This book offers a highly readable, concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.

In the conversation we focus on the national aspects of the story of modern linguistics: the emergence of the discipline in 19^th century Germany and the passing of the baton to make it an American science in the 20^th century.

James also shares the story of writing the book and how it grew out of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast he hosts.

Enjoy the show!

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Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 12/04/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr James McElvenny. James, is that how you pronounce your name?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that is how I pronounce my name, but I actually do like to encourage varying pronunciations because I think that will give philologists something to do after I die.

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs) Fantastic, so we’ll try another pronunciation like “Mackelveeney”.

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that’s perfect.

Dist Prof Piller: Dr McElvenny, or James, let’s just do it like that – James is a linguist and an intellectual historian at the University of Siegen in Germany. He is the author of “A History of Modern Linguistics” and also of “Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism”. He also hosts the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast.

Today we are going to talk about his new book, “A History of Modern Linguistics”, which has just come out from Edinburgh University Press. Welcome to the show, James.

Dr McElvenny: Thanks for having me on.

Dist Prof Piller: James, can you start us off by telling us how you got to write a “A History of Modern Linguistics”? Aren’t there enough histories of linguistics already?

Dr McElvenny: There are plenty of histories of linguistics. So, what happened is I was doing a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, and I was teaching their course in the history of linguistics while I was there, and the Linguistics editor at Edinburgh University Press came to me. I had already published my first book with them, and the Linguistics editor said that they would like a text book in the history of linguistics for their linguistics series. So, I thought, “Gee, that should be relatively easy. I can just base it on the course I’ve been teaching.”

And I also long had had the ambition of doing a podcast, so I thought that I might be able to imitate Peter Adamson who does the podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps”, and he’s produced books with Oxford University Press based on that podcast. So, I thought, “I could just turn my lectures into a podcast, and I could turn the podcast into a book.”

It didn’t turn out to be quite as simple as that. So, moving from one text type to another, in my experience, was actually quite complicated. Podcasts have their own format and affordances, which I had to adapt my lectures to. And then turning that into a book was also a huge amount of work to make it into a coherent written text. But it’s done now, so… (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: And it’s eminently readable, I really enjoyed reading the book so much. I think the process you’ve just described of trying out the text with your students and then turning it into a podcast and then turning it into the book really shows in the readability of the book. So, I enjoyed that immensely.

Dr McElvenny: I’m glad you think so.

Dist Prof Piller: Tell us – how did you actually choose where to begin and where to end, because it’s not a history of the longue durée from the Greek and Sanskrit grammarians to the present day. It’s actually a much narrower project. So, can you tell us about the beginning and the end?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so it’s meant to be a history specifically of disciplinary linguistics. By that I mean this modern discipline of linguistics that we study at universities. So, I think that there’s a great deal of value in a longue durée history of linguistics which is the modes that most histories that have previously been published are written in. They go back to ancient Greece and follow things through the medieval period and the early modern period, right up to the modern era.

That’s very good, but it’s more of a sort of old-fashioned history of ideas kind of approach. And I think there are some problems with that, like it sort of is based on the assumption that there are facts about the nature of language and that we’ve discovered them and that it’s a story of simple progress of us building on what has happened in the past. Of course, we do know a lot of things about language that are the direct result of the research that we do today at universities, but we’ve also forgotten a lot of what has come before. We also have, as university researchers in linguistics departments, we also have a very specific perspective on language. There is much, much more that could be said.

So, I think that it can be problematic to assimilate everything that has come before to say that that is all a prelude to what we do now. All of those things that have come before need to be understood on their own terms. Each of those need their own book, and they have their own books. So, I thought I would start when this modern discipline starts. And I don’t say that nothing came before. I actually do refer back to things that came before when they’re relevant to what is happening in the modern discipline. But I do place a boundary there and say, “This is when the modern discipline starts”. And I say that it’s around the beginning of the 19^th century when modern research universities came into being, the first of those being the University of Berlin, and linguistics as a modern university discipline started to develop.

As for the end point, well that has its own story as well. I actually wanted to come much closer to the present, but I also wanted to get the book finished before my funding ran out. This is one of the contingencies of being a researcher in modern linguistics. So, I decided to end it with WWII where there’s a major shift that the sort of centre of gravity of linguistics as a discipline, and of lots of other university disciplines, shifted from Europe to America. There’s the beginnings of that shift in the book, so I talk about figures like Bloomfield and Sapir, and the so-called American Structuralists, but I don’t venture into the sort of Cold War period when America became preeminent.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and look, I think that makes a whole lot of sense, even if it was sort of an extraneous reason. So, you just stated that essentially the book starts with the foundation of the modern research university in Germany in Berlin University. I’d still like to go one little step before that because your book actually starts with Sir William Jones and the discovery, if you will, of the Indo-European language family. Can you tell us a bit about Sir William Jones and why you started there and what was novel about his work?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean I think it’s easy to over-emphasise the role of Sir William Jones. So, this is the traditional fable of how modern Linguistics came into being. So, I repeat it in the book, but I mark it as the traditional fable. I mention that as soon as Linguistics started to form as a discipline, people started writing histories of Linguistics, and this story that started to develop that there was Sir William Jones and then Schlegel and Bop and then Grimm, and so I repeat it, like I rehearse this story because this is designed as an introduction to the history of Linguistics so that people are aware that this is the traditional narrative.

But at the same time, I try to poke holes in it. So, Sir William Jones is well known because he was a British judge in Calcutta and was very interested in philology. In fact, he probably went to India to pursue his philological interests. He studied Sanskrit, and he gave a famous address where he pointed out the similarities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin and said that this must mean that they came from a common ancestor. Then this has sort of been taken as the beginning of historical comparative Linguistics.

But if you actually read Sir William Jones’ address, you immediately see that this is not modern Linguistics as we understand it. The framework that he’s putting this genealogical narrative into is actually a Biblical framework. He’s talking about the sons of Noah spreading across the Earth, and that’s how he identifies the families of languages in the world today. So, it’s a sort of medieval hangover.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I really like that idea of the medieval hangover as you put it, and that still we have medieval ideas baked into modern Linguistics. So, let’s then go from William Jones to the German foundations of modern Linguistics. Essentially, you are telling a story of a national discipline that’s grounded in two nations, if you will. The beginnings in Germany in the 19^th century and then the passing of the baton, if you will, to the United States in the 20^th century.

So, why Germany? What was going on in Germany at the time that provided this fertile ground for the creation of this new discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, above all it’s the creation of the research university which is in no small part an achievement of Humboldt, Wilhelm Humboldt, who was himself very interested in language and made sure that professorships in language were represented in the new research university in Berlin and brought Bop to Berlin to pursue his comparative approach to grammar.

But there’s also a broader social and political context which comes out very clearly in the story of Grimm of German nationalism, of trying to show that people who speak German are a unified national group. This is before the days of Germany as a political unit, so it was a project to try and raise German national consciousness as a way of forging a political unity, and also to create a history for the German nation because the great rivals of the Germans at this time, the French, could trace their own intellectual history back to classical Rome, back to the ancient world, whereas the Germans had nothing. They just had barbarians as their ancestors.

But through historical comparative Linguistics, you could show that the Germans actually belonged to this bigger Indo-European family, you know, that links them up with Sanskrit, an even older, more prestigious tradition as was understood in 19^th century Europe.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. So, can you maybe talk us through some of the key linguistic ideas about what’s new in language now? So, if we start with, you’ve mentioned Bop and Grimm – what’s key for Bop and Grimm and maybe the neogrammarians?

Dr McElvenny: Ok, what’s key? Well, the key methodological breakthroughs that they made – so Bop went through the meticulous task of comparing in excruciating detail the conjugational forms across the European languages, and thereby provided a basis of reconstructing to the ancestor that they could have come from. So, instead of talking in sort of general terms about similarity, you could actually show in detail what the ancestral forms would have looked like.

And then Grimm is usually credited with establishing the principles of sound laws, so showing how specific sounds have changed historically over time.

Dist Prof Piller: And I guess this methodological innovation really was new in a sense and was not necessarily well-received by all the key players at the time. Many people sort of thought that Bop in particular was really pedantic. You cite this nice little limerick of sorts about how he’s really a pedant. So, what’s the tradition against which Linguistics established itself as this very formal and very narrow discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so I mean these grammatical tasks, or these details of grammar that people like Bop were interested in that form the basis of comparative grammar were traditionally considered just to be something that you had to know about in order to read texts in an ancient language. The real task was understanding the culture and the literature that is written in these ancient languages and not to obsess about the grammatical forms.

But Bop, for the first time, spearheaded this tradition where grammar becomes the really important thing. You can make your entire career just out of comparing forms, and the literature, what is actually written in the language, is completely irrelevant. Or is of secondary importance.

I think it’s probably fair to say that this is something that characterises Linguistics as a discipline, that Linguistics as a discipline has this sort of fetishisation of form, by which I mean that Linguists want something that their discipline is about. They want an object that they study that is different from what everyone else has. The traditional philologists have literature and culture and so on.

But the linguists have the language itself. They have the grammar. They have the forms. So it’s all about separating the form off. This is what Bop has done, and then with the neogrammarians who you mentioned, they turn this into an art that the sound laws of how languages change become THE key thing. That’s what it’s all about.

Then even if you move into the structuralist era, you could understand Saussure’s distinction between la langue and la parole as being a further manifestation of this desire to hive off language as a special thing that linguists study themselves. La langue is the formal system of the language –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and it’s an imagined system, right? I mean, he claims or posits this exists and parole is not interesting, but really –

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean it is controversial whether Saussure thought that there could never be any – whether Saussure thought that parole was not interesting at all as a scientific object, but definitely he is usually understood as saying la langue is where all the action is.

Dist Prof Piller: So your book covers these 200 years of intellectual history. There are 15 chapters, and we don’t really have time to go into all of them, but I think you’ve told us very nicely about the German context and where this obsession with form really starts. Let’s maybe jump close to the end of your story, but not quite to the end, not quite to structuralism which is the logical conclusion of the formal obsession. But one step before Sapir and Whorf.

One thing that I’ve noticed, I mean obviously not for the first time, but it’s very clear that the history of modern Linguistics is the history of monolingualism, of national languages, and that there really, because of the way it got started, there really is no interest in language contact and multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

Sapir and Whorf are actually credited with being interested in linguistic diversity. That was actually very important to them, and also drawing on Boaz. So maybe can you tell us a bit about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in quotation marks for everyone who can’t see us. How is that sort of close to the end of your story?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, sure. I’ll quickly say too on the topic of 15 chapters – yeah so there are 15 chapters with content that tell the story, and then an introduction and a conclusion. But I think saying 15 chapters sort of misrepresents the style of the book because it makes it sound like it’s a gigantic tome, but it’s actually a really short book. It’s like, 200 pages, and the chapters are really short. It’s made to be very snappy.

Dist Prof Piller: And it is snappy! It’s really very readable. Sorry to kind of create an impression as this being – I mean I guess we can’t really cover all of these developments here in our conversation.

Dr McElvenny: On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, yeah, and linguistic diversity, I mean this is a very interesting question. It depends a little bit on what you mean by linguistic diversity, but perhaps what you’re getting at with Sapir and Whorf is this interest in indigenous languages of America and other parts of the world. So, indigenous as opposed to the written standardised languages familiar from the European countries, and that is definitely something they were interested in.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is well known, and you put it in inverted commas because neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a hypothesis in the sense of something that could be tested, like something could be tested with experiments.

Dist Prof Piller: Could you maybe just tell our audience how the name came about? So, neither of these two men ever claimed that they had formulated a hypothesis, and still that’s all we can think of now. I mean, it’s one of the most well known linguistic facts, if you will, outside the academy.

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, the first attestation of the term as far as I’m aware, in print, comes from Harry Hoijer, who had been a student of Sapir’s from the 1950s, so after both Sapir and Whorf had died. Hoijer used the term in the context of a conference that he had convened on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, so on the idea that there’s some sort of connection between language and thought, or perhaps that even language influences thought.

Sapir and Whorf didn’t formulate a hypothesis as such, but they definitely wrote lots of things about the interplay between language and thought. Whorf perhaps more so. I think one of the most, well there’s a few interesting things that can be said about the background to both Sapir and Whorf’s ideas on linguistic relativity as you could also describe it. One is that there is a German tradition which Sapir was directly in touch with, and Boaz as well who was Sapir’s doctoral supervisor and mentor. This goes back to Humboldt and so on, and that’s also something I talk about in the book.

But there’s also a contemporary context for Sapir emphasising linguistic relativity, that language creates a worldview and shapes how we see the world, and Whorf too for that matter. This contemporary context is there was a lot of discussion on a political level on propaganda in the period between WWI and WWII. This was the era in which totalitarianism arose in central Europe and eastern Europe as well. There was a feeling that propaganda often had a linguistic basis, that it was a deliberate abuse of language to shape the way people think, to sort of brainwash them.

This finds an expression also in the philosophy of the period, so in early analytic philosophy or in the earliest works that fed into what later became analytic philosophy of people like Bertrand Russell, but even Wittgenstein, you can see this discourse that we need to purify language in order to be able to think clearly and logically. So, this is what motivated Russell’s Logical Atomism. He says this as much in his scholarly writings but also in his popular writings where he’s presenting his ideas.

And there was a whole ecosystem of popular books, so like The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, which forms the basis, or is one of the major works that I talk about in my first book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism. But also Korzybski with General Semantics, and so on. There’s a whole heap of these.

So, I think that it’s fair to say that Sapir in emphasising linguistic relativity was picking up on this discourse, and you can find Sapir also directly referring to this discourse of how language can be abused to brainwash people. I believe that Sapir was picking up on this discourse and using it as a justification for doing linguistic scholarship. So, Sapir says by studying diverse languages, so languages that have a very different structure from the familiar European languages, such as the indigenous languages of America, we can get a completely different view on the world. We can see how what we assume to be a fact is just an illusion created by our language. This also comes out very clearly in Whorf’s writings, and Whorf is perhaps more explicit about it too.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I was fascinated by how you describe that. Partly the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a form of language critique, and of course that feeds into another key tension that runs through modern Linguistics, the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism and whether we just describe language or we actually engage with the meanings of language.

Before we end, I’d like to quickly draw one other kind of dichotomy or tension that also comes out really nicely in your book, and that is sort of the establishment of Linguistics as a scientific discipline, and the ambition to be scientific, but at the same time the constant undercurrent of all kinds of romantic ideas. There is the German Romanticism but also the romanticisation of ancient India for instance, so that’s a big topic. Or then Whorf and his spiritual world view.

So, can you maybe talk about this tension a bit more as Linguistics as a science, but Linguistics also as a romantic philosophy or the spiritual undercurrents?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, definitely. This is actually a topic that is much broader than disciplinary Linguistics itself. It has to do with what is considered in this period from the 19^th century to the present, what is considered legitimate scholarship and what is considered science.

So, the English word “science” generally only refers to natural science. We make a clear distinction between the sciences in the sense of the natural sciences and the humanities. I can’t really think if there’s a superordinate term that would cover both of those. I don’t know in English; I don’t think so. Scholarship?

Dist Prof Piller: Hmm, “research”?

Dr McElvenny: Research, yeah, research perhaps. But in the European context, like Wissenschaft, can also be, it can be Geisteswissenschaften, Naturwissenschaft – well do they have their own methods? And do they have their own objects of study? Or are they both two different manifestations of the same thing? This is a debate that ran throughout the 19^th century and influenced Linguistics.

So, by the end of the century, well, if we start at the beginning of the century, the Humboldtian university was very much oriented towards the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften. They were the more important ones, and the natural sciences were considered to be less prestigious. But as the century bore on, the natural sciences could show all sorts of amazing discoveries in fundamental physics in chemistry, and all sorts of really interesting and useful applications of these discoveries in the development of technology – so electricity and new medicines and new chemicals that were synthesised and so on.

So, the natural sciences grew in prestige during the 19^th century, and by the 1880s this became a bit of a sticking point for the humanities, and in Linguistics there was this question of whether Linguistics should orient itself towards the natural sciences or whether it should claim its own special method as one of the humanities. The neogrammarians, of course, were very strongly on the natural science end of this debate with their emphasis on sound laws, saying that these are a kind of natural law.

But critics of the neogrammarians, people like Schuchardt, were saying that that doesn’t make any sense, that the sound laws are not like natural laws because they have limited applicability. They only work in a single language or a single dialect, and they only work for a certain period of time. They go to completion, so they can’t be equated to things like the law of gravity, which applies everywhere in the universe. So, someone like Schuchardt argued it’s just trying to grasp at the prestige, incorrectly, of the natural sciences by importing this to Linguistics.

I say that this came to a head in the 1880s, but it was already building up through the century. Schleicher, another figure who I talk about in the book, in mid-century was already going down this path where the debate was more in terms of materialism, as I described in the book, which is more a debate about whether laws of matter, like laws of physics, tell us everything we need to know about the world, or whether there is a special world of the soul or world of the mind that exists separately from this.

This debate continued after this period. It didn’t end in the 19^th century, but it’s probably fair to say that the model that has won out in Linguistics is very much a scientistic model that wants to orient Linguistics as a discipline to a sort of natural scientific conception of the world.

Dist Prof Piller: One question maybe. So, for a sociolinguist like myself, one thing that is very noticeable in your history is that there really was no place in the story of the birth of modern Linguistics, there was no place for linguistic diversity. There was no place for language contact. There was no place for multilingualism and all those kinds of things that weren’t clearly tied to “one nation, one language”, if you will.

So, can you maybe talk a bit about this history that is not there and how that got back into Linguistics again? Or how it was written out?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I think it was written out because of this form fetishism, of this obsession with the language as the object of study that is an entity in its own right, and the job of the linguist is to describe its grammar and so on. Because if you make the language into the thing that you are studying, then there’s no space for speakers. It’s not about people speaking language, it’s about this abstract thing that exists independently of them.

But even in the 19^th century, you know, I talk about William Dwight Whitney. Even William Dwight Whitney in the mid 19^th century started to talk about diversity in texts, so he still had a philological method where he was analysing written texts, but he looked at the distribution of different sounds in the texts. He produced tables and calculated statistically how sound was distributed, not using the sophisticated statistical methods that we know today, but still talking in terms of percentages and using that to describe tendencies in the development of languages. On a theoretical level he also talked about the individual speaking subject and how people interacting with each other in language will influence each other, and how an individual might innovate a change, but then it has to be ratified by the speech community to become part of the language.

There were other figures as well into the latter half of the 19^th century who talked about the speaking subject and their place in the community of speakers. But it is definitely true that this was a minority, an oppositional position that you could take in studying language because the default position in Linguistics was to talk about the language as an abstract thing.

The introduction of modern sociolinguistics, or the advent of modern sociolinguistics, is probably, I think it’s fair to say, a phenomenon mostly of the post WWII era. So, it definitely has roots that go back earlier than that, but as a sub-discipline in its own right it’s a post WWII thing. So, you’ll have to wait for volume II of the book to be able to find out about that.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s brilliant. So is that what’s next for you, James? Volume II? Post World War?

Dr McElvenny: Well, if I get funding, yes. (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Brilliant. So looking forward to that and very much hope you’ll get the funding. Thanks again, James.

Thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Until next time!

Map of Transoxania (Source: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: Arabic language learning is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world, such as China, where it may be a source of empowerment for impoverished Muslim women. This post by Mehrinigor Akhmedova (Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan) and Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar) takes us to Uzbekistan, a part of the post-Soviet world, where some aspects of Transoxania’s multilingual past are being revived for religious and economic reasons.

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Mehrinigor Akhmedova, Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan
Rizwan Ahmad, Qatar University, Qatar
***

Recently, interest in the learning of Arabic language and script among the young generation of Uzbeks has been rising. Young Uzbeks are learning Arabic not simply because of their faith, Islam, but also because it is desirable in the domestic job market and opens a window of opportunities in the Arabic-speaking Gulf states.

In September 2023, the Department of Islamic History Source Studies, Philosophy at Bukhara State University invited a professor from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University to teach courses in Arabic. This is a significant change in the history of Arabic and Islamic learning in Uzbekistan. During the Soviet rule and early years of independence in 1991, Uzbekistan witnessed many ups and down regarding the place of Islam in the constitutionally secular Uzbek society. In 1998, fearing radical Islamic ideologies, the government closed many madrasas, traditional schools of learning, established soon after the independence.

Liquidation of Madrasas and Teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan

Although the repression of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including modern-day Uzbekistan, began during the Tsarist regime, it reached its climax during the Soviet rule following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The state repression of Islam took many forms, including the persecution and killing of mudarris and ulama, teachers and scholars of Islam, nationalization of vaqf properties, Islam endowments, and forceful removal of veils from Muslim women, known as the hujum campaign.

Dome of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa (Image credit: Wikipedia)

On the educational and sociolinguistic fronts, the repression led to the dismantling of the centuries old traditional Islamic educational system of maktabs and madrasas where students learned to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic. In 1928, the Fourth Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic issued an order on the liquidation of all old method schools and madrasas. According to Ashirbek Muminov and Rinat Shigabdinov, before the 1928 decree, there were 1,362 madrasas in Uzbekistan with 21,183 students enrolled in them.

Another measure that damaged Arabic teaching and learning was the decision to replace the traditional Arabic script of Uzbek with a Latin-based writing system in 1927. Ten years later in 1937, as a measure of Russification, the Cyrillic script replaced the Latin script. These measures dealt a death blow to the teaching of Islam and Arabic language and script in Uzbekistan. In 1945, as a token of acceptance of religious institutions, Stalin allowed Mir-e-Arab madrasa, established in the 16th century, in Bukhara, to reopen with a limited number of students. Subsequently, two more institutions of Islamic learning were established; namely, madrasa Baraq Khan in 1956 and Tashkent Islamic Institute of Imam al-Bukhari in 1971.

Arabic within Multilingual Transoxiana

Present-day Uzbekistan, which in pre-modern times, was part of the larger Transoxiana region in Central Asia, was a thriving center of Arabic language and literature. The Persian-speaking Samanids (819-999 AD), who ruled Central Asia from their capital in Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Arabic-speaking Abbasids, maintained Arabic as the language of administration, Islamic learning, and sciences. The Samanids simultaneously encouraged use of Persian in the court. Under their patronage, many Arabic texts were translated into Persian, including the Quranic tafsir, exegesis, of Al-Tabari (d. 923 AD) and the Kalila wa Dimnah, a collection of fables, originally written in Sanskrit.

1958 Soviet stamp celebrating the 1100th birthday of Rudaki (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Rudaki (858-940), born and raised in Bukhara and regarded as the founder of New Persian Poetry, was granted the esteemed position of the court poet of the Samanids.

In this multilingual linguistic and intellectual environment, there emerged in Bukhara two towering figures among the scholars of Hadith, the most foundational Islamic text after the Quran, namely Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari aka Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD) and Muhammad ibn Isa known as Al-Tirmidhi (824-892). Both were born in the Bukhara region of what is today Uzbekistan. In pursuit of the compilation of the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, they travelled widely to different parts of the Muslim world. They wrote their collections of hadith in Arabic, known as Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sunan Al-Tirmidhi respectively.

To the illustrious history of Bukhara as a center of Arabic can be added the polymath and physician Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin Western sources. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine. Born in Afshona in Bukhara, Ibn Sina, had memorized the whole of the Quran before the age of ten. Later he turned his attention to the study of medicine. He authored many books in Arabic on philosophy, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. In medicine, his famous work is Al-Qanoon fi Al-Tib, “The Canon of Medicine.” This work consists of five volumes with over 1 million words. He was the physician of the Samanid ruler Nuh II (976-997).

In September 2023, in a speech delivered in the UN, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, named Imam Bukhari and Ibn Sina, among others, as scholars who richly contributed to science and showed that Islam was a religion of knowledge and peace.

Rise of Interest in Arabic in contemporary Bukhara

After the repression of Arabic and Islamic teaching during Soviet rule, there are signs of change in today’s Uzbekistan. In addition to official institutions such as Bukhara University encouraging the teaching of Arabic, many private language centers have also recently emerged in the city of Bukhara. There are over 50 private language centers in Bukhara, including popular ones like Takallum, An-Nisa, and Naqshbandi School.

Drawing of viscera from Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine” (Source: Wellcome Collection)

On their Facebook page, Takallum invites students as follows, “…reciting the Qur’an with Tajweed is our obligatory deed and our deed will lead us to Paradise! Lead your friends to paradise, help them read the Quran, be a true friend for them”. Evidently, for Takallum the learning of Arabic is coupled with Islamic beliefs and practices.

Based on a pilot study conducted in September-October 2023, we found that there are clear signs of the rise in the interest in Arabic learning. First, we discuss a survey that was given online to an active Telegram group called NIسA_School, Ayollar Maktabi, with over 14,000 women members. The use of the Arabic letter س in the first word of the group is indexical of the fact that it brings back the Arabic language and its history in Uzbekistan.

Next, we discuss statistics of students who received Arabic language proficiency certificates from Davlat Test Markazi Buxoro Viloyat Bo’limi, National Test Center, Bukhara Region.

In response to the survey question ‘what was your goal of learning Arabic?’, an overwhelming 82% of the participants (N=347) answered that they considered learning Arabic as most important knowledge for their self-development. Related to this personal/spiritual goal of learning Arabic was the response from 14% of the participants who learned Arabic in order to teach it to others.

It is important to mention here that Muslims believe that God rewards those who read the Qur’an in the original Arabic, even if they do not understand its message. This means that the original Arabic text has spiritual value that cannot be gained by reading it in translation.

The remaining 4% learned Arabic because they wanted to live and work in an Arabic-speaking country.

Another indicator of the rising interest in Arabic comes from the data of students who have received a proficiency certificate in Arabic based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2022, Uzbekistan started to use the six-point CEFR proficiency levels from A1-A2, basic user, through B1-B2, independent user, to C1-C2, proficient user. Since the implementation of CEFR in 2022, the total number of students receiving CEFR enrolled in different Arabic language teaching centers in the Bukhara region alone was 3,079. The vast majority of them (92%) received B1 and B2 and the remaining 8% received the higher proficiency level C1. No Uzbek students attained C2, the highest-level proficiency.

Post-Soviet transformations

Bukhara, Old City (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Another important factor propelling people’s interest in Arabic learning is that the Government of Uzbekistan encourages learning of foreign languages and rewards those who earn high-level proficiency certificates in them. According to a presidential decree of 2021, teachers of Arabic and other foreign languages with a C1 certificate will be paid an additional bonus of 50% of their basic salary. Similarly, employees in any government agency possessing any national or international certificate in a foreign language will receive an extra bonus of 20% on their basic salary. Furthermore, students applying for admission into master’s and Ph.D. in the philological studies must show a C1 level proficiency in a foreign language and those in non-philological fields must have a B2 level proficiency.

The discussion above clearly suggests that the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union have transformed the linguistic and educational fields. Uzbekistan, one of the great centers of Arabic language during the medieval era is witnessing a renaissance in the learning of Arabic after a long period of state suppression. Many young Uzbeks are rediscovering their history by learning the Arabic language and its script. The government’s incentives of learning a foreign language make Arabic learning even more attractive.

***

Akhmedova Mehrinigor Bahodirovna is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Translation Studies at Bukhara State University. Her research covers issues related to translation, literature, spirituality and sociolinguistics.

Enjoy this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity! The conversation is a sequel to our previous conversation about whether we can ever unthink linguistic nationalism.

Edited transcript below

Can you tell us about the story behind Multilingualism and history?

I have a very short answer and a somewhat longer answer to your question.

The short answer: this is the book I always wanted to read. And I was hoping that somebody else would write it or edit it. That never happened.

The longer answer is that it’s a very natural outcome of the way I see my scholarly trajectory.

If you remember when we were junior scholars, our main preoccupations were, “I want to be heard, I desperately want to be published.” And then you go along and then you start thinking, “What are the conversations going on? How can I contribute to these conversations?”

And then you go along and you start thinking, “What conversations are not happening? How can we start them?”

And you and I have both been very successful starting some conversations about gender, identity, emotions. I’ve also been very lucky to start conversations about forensic linguistics.

And so it seemed like the path is very clear. You put together an invited colloquium, maybe a workshop, you put together a special issue. An edited volume. And you are building a network of people, and you get people interested, and you get people excited, and I’ve always believed that history was another missing piece.

But nothing was ever easy with history and multilingualism. Because when people heard about gender and emotions and identity, it made sense to them. It was relevant. It was relevant to the present moment. But history seemed utterly irrelevant to multilingualism in the digital age.

And so the long answer is the purpose of this edited volume. It’s to make historic research relevant to sociolinguists in a very pointed way because this research undermines the foundational myth of our field which is that we live in a world that’s more multilingual than ever before. When in reality we live in a world that’s less multilingual than ever before.

And the historians know this.

How is Multilingualism and History structured? What topics are being addressed and who are the contributors?

The choices I made was not to be comprehensive, but to highlight what is novel and interesting. So, for example, the pivotal chapter by Ben Fortna shows the transformation of a very multilingual Ottoman Empire into a very monolingual nation state of Turkey. It follows the transformation in a way that for me is emblematic of the main point made in the book.

Susan Gal talks about language ideologies that shape the ways linguists themselves work, and see multilingualism, which is also very relevant.

Or I invited Roland Willemyns to contribute a chapter on why Dutch failed as a lingua franca. Because we love talking about Latin and English and other Lingua Francas, but we never think about languages that were poised to become a lingua franca but never became one. Why is that?

So for me, each chapter highlights a novel dimension in relationships with language in ways that we often don’t talk about.

Ads in Polish and Yiddish for Halpern’s fabric store and warehouse, Skład towarów bławatnych, on Nalyvaiko street, 13 (at the turn of the 20th century the street – then known as Rzeżnicka – was inhabited primarily by Jews). Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko

The progression in the book is chronological from ancient Egypt to modern day.

The aim of this volume was never to be comprehensive and to only show that multilingualism was here. Multilingualism was there. Because if that’s what I wanted, I would have edited a very different book. The challenge for me is not in the many contexts where we can find multilingualism. But in the story that we have been telling ourselves. And the story we’ve been telling ourselves is a very European, Western story. And we got it wrong.

How did we get the history of multilingualism wrong?

There was a lot of forgetting that happened in the early part and the middle of the twentieth century. And a lot of lack of intergenerational transmission.

It also has to do with the incredible dominance of English as an academic language that emerged in the second part of the twentieth century. That led to the loss of multilingual knowledge that no longer made it into the sociolinguistic mainstream. And that unfortunately also extends to historians.

In my introduction to the volume, I cite one very bitter German historian who says that American historians write the history of the colonial United States without looking at documents in European languages like Dutch and French and Swedish. Not to mention Native American languages.

It has become acceptable to be a scholar of multilingualism while not knowing more than one language. It has become acceptable to be historian while being monolingual. And that is part of forgetting.

To an English speaker, multilingualism is an unusual phenomenon worthy of study. For me, it’s a rediscovery of the wheel. It’s the process of historical amnesia.

Let’s talk a bit more about amnesia and ignorance pacts.

The term “ignorance pacts” is from Joshua Fishman, who talked about the reciprocal ignorance pacts between sociolinguists and sociologists, which made sociolinguistics a very provincial, parochial discipline.

Café Sztuka, with restored Polish and Yiddish ads for groceries and haberdashery. Kotlyarska street 8. Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko.

And of course, Fishman is still that generation of scholars who are trained in a much broader tradition than we’re currently trained. And so when you spend a lot of time in the field, as you and I did, what becomes apparent?

When we started out in the 1990s, there were 3 journals focusing on bilingualism. It was hard to get a publication in, but everybody was reading everybody else, everybody knew everybody else. Since then, our own field, just like other fields, has experienced a tremendous growth. And the growth came with many positives but also with many negatives such as the fragmentation of the field.

And this split into academic tribes with their own little conventions. Their own publications, their own conferences. Bilingualism people for some reason meet separately from the multilingualism people. And the sociolinguists of multilingualism, bilingualism, live in a very different world from the psycholinguists.

Where do data about past multilingualism come from and what methods do we use in the study of historical multilingualism?

By definition, the spoken word is fleeting and so everything that we have pretty much is written records and that, of course, has limits.

The challenges are also advantages because when you look at multilingualism in the past the degree to which we privilege the spoken word becomes very obvious.

In reality, the data is plentiful for many contexts. As of today, there’s still many little clay tablets and many papyruses sitting there unread, containing precious information: administrative records, bureaucratic records, receipts, letters. There is a ton of information to be gained about all aspects of history, economics, politics, and also multilingualism from such trivial things, such as bureaucratic receipts, court records, administrative correspondence.

Moreover, when we look at evidence such as, for example, travel accounts by pilgrims. They also pick up on oral language practices. The eyewitness accounts of these people bring very precious information about what we would call oral practices. And the same goes for court records.

Bilingualism was foundational to the development of literacy. And that is not something we talk about. We kind of imagine the trajectory being the other way around. But people go on and appropriate scripts from other languages and make them their own.

What do ghost signs tell us about past multilingualism?

Ghost signs are very commonly painted, sometimes faded ads. That have lost their functional significance. The business they’re advertising, for example, is no longer there. The store is no longer there. But the sign is still there. And people love them just for the aesthetics for an immediate connection to the past.

Nevsky Prospect 20, St Petersburg, with Russian signs, German signs for St Petersburger Zeitung, the German bookstore and library of Andreas Isler, and a French sign for the Grand Magasin de Paris (ca. 1900)

The capital of ghost signs is the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which before World War 2 was the Polish city of Lwów and before that was the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg.

And so the signs in Lviv are in German and Polish and Yiddish; three languages that are no longer spoken on its streets.

And when you start seeing those signs, some of them very nicely repainted and spruced up, you start asking yourself, well, what is the function of the signs? If they are not really about Ukrainian history, what are they doing on the streets of a modern Ukrainian city?

They tell a story of how multinational the city of Lviv has always been, and an example of the tolerant coexistence between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. And that is a kind of statement that doesn’t make sense on many different levels.

First of all, because the Ukrainian language is missing from the signs. It was not very much in use in signage before World War II in a Polish city.

Secondly, we all know of the historic antagonism between the three main populations, so the coexistence was by no means very tolerant.

The multilingualism was real, it was there, but it was hierarchical. If you were Polish, you may learn German, but you’re not going to learn Ukrainian or Yiddish, but if you were Jewish you would have to learn everybody else’s language, in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew.

Even more importantly, the signs that make this very smooth artificial transition from a Polish to a Ukrainian city obfuscate the amount of violence that took place in the city during and after World War 2, that transformed a historically Polish city into a Ukrainian city through the genocide of its Jewish population, and ethnic cleansing and deportation of its Polish population.

We don’t just innocently reimagine history. We reshape people’s perceptions of what happened in the past. And that is what the ghost signs are very successfully doing. They’re creating someone else’s history. In this case, the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was cosmopolitan, the history of multilingual Poland – to give a very respectable aura of cosmopolitanism to a modern Ukrainian city, that is by no means very tolerant. In my fieldwork I found not a single sign in the language of the largest linguistic minority of the city of Lviv, which is Russian.

How is the past entangled in the present and the future?

It breaks my heart to see war in my homeland of Ukraine. It broke my heart to see Russia invade Ukraine, cruelly, with no justification. Nobody can justify that.

But it also breaks my heart to see the Ukrainian government using the very same invasion to push forth language policies that have been unpopular before and making them popular. Taking down every monument in a Russian writer, reducing the uses of the Russian language further because it’s presumably the language of the enemy and not the language of the population.

And that is something that no sociolinguist comments on because presumably that is okay. We are okay with linguistic nationalism in certain forms. That to me is hypocritical.

We start from the question whether the world today is more multilingual than it was every before. Spoiler alert: we quickly conclude that no, it is not.

Aneta takes us to one of her favorite multilingual polities, Medieval Palermo. The Normans who conquered Palermo in 1072 ruled trilingually – through Arabic, Greek, and Latin. However, we would be wrong to conclude from this multilingual regime that Norman Palermo was a tolerant and liberal place. Both monolingual and multilingual regimes operate in the service of the state, as evidence from laws, trial proceedings, monuments, or even currency shows throughout the ages.

Petrus de Ebulo, Trilingual scribes in the Kingdom of Sicily (1196)

One of the reasons why the world may seem more multilingual today than in the past lies in the European nationalist project, which culminated in the “population exchanges” of the 20^th century – the great “unmixing of peoples”, as Lord Curzon called it.

As a result, languages became associated with nations and this linguistic nationalism continues to guide views of language today. Can linguistic nationalism ever be unthought?

Maybe because languages are now so deeply intertwined with nationalist projects, we have become much more emotional about language and languages than people may have been in the past. This is true even of academic research, where there can be significant pressure to bring our emotions into our research, too.

How to deal with such pressures is another thread that runs through our conversation. We reflect on our own academic careers and what lessons they may or may not hold for early career researchers today.

Further resources

Our conversation accompanies Aneta’s 2021 Einar Hauge Lecture “Does multilingualism need a history?” and the introductory chapter “Multilingualism and history” to her upcoming book devoted to the same topic.

Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers

Academic interpreting often labors under the assumption that the profession was born in the early years of the 20^th century. Billions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of course, know better. They first encounter an interpreter in the biblical story of Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob. Sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, Joseph rises to become the deputy of the pharaoh by the grace of God. When the Israelites’ harvest fails, the brothers must travel to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph, who oversees the grain trade, recognizes them, but they do not recognize him. Joseph imposes a series of tests on his brothers to see whether they have repented. Eventually, he forgives them and the whole clan of Jacob moves to Egypt to share in Joseph’s good fortune.

One of the reasons the brothers did not recognize Joseph was that, as an Egyptian official dealing with foreigners, Joseph used an interpreter to communicate with foreign merchants. According to Genesis 42, 23 “[the brothers] did not realize that Joseph could understand them, since he was using an interpreter.”

Interpreting was institutionalized in the Egyptian bureaucracy

Trade was one of the domains that brought Egyptians into contact with speakers of other languages, as in the example of the Israelites. Diplomacy was another area and captive taking yet another. To cope with the intercultural communication demands raised by Egypt’s considerable external dealings in Africa and the Middle East, ancient Egyptians instituted the role of interlingual mediator in their bureaucracy (Kurz, 1985, 1986; Salevsky, 2018).

Some of the earliest evidence for Egyptian interpreting practices comes from the tombs of the princes of Elephantine, which date from the 3^rd millennium BCE. The princes of Elephantine were the governors of the Nubian border province in the south of Egypt. Their titles included “secret advisor for all business concerning the south of Upper Egypt,” “steward of the southern lands of Upper Egypt,” and “the one who has brought back the produce of all foreign lands for his royal lord and who spreads the fear of Horus in foreign lands” (Chrobak, 2013).

In short, the princes of Elephantine were in charge of what was essentially a colony and regularly led raids further south, into what they called “the land of Yam.”

To communicate with their non-Egyptian subjects and contacts, they employed interpreters, as is apparent from another one of their titles: “overseer of dragomans” (Gardiner, 1915). “Dragoman” is a fancy word for “interpreter” (Hermann, 1956), and one I will write about next time.

Whether “dragoman” or “interpreter,” the exact meaning of the hieroglyph “wa” remains a matter of some debate (Falbo, 2016). The hieroglyph is an abstraction of a loincloth that was only used by foreigners or by people speaking a foreign language (Salevsky, 2018). The Egyptologist who first deciphered the inscriptions had already cautioned that it might refer to any “speaker of a foreign language” (Gardiner, 1915). As such the duties of the “interpreter” were probably not restricted to linguistic mediation only but were quite wide-ranging in maintaining various forms of contacts with foreigners (Chrobak, 2013).

The interpreter relief in the tomb of Horemheb

The interpreting relief from the tomb of Horemheb. The interpreter (in the middle) mediates between Horemheb (left) and foreign envoys (right) (Image credit: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden)

A striking depiction of the work of an Egyptian interpreter can be found on a bas-relief in the tomb of Horemheb, which dates from the 14^th century BCE. Horemheb was a general under the pharaoh Tutankhamun before he became pharaoh himself. The relief shows envoys from Libya, Nubia, and Syria prostrating themselves before Horemheb. According to the inscription, these foreigners are begging the Egyptians to send their armies and turn their countries into protectorates because the people there “live like animals in the wilderness” (Kurz, 1986).

One cannot feel but cynical about the age-old lies with which empires justify their exploits to themselves.

Between Horemheb and the envoys, we see an interpreter in action. It is a clever visual depiction of an essentially oral act: the interpreter is shown twice, once facing Horemheb and once facing the envoys. We can almost see him turn from one interlocutor to the other, as the image gives us a strong sense of the dynamism of the interpreting act.

Sadly, it is today impossible to get a full view of the complete interpreting scene because in the 19^th century the relief was broken up into pieces and sold to European tourists. The three pieces that make up the interpreter relief are today housed in museums in Berlin, Leiden, and Vienna (Kurz, 1986).

Training an interpreter corps

The records suggests that, for the longest time, Egyptians could not be bothered to learn foreign languages themselves (Hermann, 1956). In an eerie resemblance to today’s English monolingual mindset, they felt that for an Egyptian, speaking Egyptian was just fine. It was non-Egyptians who had to adjust and become bilingual by learning Egyptian.

Despite their strong sense of superiority, they did no want to leave the business of interpreting in the hands of foreigners. Therefore, they systematically created an interpreter corps of people who were not only bilingual but also Egyptian in culture and tastes. At least since the Middle Kingdom (2040 to 1782 BCE), they did this by bringing sons of foreign royal families to Egypt at an early age so that they could learn the Egyptian language and be socialized into the role of interlingual mediators (Kurz, 1986).

Only when the Egyptian empire began to decline, did Egyptians themselves start to learn foreign languages. From the 6^th century BCE, Egyptian boys were sent to live with Greek families so that they could become bilingual in Greek. The Greek historian Herodotus reports that, by the 4^th century BCE, their descendants had congealed into an interpreter caste, whose status ranked between that of merchants and seafarers (Kurz, 1986).

Interpreting gives way to multilingualism

By then, the power of the pharaohs had waned, and Egypt had become a multilingual polity. With the Persian conquest of 525 BCE, Aramaic replaced Egyptian as the language of the state, and with Alexander’s conquest in 332 BCE, Greek became the dominant language (Thompson, 2009).

Multilingual Cleopatra

When the pharaohs’ power had been assured, they could leave the pesky work of intercultural communication to others. Not so Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, with whose death in 30 BCE 5,000 years of Egyptian empire came to an end. In addition to Egyptian and Greek, she knew at least seven other languages. According to Plutarch’s Life of Antony (27, 3-4), “in her interviews with Barbarians she very seldom had need of an interpreter, but made her replies to most of them herself and unassisted, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes or Parthians.”

References

Chrobak, M. (2013). For a tin ingot: The archaeology of oral interpretation. Przekładaniec: A Journal of Literary Translation, Special Issue 2013, 87-101.
Falbo, C. (2016). Going back to Ancient Egypt: were the Princes of Elephantine really ‘overseers of dragomans’? The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 21, 109-114.
Gardiner, A. H. (1915). The Egyptian Word for “Dragoman”. Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 37, 117-125.
Hermann, A. (1956). Dolmetschen im Altertum. In K. Thieme, A. Hermann, & E. Glässer (Eds.), Beiträge zur Geschichte des Dolmetschens (pp. 25-59). Munich: Isar Verlag.
Kurz, I. (1985). The rock tombs of the princes of Elephantine: Earliest references to interpretation in Pharaonic Egypt. Babel, 31(4), 213-218.
Kurz, I. (1986). Das Dolmetscher-Relief aus dem Grab des Haremhab in Memphis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dolmetschens im alten Ägypten. Babel, 32(2), 73-77.
Salevsky, H. (2018). The Origins of Interpreting in the Old Testament and the Meturgeman in the Synagogue. The Bible Translator, 69(2), 184-198. doi:10.1177/2051677018786366
Thompson, D. J. (2009). The Multilingual Environment of Persian and Ptolemaic Egypt: Egyptian, Aramaic, and Greek Documentation. In R. S. Bagnall (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of papyrology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199843695.013.0017

Diagram of the ‘radial definition routes’ of Panoptic Conjugation (Ogden 1930: 12)

A fascinating turn in recent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scholarship is the development of ‘Minimal English’, an international auxiliary language combining the best of Standard English and NSM. One of the earliest published mentions of this project is in Anna Wierzbicka’s 2014 Imprisoned in English, where she states that Minimal English ‘is, essentially, the English version of “Basic Human”‘ (Wierzbicka 2014: 195), the rendering in English exponents of the set of primitive concepts uncovered by NSM research. An example of Covid-19-related messages in Minimal English can be found here.

The idea of a simplified engineered language for international communication is by no means new, as Wierzbicka and her colleagues freely acknowledge. The specific proposal of creating a reduced form of English for this purpose has also found many advocates in the past.

The special characteristic of Minimal English that is supposed to set it apart from all prior projects is its culturally neutral standpoint. The use of Minimal English should preserve the existing investment of the millions of second-language learners of English in acquiring the formal shell of that language – its phonology, word forms, grammar and so on – while leaving the baggage of ‘Anglo’ culture behind. Any other language could be reduced in this way to serve as the medium for ‘Basic Human’, argues Wierzbicka, but in the context of present-day globalisation English is indisputably the best host:

[G]iven the realities of today’s globalizing world, at this point it is obviously a mini-English that is the most practical way out (or down) from the conceptual tower of Babel that the cultural evolution of humankind has erected, for better or worse. (Wierzbicka 2014: 194)

Wierzbicka (2014: 194) tells us that Minimal English ‘is not another simplified version of English analogous to Ogden’s […] “Basic English” or Jean-Paul Nerrière’s “Globish”‘ (cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 8). But if we look at the particular case of Ogden’s Basic English we may notice many striking parallels to Minimal English. These parallels warrant closer inspection.

In the most detailed published treatment of Minimal English to date, the 2018 edited volume Minimal English for a Global World, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka dedicate a section of their co-authored chapter to comparing Minimal English and Basic English (as well as ‘Plain English’; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 18–22). Goddard and Wierzbicka (ibid.: 19) note ‘enormous’ differences across ‘structure (words and grammar), intended range of functions, and in “spirit”‘ between Basic and Minimal English.

However, the comparison misses many significant points of contact between the two endeavours.

In terms of the differences in ‘structure’, Goddard and Wierzbicka point out that Ogden’s core vocabulary of 850 ‘Basic Words’ (see Ogden 1933 [1930]) does not respect the cross-linguistic primitives proposed within the NSM framework. In addition, a central grammatical feature of Basic English was the elimination of verbs from the language, a goal foreign to NSM thinking. These two differences between Basic and Minimal English are quite real, but focusing on them misses the more profound philosophical and methodological similarity between the projects: that both NSM and Basic English are centred around reductive paraphrase. Although not identical to NSM procedure, Ogden’s (1930) method of ‘panoptic conjugation’ sought, in very similar fashion to NSM reductive paraphrase, to strip down meaning to its fundamentals. From Goddard and Wierzbicka’s commentary we may get the impression that Ogden’s method was not much more than an ad hoc heuristic, but this is by no means the case: his method was grounded in contemporary analytic philosophy and even received monograph-length exposition in the 1931 Word Economy by Leonora Wilhelmina Lockhart, one of his close collaborators.

The ‘intended range of functions’ of Basic English is perhaps also not as far from NSM and Minimal English as Goddard and Wierzbicka suggest. Ogden and his collaborators of course indulged in very off-putting Anglo chauvinism, but this was in many ways an expression of a kind of universalism current in analytic philosophy of the time. While NSM explicitly rejects any claims of cultural superiority, it shares many of the same sources. The historiography of NSM typically looks much further back and conceives of the approach as a continuation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (1646–1716) characteristica universalis (see, e.g. Wierzbicka 1992: 216–218; Wierzbicka 1996: 11–13), but NSM – like Basic – also has clear proximal predecessors in the language-critical thought of early analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. These connections are something that I have explored at length in my 2018 Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (see also McElvenny 2014).

Finally, the difference in ‘spirit’ that Goddard and Wierzbicka highlight is another aspect of the comparison between Basic English and Minimal English that deserves deeper scrutiny. It is indeed true that Ogden and many of his collaborators – although by no means all – were quite hostile to multilingualism and saw Basic English as a means to the linguistic homogenisation of the world. By contrast, practitioners of NSM and Minimal English celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and see their project as a means for facilitating cross-cultural communication.

However, the historical contexts of Basic English and Minimal English are very different in this respect. Ogden and his collaborators were working in a world that was much more multilingual than ours today: in Ogden’s day, many languages were used equally in science, business and international relations. At the same time, this world was deeply fractured, having endured by the middle of the twentieth century two World Wars. Whether right or wrong, many scholars of the first half of the twentieth century imagined a connection between competing national languages and international friction.

Minimal English, on the other hand, has been born into a world where Ogden’s dream has essentially come true: international co-operation in science, business and politics is today overwhelmingly mediated in English (see Piller 2016 for incisive discussion of how this plays out in present-day language scholarship). With the end of the Cold War, most people around the world live in an often uneasy but enduring peace – and let’s hope that there will never be a World War III. In this environment, Minimal English has the opposite mission of overcoming the de facto hegemony of English, which has brought with it a different set of problems.

The ahistorical juxtaposition of Basic English and Minimal English ignores these important points of intellectual and political context, which shape the outlook and design of the two projects. There is no shortage of current secondary literature that would help to illuminate this context. My own Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism, mentioned above, deals with this, as does Michael Gordin’s 2015 Scientific Babel.

This blog post is intended as a plea for greater engagement with intellectual history on the part of linguists. On the example of Minimal English, we can immediately see that there are significant parallels between this project and efforts pursued by scholars of only a few generations ago. Greater awareness of their work and the context in which it was undertaken may cast new light on our own assumptions and practices, and in the process enrich our own thinking and alert us to potential pitfalls.

References

Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (2018), ‘Minimal English and how it can add to Global English, in Minimal English for a Global World: Improved communication using fewer words, ed. Cliff Goddard, Cham: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 5–28.
Gordin, Michael D. (2015), Scientific Babel: How science was done before and after Global English, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lockhart, Leonora Wilhelmina (1931), Word Economy, London: Kegan Paul.
McElvenny, James (2014), ‘Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning and early analytic philosophy’, Language Sciences 41, 212–221. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.10.001
McElvenny, Jame (2018), Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his contemporaries, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1930), ‘Penultima (editorial)’, Psyche 10:3, 1-29.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1933 [1930]), Basic English: a general introduction with rules and grammar, London: Kegan Paul.
Piller, Ingrid (2016), ‘Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism’, Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11.1, pp. 25–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), ‘The search for universal semantic primitives’, in Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. Martin Pütz, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 215-242.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996), Semantics: primes and universals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014), Imprisoned in English: the hazards of English as a default language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

One of countless internet memes about crazy English spelling (Source: angmohdan.com)

During a dreary German winter in the 1980s, I would get up early each Friday morning, wrap myself up against the cold, and ride my bike in the morning darkness up “Gallows Hill Street”, where for many centuries the city’s court of justice had been located. My destination was a windowless underground classroom in a 1960s concrete building, where an “Advanced Dictation” class was taking place that was compulsory for all undergraduate students of English.

For 90 minutes each week, we would take dictation of some text, then swap the result of our labors with our neighbor, whose job it was to mark up the errors and tally them while the teacher wrote out the difficult words on the blackboard. Each week, this was an exercise in guessing and humiliation: for instance, how do you spell /ɪndaɪt/ when you hear it for the first time and have only the vaguest idea what it means? Most likely “indite”? Or is it spelled like “night” and “right” and hence “indight”? Or how about /teknɪklɪ/? To spell “technicly” seems obvious enough but wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

There are hundreds if not thousands such words in the English language that you need to know before you can spell them. Understanding the logic of the alphabet and the main sound-letter correspondences still leaves you with a long way to go when it comes to being able to read and write in English.

Most students in the class struggled and we all dreaded the final exam (I passed with a credit, which, by my standards, was disappointingly low).

A student in the class had dug up a quip by the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka, who had opined that “English spelling is an insult to the human intelligence.” Being teenagers, we all agreed with the statement and – in a classic case of sour grapes – consoled ourselves with the idea that not doing well in English dictation was in fact a badge of honor that demonstrated our superior intelligence.

Pope Gregory sending St Augustine to convert the people of England to Christianity in 597 (11th c manuscript, British Library)

In the years since, maybe in a case of Stockholm syndrome, I’ve come to adore English orthography. Today, I see it as an intricate system that contains within it the sediments of the innumerous contacts between different languages and cultures that make English such a fascinating language.

Adopting the Latin script

English writing had a design flaw from Day One: adopting the Latin alphabet, which is designed for the sound system of another language, Latin, to English was always going to be a problem – as has been proven innumerable times since the Latin alphabet has been adopted to more languages than any other script (as I explain in this lecture).

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain (ca. 400-700 CE), they brought with them not only their Germanic dialects but also their runic alphabet, which had been designed for the phonology of Germanic languages.

During Christianization the runic alphabet became associated with heathendom, and the Latin alphabet with Christianity. From 597 – the date of Augustine’s mission to Kent – Latin became the language of the new faith and, gradually, the alphabet of the Latin language began to be used to also write English.

Old English was a very different language from what it is today, and with the addition of a few letters, the match between sounds and letters was not too bad in those days, even if the problem of fewer letters than sounds has been a problem of English spelling since the beginning. The classical Latin alphabet had 23 letters, and three were added. These 26 letters now have to cover the 43 phonemes (19 vowels and 24 consonants) of modern English.

The last English king, King Harold, is killed during the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (Bayeux Tapestry)

So, the first story of language and culture contact encoded in English spelling is that of the contact between spoken Germanic dialects and the sophisticated literate world of Latin. It is also the story of adopting a new faith and the fundamental transformation of a culture this results in.

Mixing in French

Old English died in 1066. Although the name “English” suggests continuity, Old English is as different from English as we know it as, say, German or Norwegian.

This is because the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought Old English into intense contact with French. For centuries, a social divide separated English (the spoken peasant dialects) and French (the language of the upper classes, and the language of almost all writing in England during the period).

This medieval social-cum-linguistic divide is still vividly illustrated by Anglo-Saxon-origin terms for animals (e.g., pig, cow, sheep, deer) existing side-by-side with French-origin terms for the meat of those animals (e.g., pork, beef, mutton, venison). That the medieval division of labor was also an ethnolinguistic divide could not be clearer.

By the time “English” started to be used again in writing it was a fundamentally changed mixed language, and spelling conventions that made sense in a Germanic language co-existed, not always easily, with spelling conventions that made sense in French.

The printing press fossilizes spelling

As if all that language mixing was not enough to confuse English writing, the printing press, which was introduced to Britain by William Caxton in 1476, altered the relationship between speech and writing forever.

Caxton’s rant about linguistic diversity (from the Preface to his print of Eneydos)

The idea of orthography – that there is only one correct way to spell – was alien to the medieval mind. Spelling mirrored pronunciation closely and different scribes in different dialect areas spelled differently. Spelling was ultimately a matter of individual preference.

Printing changed that – not only because a standard was more convenient for printers but also because a uniform linguistic product could reach a larger market. Not surprisingly Caxton was one of the first to rail against linguistic diversity when he famously complained that “eggs” were called “egges” in some parts of England but “eyren” in others.

Standardization was born.

Initially, the idea of a standard language only applied to writing, and spoken English continued to be highly diverse.

What happens when spoken language continues to change but writing does not? They drift apart … and you end up with a spelling system that is more in tune with the pronunciation of 500 years ago than contemporary pronunciation. This is particularly true of English vowels whose pronunciation changed considerably between the 15^th and 18^th centuries in a process called the “Great Vowel Shift.”

The Great Vowel Shift and the stubborn conservatism of printing have created a rift between spoken and written English (Image credit: Wikipedia)

As a result, written and spoken English are today quite different beasts.

Is learning how to spell in English worth it?

Untold numbers of English language learners have, like myself, sweated to learn how to spell in English.

This task has been unnecessarily complicated by the false belief that we were learning an alphabetic script. Systematic letter-sound relationships are the foundation of English spelling but they are complemented by a significant logographic element, where letter combinations are systematically related to morphemes. The triple baggage of adopting an ill-suited alphabet, of mixing two languages and their internal logics, and of separating written from spoken language, has inserted a considerable logographic element (I explain this is in greater detail with the example of <s> as plural marker and <ce> as marker of word-final voiceless /s/ in non-inflected words in this lecture).

Logograms can only be acquired through patient practice, as any Chinese teacher will tell you. However, a knowledge of language history can help make sense of the logographic element. And it is certainly more motivating to understand English spelling in its socio-historical context instead of considering it “an insult to human intelligence.” The reward of learning how to spell is the kind of reading automaticity and speed that characterizes the proficient reader and that is the ultimate point of literacy.

What is your experience with learning or teaching English spelling? And how do you think digital technologies will change English spelling?

To explore further, view the lecture about the spread of the Latin alphabet that goes with this blog post:

Front of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

Remember library stacks? Browsing among books? Serendipitously finding on a nearby shelf what you didn’t know you needed? There are still stacks, though nowadays you might be crushed if someone turned the crank. Public libraries have stacks. But where do we do most of our research?

On the internet, of course. Does serendipity exist in cyberspace?

It does. At the 2016 annual Institute for Historical Study meeting, Charles Sullivan described finding a document that had seemed non-existent, simply by using the right search terms. Advised to pursue primary sources, he worried about traveling to archives hither and yon. Did he travel? Not at all: the documents had been digitized.

I am now working with primary sources in my possession: ninety-nine postcards that my mother-in-law, Matylda Sicherman, brought with her from Poland when she emigrated in 1928. Out of them, and with the aid of other primary sources, I’ve teased the stories of a mostly Hasidic community in the first quarter of the twentieth century. I’m hoping that the owners of the cards will donate them to the Center for Jewish History in New York, which is digitizing its entire archive. In the future, these cards could be read in the countries from which they were sent—Poland, Romania, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia—and by anyone anywhere with access to the internet.

But for me, physically handling these battered cards is essential to understanding them. Each one was written by a particular person in a particular place, stamped by a post office or military postal service, read by someone in a different place and circumstance. One card depicts four generals shaking hands in 1915 to signify Bulgaria’s joining the Central Powers—“der neue Waffenbruder” (“the new brother-in-arms;” in addition to German, the phrase is also given in Hungarian, Czech and Polish). The sender, Private Jacob Isak Sicherman, wrote each “brother’s” nation above his head: “BULG. TURKEI, OS-UNG [Austro-Hungary], DEUT[SCH].” He wrote on 1 June 1916 while convalescing in a Cracow military hospital. The card is stamped by the hospital and by the military postal service (there’s no postage stamp). Like most of the cards, it went to his wife, then living in a small town in Hungary because her home in Poland wasn’t yet safe. His words overflowed the space. He writes intimately, yet anyone who read his crabbed handwriting would find no secrets:

I am going to note for you who each of these high and mighty gentlemen is. You’ll also know by yourself. Let me know whether you received it. I kiss you and the dear children heartily–[also] the dear parents. Your faithful J. Isaak

Holding this card contributes an ineffable sense of connection. Years ago, in the Public Records Office in London, I pored over scraps that a colonial official had scribbled in the course of his duties. I felt his presence.

Back of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

This tactile connection is only part of the pleasure of my often-serendipitous research preparing an edition of the postcards. Early on, an Institute member told me about a genealogy site, JewishGen.org, loaded with an astonishing wealth of ever-growing databases and a large and friendly community of scholars and translators offering their skills for free. The main translator of the German cards, Isabel Rincon, teaches German literature and languages at a Munich Gymnasium. There was more than her training in German philology that prepared her for the task. Her personal history impelled her to volunteer: her grandfather and his best friend (Jewish) had both been in love with a young Jewish woman. She left Germany in the 1930s for America. Tempted to emigrate with her but not sharing her danger, the grandfather remained regretfully in Germany. The other two emigrated and married; all three friends remained in touch throughout their lives. Isabel knew them all.

Besides Isabel, I have had many pen pals met through JewishGen online discussion groups. Valerie Schatzker, author of the monograph Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia—a wonderfully readable book—sent a source in a 1917 Austrian newspaper, explained Polish words, and offered to read the manuscript. A professional translator in Israel grappled with the intolerably messy Yiddish script. Institute member Bogna Lorance-Kot translated Polish cards. A man in Ohio eagerly offered to make a genealogical chart for the book. Rabbi Avrohom Marmorstein figured out the most likely way that Jacob Isak learned to read and write German—from his fellow pupils in one of the yeshivas that he attended. Like many Hasidim, his family ignored the imperial law that required all children to go to school. Jacob and his parents preferred that he sleep on straw and go hungry, as long as he could absorb rabbinic learning.

What has been most rewarding about this research has been the human element: coming to know the people of the cards and the people of the scholarly community–discovering and being offered knowledge that illuminates the stories of these long-gone people.

This post was first published in the Summer 2016 issue of the newsletter of the Institute for Historical Study.

Barely legible today but evidence of ‘super-diversity’ in the 9th century: Runic graffiti in Hagia Sophia

On a parapet in Hagia Sophia’s gallery there is an obscure little graffiti written in Viking runes and dating back to the 9^th century. All that is legible today is ‘alftan,’ which refers to the Norse name ‘Halfdan’ and it is assumed that it was part of a formula such as ‘Halfdan carved these runes’ – the medieval equivalent of the modern graffiti formula ‘XY was here.’

How did a medieval Viking get all the way to what is today Istanbul and was back then Constantinople, the centre of the Byzantine Empire, the most powerful metropolis on earth? Maybe Halfdan was a mercenary in the Varangian Guard. Drawn from all over Northern Europe, the Varangian Guard were an elite army unit serving as personal body guards of the Byzantine Emperor. The Byzantine Emperors felt safer with foreigners as body guards who had no local loyalties. Little is known about the motivations of the young men who left Northern Europe to serve far from home in present-day Turkey but I imagine the usual mixture of lack of opportunities at home and the lure of the metropolis – a lure so powerful that medieval Constantinople drew migrants from all across the known world to this multilingual and multicultural city.

Evidence of contemporary ‘super-diversity:’ Chinese flier in Antwerp (Source: Blommaert&Rampton, 2011)

The Viking graffiti in Hagia Sophia reminded me of the Chinese flier in a contemporary Antwerp shop window that Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton recently used as example to explain the scope of linguistic research under conditions of super-diversity. Arguing that the example – an ad for a room for rent – bears traces of worldwide migration flows which make language varieties and scripts globally mobile, they outline the theoretical and methodological implications of migration and globalization for contemporary sociolinguistic research. I largely agree with their conclusions but I cannot help but wonder that two qualitatively similar examples – Viking graffiti in 9^th century Constantinople and a hand-written Chinese flier in 21^st century Antwerp – have such different effects: why has sociolinguistics been oblivious to linguistic diversity through the ages and why is the recognition that linguistic diversity is fundamental to all research in language and communication relatively recent?

Why does evidence of contemporary linguistic diversity move us to re-think sociolinguistics in a way that evidence of linguistic diversity through the ages has not? I answered that question previously with reference to the position of key linguistic thinkers in monolingual environments. However, there is another answer, too, and – like the medieval Viking graffiti – it also stares you in the face here in Istanbul. That further explanation is that multilingualism has been actively expunged from the historical record.

Ottoman Turkish inscription above the gate through which Mehmed II entered the city: its Greek name is Χαρ[ι]σίου πύλη/πόρτα (‘Gate of Char[i]sius’) and its Turkish name is Edirnekapı (‘Adrianopole Gate’)

However, the transient nature of language is only part of the story why we fail to see linguistic diversity in the historical record. The other part of the story is that evidence of linguistic diversity has been systematically erased from the historical record.

This obelisk inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs has been part of Istanbul’s linguistic landscape since the 4th century when Emperor Theodosius had it brought in from Egypt. The pedestal with its bilingual Greek and Latin inscription was added at the same time.

When Halfdan wrote his Viking graffiti and, presumably, spoke some form of Old Norse with those of his fellow Varangians who shared his dialect, the main language of Constantinople – and the lingua franca of its diverse population – was (medieval) Greek. Latin was also widely used and then there were the languages of all the city’s migrants and visitors. Christian Constantinople was a hugely multilingual place.

The city’s linguistic make-up changed on May 29, 1453 when Mehmed II took the city: not only did the Christian city become a Muslim one – and the Hagia Sophia church a mosque – the city’s dominant languages also changed from Greek and Latin to Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

What did not change was the fact of the city’s multilingualism: Arabic was the language of prayer and religion, Persian was the language of the court and Turkish was the language of the troops. Greek found itself as the language of a now down-trodden and subjected population and, as before, there were many other languages spoken by the city’s diverse inhabitants: Armenian, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Russian and Serbian would have been particularly prominent.

The Turkish that came to predominate over the centuries as Istanbul’s lingua franca was itself a highly heteroglossic language. Ottoman Turkish was inflected particularly by Arabic and Persian but also by all the other languages of this great melting-pot city.

Arabic calligraphy in Hagia Sophia: Quranic verse inscribed in the dome

The city’s multilingualism and the multilingual character of Turkish officially came to an end with the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The new Turkey wanted to sever its links with its Ottoman and ‘Eastern’ past and wanted to become modern and European. The multilingual laissez-faire of the past was now seen as decidedly ‘backward’ and ‘Eastern.’ Languages other than Turkish started to be repressed, with Kurdish as the most well-known victim of the new repression of linguistic diversity by the state. Not only was Turkey going to have only one language – Turkish – but that language was going to be ‘modernized,’ i.e. rid of the traces of other languages, particularly linguistic traces associated with ‘the East,’ i.e. Arabic and Persian.

The most well-known aspect of the Turkish language reform is the abolition of the Arabic script and its replacement with the Latin script. In one fell sweep, modern Turks lost access to their written historical record. Another target of the language reformers was Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Such words were replaced with ‘Turkish’ ones or loans from ‘modern’ European languages.

The futility of this undertaking – even if lost on everyone but the philologist – is nicely encapsulated by the word for ‘city’: Ottoman Turkish used ‘شهر‎ şehir.’ Because of its obvious association with Persian ‘شهر‎  šahr’ the language reformers saw no place for it in ‘Modern’ Turkish and cast around for a ‘pure’ Turkish word. They found it in the ancient ‘kent.’ The irony is that ‘kent’ is iself a much older loanword from Sogdian, the lingua franca of Central Asia before the Islamic Conquest.

Multilingualism has made a powerful comeback thanks to the tourism economy: this restaurant menu sports entries in 10 languages. And, no, this particular dish doesn’t sound appealling in any of them …

The reform was “a catastrophic success,” as the Turkologist Geoffrey Lewis has called it. As a result, most contemporary Turkish speakers are cut off from their linguistic and cultural heritage predating the 1930s. A famous – and also ironic – example of the monolingualization of Turkish is the fact that a major 1927 speech by Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, has had to be ‘translated’ repeatedly into contemporary Turkish so as to remain comprehensible to contemporary Turks.

In Istanbul, as elsewhere, contemporary examples of ‘super-diversity’ – the Russian ‘Sale’ signs in the shop windows, the tourist communications in all the languages of countries with strong currencies, the handwritten Arabic ‘for rent’ signs, the Kurdish music stalls – are impossible to ignore. By contrast, the fact that super-diversity has been a characteristic of Istanbul-Constantinople-Byzantium since time immemorial is easy to overlook.

Monolingualism and the Turkish language – just as all other standardized languages – are invented traditions. Diversity is, in fact, the normal human experience, as the anthropologist Ward Goodenough, who passed away last weekend, pointed out back in 1976. A research agenda that takes linguistic diversity as the basis of sociolinguistic inquiry must also include the hidden histories of linguistic diversity and modernity’s attempts to erase diversity.

Jan Blommaert, & Ben Rampton (2011). Language and superdiversity Diversities, 13 (2)
Goodenough, W. (1976). MULTICULTURALISM AS THE NORMAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE Council on Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 7 (4), 4-7 DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1976.7.4.05x1652n

Ernst Reuter, West Berlin’s post-war Mayor, was Professor of Urban Studies in Ankara from 1938 to 1946 (Source: turkishpress.de)

While the internationalization of higher education is a hot topic at the moment and is widely seen as unique to the present, internationalization of higher education is not new. The politics of internationalization at Istanbul University in the early years of the Turkish republic provide a fascinating case study (Ergin, 2009).

In the 1930s 38 out of 65 chair professors at Istanbul University were German. If university rankings had been around then, Istanbul University would obviously have done fantastically well on the ‘internationalization’ criterion. Two events in 1933 were responsible for this amazing level of internationalization: Hitler’s ascent to power meant that Germany’s Jewish and/or Socialist intellectual elite started to leave the country. Simultaneously, the Turkish republic undertook a major reform of higher education, which was to be a radical break from the Ottoman past.

In its efforts to modernize and Westernize, Turkey employed a large number of Western academics in the early years of the Republic (1923-1950), many of them refugees from Nazi Germany. The irony of employing the victims of Western modernity to achieve Western modernity was not lost on many of those academics who inhabited this paradoxical world.

The Turkish reformers largely accepted the Orientalist and racist world view of the time but wanted to switch sides. They accepted that ‘the West’ was superior to ‘the East’ but contested the idea that they were part of ‘the East.’ The humanities and social sciences of the reformed universities were expected to demonstrate exactly that: that historically, linguistically and racially Turkey was on par, if not superior, to Western modernity and civilization, conceived as an essential trait of culture and race. Specifically, academics were mobilized to demonstrate the ‘Europeanness’ of Turks and their membership in ‘the white race;’ to establish the ancient and enduring character of ‘Turkishness;’ and to show that the Turkish language was the source of Western languages.

In effect, refugees from Nazi Germany, which was ideologically built on exactly the same universalist conceptions of history, language and race (localized, of course, to “Germanness” rather than “Turkishness”), became the local personifications of Turkey’s modernization project. How did they live their paradoxical situation?

Ergin (2009) explores this paradox with reference to the work of Wolfram Eberhard, who was Professor of Chinese at Ankara University from 1937 to 1948. Eberhard, who was widely seen as one of the most talented sinologists of his generation, left Germany because he was under pressure to become a member of the Nazi Party in order to advance his academic career. His approach to language and culture did not fit in with the nationalistic and racial ideologies of the time (neither in Germany nor in Turkey) and his work thus provides an interesting case of intercultural communication in research.

Specifically, Eberhard sought to reject the then-prevailing idea of Chinese as an autonomous civilization and to demonstrate that Chinese language and civilization were as much a product of linguistic and cultural contact and exchange as any other. In one article, he identified five major influences on ancient Chinese, including a ‘Western’ influence “whose possessors were of Turkish stock” (quoted in Ergin, 2009, p. 117). While intended to contest notions of national and racial purity, this academic article was reinterpreted by Turkish academics and in the Turkish media as evidence that many achievements of Chinese civilization occurred because of Turkish influence. Eberhard’s anti-nationalistic and anti-essentialist argument thus came to be read as its exact opposite.

However, it would be wrong to assume that Turkey’s German academics only participated in the Turkish nationalist project inadvertently and through being misinterpreted, as in this example. They also had their careers and the interests of their employer – the Turkish state – to consider. Like many others, Eberhard, too, on occasion explicitly located his research agenda in Turkish nationalistic and racial positions. The tension between producing universalistic research for local purposes was continuously present.

While finding themselves welcomed and admired as ‘Western intellectuals’ these émigré scholars also found themselves resented and envied by their Turkish colleagues. One terrain where resentment against ‘Westerners’ could be openly expressed was language: most of the German academics taught in English, French or German and their contracts stipulated that, after three years, they would switch to Turkish. The assumption was that they would help to enrich and develop the Turkish language by lecturing and publishing in Turkish. In practice, unsurprisingly, only a relatively small number was able to achieve sufficient proficiency in Turkish to be able to teach in Turkish. For most, the contractually stipulated linguistic transition period went by and they quietly continued to teach in English, French or German.

Internationalizing Turkish academia in the early years of the republic was a creative response by the Turkish modernizers to turn Western academic Orientalism to their advantage. They tried to establish the Turkish origins of Western civilization with the help of Western knowledge and Western academics. Ergin’s article is a fascinating account of the entanglements in global and local power struggles that internationalizing discourses and international academics can find themselves in – then as today.

Ergin, M. (2009). Cultural encounters in the social sciences and humanities: western emigre scholars in Turkey History of the Human Sciences, 22 (1), 105-130 DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099137