sneeringly compares the unicity of Latin to the multiplicity of Greek. Because it has several variations Greek cannot compete with Latin as a universal language purveying an all-inclusive culture able to unite peoples of diverse ethnic and linguistic origins. Lacking unity, Greek is the image of anarchy, ‘like so many factions in the State’. With the superiority of Latin thus eloquently affirmed, Valla then goes on to bewail the disfigurement of Latin at the ignorant hands of barbarians over the passage of time. As a modern Roman patriot, and through his concern for mankind generally, he now sees his task to be the rescue of Latin and its restoration to its former high quality, by which he means a return to the standard of Latin used by the best authors of Antiquity. Underlying this exhortation to the civic task of restoring the Latin language is the conviction that a return to the superior Latin of Rome’s greatest period will be a springboard to renewed Italian greatness. Even this brief summary shows Valla’s Preface to be the product of a skilled publicist, and it is not my intention to refute him in any way. Perhaps the best comment is provided by Arnold Toynbee’s characterisation of the Renaissance as an evocation of the ghost of the Roman empire, or better still maybe, Marshal MacLuhan’s view of Renaissance Italy as the producer of Hollywood sets of Antiquity. But whether ghost or Hollywood set, what Valla conjured up offered a strategy to minds concerned less with renewing the glory that was Rome than with affirming the present power and sovereignty of burgeoning kingdoms like France and Spain. Dominion over others, however obtained, was strengthened and perpetuated by cultural dominion. And this cultural dominion was best ensured by a unified language consciously cultivated by patriotic subjects. If, let us say, the kingdom of France contained individuals prepared to cultivate their native but unstable vernacular with the same fervour that Roman patriots had theirs, then this stabilised, value-added idiom would undoubtedly perform for the
Modern European Languages and Universality
373
kingdom the same function that Latin had for the Roman empire. This in fact is the gist of a suggestion made to Louis XII in 1507 by one of his officials, Claude de Seyssel(1450-1520): ‘When the Roman princes and people were masters of the world, they found no better means of perpetuating their dominion than to enrich, enlarge and publish their Latin language which, to begin with, was as crude and impoverished as our French idiom is at present.‘3 A similar policy, with royal encouragement, would help Louis consolidate his conquests in Italy by a process of assimilation. For the humanist Seyssel, this meant creating a corpus of printed books (une bonne licterature francoyse) in a French idiom stylistically akin to the Latin. Seyssel did not enter into the mechanics of making French a unified and therefore a high quality language. The programme for this enterprise was drawn up, appropriately enough, by a Sorbonne grammarian turned King’s printer, Geoffrey Tory (1480-1533?), who in his Champ FZeury4 echoes Valla’s claim that the Romans ‘prospered and won more victories with their language than with their lances’. He is obviously aware of Valla’s criticism of Greek and how the Italian’s strictures might equally apply to the distinctive varieties of French idiom. But with that self-confidence so characteristic of the vernacular civic humanists in the sixteenth century, he points out, like Seyssel, that since Greek and Latin had to start from equally unpromising origins, the inchoate French of his time was just as amenable ‘to being regulated and put into good order’.5 The operative words are ‘order’ and ‘regulation’. The source of authority for these operations is to be found in the civic virtue and zeal of learned men. As it happened, these qualities were to be found in abundance in a well-defined body of the king’s subjects. These were, in the kingdom of France, the officiers, trained in Latin and the law. Like their counterparts in Spain, the letrados, the officiers purchased their office and considered themselves an integral part of the State. From the State they expected the reward for their commitment and they sought it as much in the form of social distinction as they did of pecuniary gain. The drive to endow the majesty of the State with a standardised synthesis of regionally differentiated vernaculars and the high culture produced by such endeavour also endowed its agents with a matching glamour. Standardisation of course begets standards. Respecting those standards involves many years of discipline and constant vigilance thereafter. In preindustrial Europe this was not a situation that concerned the majority of its inhabitants. When Valla spoke of Latin as being one and the same for many peoples, he was certainly not understood by his sixteenth century vernacular disciples as meaning that all the inhabitants of the empire spoke the ‘pure’ Latin he was extolling. For them the power of language meant the language of power and was intended for those whose station in life called them to the exercise of authority over others. In the territorial States taking shape in early modern Europe, a universal language was conceived of as a joint venture by those who had the common task of administering a diversity of regions. That is why in France, for example, the French language as it had been minutely standardised over several generations was a foreign idiom to the majority of those who at the time of the French revolution in 1789 comprised the population of the country. Perhaps one of the most atonishing developments in revolutionary France was that a standardised French language which had hitherto been the jealously
374
Albert Jordan
guarded preserve of a minority was now proclaimed the language of liberty and thus charged with an affective energy it had previously lacked. It was perhaps then that for the first time a republic one and indivisible was equated with one universal language for all. Thus the Renaissance ideal of a Latin language whose divine civilising power stemmed from its being a uniform idiom (as opposed to multiform Greek) was to find its epiphany in the standardised vernacular of a modern European State about to embark on unprecedented career of conquest. The well-known response to that career has perhaps obscured the fact that the linguistic homogenisation of the nineteenth-century Nation-States had to await the introduction of widespread public primary education and the accompanying rise of the popular press before it got truly under way. It may even be argued that the process has only recently been completed, as far as it ever can be, with the advent of the radio, motion talking pictures and especially television. The reason for this is that for many Europeans, their national language has rarely been their ‘mother’tongue, a tongue only too often bearing the stigma of region, class or some other invidiously differentiating characteristic. To speak, and even more to write proper English, or proper French or proper German is to make obeisance at the shrine of standardisation to whose mysteries admission has finally been granted after years of apprenticeship. It is perhaps only over the last two generations that a majority of Europeans have had the opportunity to undertake such an apprenticeship. Paradoxically enough, even an unsuccessful attempt to reach the high standards of a standardised national language is enough to endow that language with a superiority that makes partial possession of it a guarantee of ‘identity’. ‘Identity’ has become a more beguiling concept as it has veered away from its repressive connotations associated with bureaucratic supervision. It now indicates a desirable quality of being. What better means to affirm this quality than through a language of high quality, which all the standardised modern European languages may claim to be? Especially since the means of projecting oneself through electronic word-processors and video camera and voice recorders is no longer the monopoly of the traditional creators of culture. It may be that the relative universality of its language will be one of the principal legacies the Nation-State of western Europe bequeaths to its citizens as its fierce political sovereignty mellows into the future of European community. In that case, the national languages would be in the situation described by Valla where Latin survived the demise of the Roman empire. 6 It may even be that, freed from the tutelage of the Nation-State, the national languages will thrive as never before. If this does indeed prove to be the case, there will be no need for a common European language with all that such a universality would imply in the way of challenge to hard-won national but now local identities. The existential need for communication between these different linguistic groups (which is of course the ostensible reason for mooting the adoption of a common language in the first place) will probably generate its own satisfaction in the form of freely consented plurilingualism on the part of those whose activities require it. Who knows but that, with time, widespread plurilingualism may even produce its own distinctive macaronic culture? Albert Jordan Concordia University, Montreal
Modern European Languages
and Universality
375
NOTES
1. See La Letteratura italiana, Storia e testi, Vol. 13, ed. E. Garin 2. 3.
4. 5.
6.
(Milan, 1962), pp. 595-600. See note 6. Claude de Seyssel in the ‘Prologue. . . en la translation de Justin. . . address& au tres puissant et tres Chrestien Roy de France, Loys XII de ce nom’. Offered in 1509 (1510, new style) to Louis XII, the text was not printed until 1559. (Paris, 1529), Le premier livre, fourth leaf. Ibid. In his preface ‘Aux Lecteurs’ Tory anticipates the programme of standardisation of the French language to be undertaken by the Acadtmie Francaise at Richelieu’s behest in 1635. ‘We have lost Rome, we have lost dominion and sovereign power. . . yet by virtue of this even more prestigious power [of Latin] we still reign over a large part of the earth.. .’ Op. cit., p. 596.
MODERN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
0191-6599/93 %6.00+0.00 Pergamon Press Lid
AND UNIVERSALITY
ALBERT JORDAN*
The prospect of further political integration of Europe has raised the question of a common European language. The economic arguments for encouraging such a ‘universal’ language are readily apparent. The EEC currently spends vast amounts on translation into only a few of the several languages used by the Community’s members. But beyond the looming cloud of financial urgency there is the instinctive if apprehensive reflex on the part of Europeans that any definable polity (as the Community promises or threatens to become) requires its own distinctive language. The apprehension arises from a generally shared experience that a distinctive language encompasses every aspect of an individual’s destiny, and decisively so in the vital spheres of culture and personal relationships. The prospect of one’s primary distinctive language being eclipsed by the emergence of another (and for the majority of Europeans it would indeed be another) distinctive idiom may be intellectually entertained but affectively rejected. Yet this experience of distinctive language as an all-encompassing existential reality, and a must for the viability of a definable polity, stems in no small measure from the historical fact that modern European languages are themselves triumphs of relative universality. Within their sharply defined political boundaries these languages generally reign supreme. As a sop to democratic pluralism, other languages within the same borders are tolerated or granted a privileged minority status. The present paper looks at how the ideological groundwork for the relative universality of modern European languages was laid in Renaissance Italy. Specifically, we shall be looking at the Preface to the first book of Lorenzo VaIla’s Elegances of the Latin Language, and deduce from it (a) his view that a quality language is the condition for the cultural superiority which both expresses and reinforces political dominion, and (b) his view of what constitutes a ‘quality’ language. We shall also briefly discuss how the old wine of linguistic rectitude when poured into the new bottles of national polities and fortified by print and audiovisual technologies, ferments into the heady brew of ‘distinctive’ language. One of the most influential books to come out of the Italian Renaissance, Six Books of the Elegances of theLatin Language,’ by Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was also one of the first to receive the honours of publication by means of the new technology of printing. Its celebrity was equalled perhaps only by its usefulness both for students of classical Latin and the Latin of Roman civil law. Less commented on is the paean to the Latin language in the Preface to the first book, *Universiti: Concordia, 145.5bld de Maisonneuve ouest, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8, Canada. 371
372
Albert Jordan
a paean that may be described as a paradigm of attitudes towards national languages still prevalent and potent today. Its starting point is that the Romans excelled all the other empires of history by the extent to which they propagated their language. Fraught with the culture that distinguishes civilised peoples from barbarians, Latin has an innate virtue capable even of reconciling the conquered to their conquerors. As the providers of such a magnificent language, the Romans transcended the mundane and self-interested sphere of conquest and deserved to be ranked in the heavens along with the other divine benefactors of humanity. Indeed, while these other benefactors may have revealed to humanity the means to satisfy their bodily necessities, the Latin language, just as importantly, offered nourishment to the soul. Valla surmises three reasons why Latin has been singled out for such a supernatural function. Firstly, the Romans cultivated language with as much energy as they developed their military prowess. Secondly they handsomely rewarded those who taught the language. And thirdly, Latin as spoken in Rome was the exemplar all were encouraged to follow. The divine character of Latin is attested by its having survived the death of the earthly imperium that begat it.* But the divine nature of Latin as evinced by its perdurability in time is matched by its unicity of form. Like one universal law, there is for many peoples one Roman language. What Valla means by this is a standardised language, as is clear from the context where he sneeringly compares the unicity of Latin to the multiplicity of Greek. Because it has several variations Greek cannot compete with Latin as a universal language purveying an all-inclusive culture able to unite peoples of diverse ethnic and linguistic origins. Lacking unity, Greek is the image of anarchy, ‘like so many factions in the State’. With the superiority of Latin thus eloquently affirmed, Valla then goes on to bewail the disfigurement of Latin at the ignorant hands of barbarians over the passage of time. As a modern Roman patriot, and through his concern for mankind generally, he now sees his task to be the rescue of Latin and its restoration to its former high quality, by which he means a return to the standard of Latin used by the best authors of Antiquity. Underlying this exhortation to the civic task of restoring the Latin language is the conviction that a return to the superior Latin of Rome’s greatest period will be a springboard to renewed Italian greatness. Even this brief summary shows Valla’s Preface to be the product of a skilled publicist, and it is not my intention to refute him in any way. Perhaps the best comment is provided by Arnold Toynbee’s characterisation of the Renaissance as an evocation of the ghost of the Roman empire, or better still maybe, Marshal MacLuhan’s view of Renaissance Italy as the producer of Hollywood sets of Antiquity. But whether ghost or Hollywood set, what Valla conjured up offered a strategy to minds concerned less with renewing the glory that was Rome than with affirming the present power and sovereignty of burgeoning kingdoms like France and Spain. Dominion over others, however obtained, was strengthened and perpetuated by cultural dominion. And this cultural dominion was best ensured by a unified language consciously cultivated by patriotic subjects. If, let us say, the kingdom of France contained individuals prepared to cultivate their native but unstable vernacular with the same fervour that Roman patriots had theirs, then this stabilised, value-added idiom would undoubtedly perform for the
Modern European Languages and Universality
373
kingdom the same function that Latin had for the Roman empire. This in fact is the gist of a suggestion made to Louis XII in 1507 by one of his officials, Claude de Seyssel(1450-1520): ‘When the Roman princes and people were masters of the world, they found no better means of perpetuating their dominion than to enrich, enlarge and publish their Latin language which, to begin with, was as crude and impoverished as our French idiom is at present.‘3 A similar policy, with royal encouragement, would help Louis consolidate his conquests in Italy by a process of assimilation. For the humanist Seyssel, this meant creating a corpus of printed books (une bonne licterature francoyse) in a French idiom stylistically akin to the Latin. Seyssel did not enter into the mechanics of making French a unified and therefore a high quality language. The programme for this enterprise was drawn up, appropriately enough, by a Sorbonne grammarian turned King’s printer, Geoffrey Tory (1480-1533?), who in his Champ FZeury4 echoes Valla’s claim that the Romans ‘prospered and won more victories with their language than with their lances’. He is obviously aware of Valla’s criticism of Greek and how the Italian’s strictures might equally apply to the distinctive varieties of French idiom. But with that self-confidence so characteristic of the vernacular civic humanists in the sixteenth century, he points out, like Seyssel, that since Greek and Latin had to start from equally unpromising origins, the inchoate French of his time was just as amenable ‘to being regulated and put into good order’.5 The operative words are ‘order’ and ‘regulation’. The source of authority for these operations is to be found in the civic virtue and zeal of learned men. As it happened, these qualities were to be found in abundance in a well-defined body of the king’s subjects. These were, in the kingdom of France, the officiers, trained in Latin and the law. Like their counterparts in Spain, the letrados, the officiers purchased their office and considered themselves an integral part of the State. From the State they expected the reward for their commitment and they sought it as much in the form of social distinction as they did of pecuniary gain. The drive to endow the majesty of the State with a standardised synthesis of regionally differentiated vernaculars and the high culture produced by such endeavour also endowed its agents with a matching glamour. Standardisation of course begets standards. Respecting those standards involves many years of discipline and constant vigilance thereafter. In preindustrial Europe this was not a situation that concerned the majority of its inhabitants. When Valla spoke of Latin as being one and the same for many peoples, he was certainly not understood by his sixteenth century vernacular disciples as meaning that all the inhabitants of the empire spoke the ‘pure’ Latin he was extolling. For them the power of language meant the language of power and was intended for those whose station in life called them to the exercise of authority over others. In the territorial States taking shape in early modern Europe, a universal language was conceived of as a joint venture by those who had the common task of administering a diversity of regions. That is why in France, for example, the French language as it had been minutely standardised over several generations was a foreign idiom to the majority of those who at the time of the French revolution in 1789 comprised the population of the country. Perhaps one of the most atonishing developments in revolutionary France was that a standardised French language which had hitherto been the jealously
374
Albert Jordan
guarded preserve of a minority was now proclaimed the language of liberty and thus charged with an affective energy it had previously lacked. It was perhaps then that for the first time a republic one and indivisible was equated with one universal language for all. Thus the Renaissance ideal of a Latin language whose divine civilising power stemmed from its being a uniform idiom (as opposed to multiform Greek) was to find its epiphany in the standardised vernacular of a modern European State about to embark on unprecedented career of conquest. The well-known response to that career has perhaps obscured the fact that the linguistic homogenisation of the nineteenth-century Nation-States had to await the introduction of widespread public primary education and the accompanying rise of the popular press before it got truly under way. It may even be argued that the process has only recently been completed, as far as it ever can be, with the advent of the radio, motion talking pictures and especially television. The reason for this is that for many Europeans, their national language has rarely been their ‘mother’tongue, a tongue only too often bearing the stigma of region, class or some other invidiously differentiating characteristic. To speak, and even more to write proper English, or proper French or proper German is to make obeisance at the shrine of standardisation to whose mysteries admission has finally been granted after years of apprenticeship. It is perhaps only over the last two generations that a majority of Europeans have had the opportunity to undertake such an apprenticeship. Paradoxically enough, even an unsuccessful attempt to reach the high standards of a standardised national language is enough to endow that language with a superiority that makes partial possession of it a guarantee of ‘identity’. ‘Identity’ has become a more beguiling concept as it has veered away from its repressive connotations associated with bureaucratic supervision. It now indicates a desirable quality of being. What better means to affirm this quality than through a language of high quality, which all the standardised modern European languages may claim to be? Especially since the means of projecting oneself through electronic word-processors and video camera and voice recorders is no longer the monopoly of the traditional creators of culture. It may be that the relative universality of its language will be one of the principal legacies the Nation-State of western Europe bequeaths to its citizens as its fierce political sovereignty mellows into the future of European community. In that case, the national languages would be in the situation described by Valla where Latin survived the demise of the Roman empire. 6 It may even be that, freed from the tutelage of the Nation-State, the national languages will thrive as never before. If this does indeed prove to be the case, there will be no need for a common European language with all that such a universality would imply in the way of challenge to hard-won national but now local identities. The existential need for communication between these different linguistic groups (which is of course the ostensible reason for mooting the adoption of a common language in the first place) will probably generate its own satisfaction in the form of freely consented plurilingualism on the part of those whose activities require it. Who knows but that, with time, widespread plurilingualism may even produce its own distinctive macaronic culture? Albert Jordan Concordia University, Montreal
Modern European Languages
and Universality
375
NOTES
1. See La Letteratura italiana, Storia e testi, Vol. 13, ed. E. Garin 2. 3.
4. 5.
6.
(Milan, 1962), pp. 595-600. See note 6. Claude de Seyssel in the ‘Prologue. . . en la translation de Justin. . . address& au tres puissant et tres Chrestien Roy de France, Loys XII de ce nom’. Offered in 1509 (1510, new style) to Louis XII, the text was not printed until 1559. (Paris, 1529), Le premier livre, fourth leaf. Ibid. In his preface ‘Aux Lecteurs’ Tory anticipates the programme of standardisation of the French language to be undertaken by the Acadtmie Francaise at Richelieu’s behest in 1635. ‘We have lost Rome, we have lost dominion and sovereign power. . . yet by virtue of this even more prestigious power [of Latin] we still reign over a large part of the earth.. .’ Op. cit., p. 596.