Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (71 page)

The first theorist of these new linguistic developments is none other than the leading Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, who lived from 1265 to 1321. In his
De vulgari eloquentia
he recognised that Latin,
grammatica
, was in essence the preserved older form of the Romance languages.
^*

He seems to have had as much difficulty in convincing his audience that these ancestral differences were the predictable result of gradual change as Darwin was to find, with a different subject matter and timescale, five centuries later.

Besides this work in Latin, Dante wrote another one, the
Convivio
or ‘Banquet’, in Italian—not a poem, but a prose work aimed at explaining some of his earlier poems, but at the same time educating people who could not read Latin: ‘I was motivated by the fear of infamy, and I was motivated by the desire to give teaching such as others truly cannot.’
⁹

This was the beginning of the end of Latin’s monopoly on learned information. Henceforth, there would be no field of discourse or function of speech reserved for it. Latin, the language of the grammar books, once felt to be eternal but now recognised as artificial, faced ever increasing competition from spoken languages being committed to writing. It began to die.

DAVID: What newes? haue you heard nothing of the coming of any ship?

ABRAHAM: I heard the thundering of Ordnance, which is a signe of ships coming.
D.: And I heard that a shippe was come from Guiserat.

A.: And what Marchandizes doth she bring?
D.: She is laden with rice, almonds and raysons, she bringeth also many cloathes of all sortes, and very much bombace.
A.: Is this so? surely this news is very much desired.
D.: I heard it so affirmed for a truth.

DAOEDT:
Appa ach gabar? tieda ga-barbarou derribarang cappal?

EBRAHIM:
Souda beta denga’r boenij bedil, iang itoe alamat derri cappal dagang.

D.:
Lagihamba deng’ar catta iang satoe cappal derri Guiserat souda datan.

E.:
Appa peruiniága debaua dia?

D.:
Ini ber’isi, ken bras, ken gorma, zebibt; lagi bauadia bania káyin alus derri samoe’ aieni: lagicapas bania.

E.:
Begitou? itoe gabar bania baick.

D.:
Ia beta deng’ar catta sach begitoe.

Augustine Spaulding,
Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages
, 1614, pp. 1-2
¹

The discovery by the western Europeans that their ships could cross oceans, and bring them directly to distant lands, whether for trade or outright conquest and exploitation, opens a new era in the global history of language spread. All too often, the language communities at the destinations of European shipping proved unable to mount effective military, or political, resistance to the adventuring invaders. When this happened, the victims were frequently decimated, and always forced to submit to a new elite. The spread of languages through the dominance of the new elites was far more pervasive than anything that had been seen before. The results are evident today in the presence of six colonising languages in the list of the world’s top ten languages by population.
^*

The Romance half of these colonising languages, as we have just seen, owed their very existence to the changes that came over the Roman empire after its western regions were dissolved by the Germanic conquests; the decline in mutual intelligibility, and the redefinition of Latin or
grammatica
, to be no longer just their written form but a language separate from them, had led to their development as vehicles of a different sort of community. This community was less intellectual, but often as rich culturally as the Church, which continued to rely on Latin, spoken and written.
¹

Yet before these languages began their accelerated progress round the world, there came an epoch-making development, which emphasised and reinforced the spread of literacy in western Europe. It widened the range of competition between Latin and the vernacular languages, including the Romance ones, and massively raised the stakes in the contest. The result was the dethronement of Latin as the lingua franca of western Christendom: in effect its death, after two millennia, as a language of any real communication and innovation.

The event was the rise of a mass market in printed books. Like the information revolution reorganising the world in our own time, it was in essence the economic effect of the spread of a new technology. Johannes Gutenberg published his edition of the Bible in Mainz in 1450. Very soon, publishing houses sprang up all over Europe, and by 1475 most of the classic works in Latin were available in print.
²
By 1500, 20 million printed volumes had been produced, estimated to correspond to one book for every five people in western Europe.
³

Almost at once comes the Reformation, and the rise of Protestant churches opposed to the established Christianity of the Pope in Rome. This, of course, was no coincidence, but a sign that the new book-publishing revolution had broken open the previously well-guarded access to media of communication. Martin Luther’s works, starting theatrically with his ninety-five theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, were printed and distributed in German translation. His translation of the whole Bible soon followed. The output of German-language publishing houses over the 1520s and 1530s was three times the total of the previous twenty years; Luther’s works accounted for 33 per cent of all German-language publications between 1517 and 1525.
⁴

The tide of new, unfiltered, information was too much for some. In France in 1535, King François I—briefly, and without effect—declared the printing of any books at all a capital offence. The Vatican, more circumspectly, set up the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
, first so named in 1559. But the flow was not stemmed. The important effect was that the channels of long-distance and high-level discourse were switching from oral diffusion at court and university, mediated through manuscript messages, to written distribution of mass-produced texts. Latin had retained its domination as the vehicle of the old-style communications, but under the weight of sheer volume it now yielded to the new. Books might be printed in Latin as well as any other language, and those that were might be expected to enjoy a wider circulation for being written in an international language; but the economics of the book trade remaindered them, clearing its shelves for books in vernacular languages, which would sell in large quantities nearer to the point of production.
⁵

What was happening was one facet of the growing power of the nation-state in western Europe: the replacement of an international intellectual elite, which provided a common background for different kings’ governments, by a much more vocal and influential bourgeoisie, taking control of their local monarchies and making them serve their more worldly purposes. One linguistic effect of this was to replace Latin with national vernaculars, not just for local purposes but even at the level of the latest research.

Latin remained, in theory, a superior vehicle for high-level intellectual discourse: as a language, it had the vocabulary, built up over more than a thousand years of thought and disputation; and as a community, it had the reach, since scholars from all over the west of Europe were accustomed to talking, thinking and writing in it. Each vernacular, by contrast, had to build up equivalent strengths little by little from a much smaller base.

But wherever there was a riot, or a market, the vernaculars had the force of numbers on their side; and the religious controversies and wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed that intellectual issues were as apt to generate sales booms, riots and civil wars as disputations or dynastic conflicts. It was not until the twentieth century that communications media could penetrate deeply enough for an international language to compete effectively with vernaculars on the street. Modern English has found in broadcasting the answer to the threat that book publishing posed for medieval Latin.

Intellectual life conducted in Latin gradually fell away. It took about a century to go. Francis Bacon, publishing his
Advancement of Learning
in English in 1605, wanted to have it translated into Latin ‘to ring a bell to call other wits together … and have that bell heard as far as can be’. It did not actually come out in Latin until 1623, when he remarked: ‘For these modern languages will at one time or another play the bank-rowtes [bankrupts] with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as God shall give me leave to recover it with posterity.’

The last major intellectual work in England to be published in Latin was Newton’s
Principia
in 1687. Since then, science has in general had to be conducted less conveniently, in a variety of languages. It is the price the modern world has paid to keep scientists and intellectuals more closely in touch with society at large.
^*

This second death was more profound than Latin’s first. It was not like the vernacular movements of five hundred years before, when Latin had just lost its use as a written disguise for Romance languages. They had moved on from Latin, and apart, in phonetics and structure; trying to access in written form through a Latin overlay was hard work, and increasingly pointless. But even as it made way for vernacular literature, Latin had retained a significant use: it was still the vehicle for the intellectual discourse that went beyond the popular themes being produced (and appreciated) in Romance. Now, Latin was ceasing to be used in any new thinking at all.

It is revealing to compare the final stages in the life of Latin with those of its fellow classic languages, Greek, Chinese and Sanskrit. Each of these languages, after all, represented the unitary linguistic ideals of an area large enough to split into a number of popular varieties. But only Latin ended up largely replaced by the set of its daughter languages.

Greek never put down deep roots in the regions to which it spread; and when these regions were conquered by others, so that Greeks ceased to be their governing elite, Greek was essentially lost in them. The result was that Greek ended up confined to a relatively small region, mostly under a single, authoritarian government. When the government was reduced in power and then ceased to exist, after the Latin and especially the Turkish conquests, the classical norms that had kept the language united were weakened; but when unitary government was returned, it proved possible, gradually, to move to a new, single, standard for the whole language.