Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 26, Issue 3, 2002

The publication of a dictionary is a means to describe, codify and ultimately standardise a language. This process is complicated by the lexicographer’s own attitude towards the language and the public’s sensitivity on language matters. The recent publication of the two most authoritative dictionaries of Modern Greek and their respective lexical coverage reveals the continuing survival of the underlying ideologies of the two sponsoring institutions concerning the history of the Greek language, as well as their opposing standpoints on the language question over the past decades, some 25 years after the constitutional resolution of the Greek diglossia, affecting the way they describe the synchronic state of language. The two dictionaries proceed from opposing starting points in attempting to influence and set a pace for the standardisation of Modern Greek by presenting two different aspects of the synchronic state of Greek, one of which focuses on the long history of the language and thus takes the present state to be only a link in an uninterrupted chain dating from antiquity, and the other of which focuses on the present state of Greek and thus takes this fully developed autonomous code to be the outcome of past linguistic processes and socio-cultural changes in response to the linguistic community’s present needs. The absence of a sufficiently representative corpus has restrained the descriptive capacity of the two dictionaries and has given space for ideology to come into play, despite the fact that both dictionaries have made concessions in order to account for the present-day Greek language.

Language planning is an issue of contemporary concern around the globe. Every sovereign nation wishes to preserve its national tongue and maintain its status as a preferred medium of communication. However, the phenomenon of globalization, coupled with the increasing hegemony of English, has motivated many nations to revisit their language planning policies with a view to ensuring and strengthening the pre-eminence of their own languages, not only within their national borders, but within their geographical and commercial reach as well. The Arabic-speaking countries, while recalling with pride their historical dominance in the medieval scientific arena, are now struggling to prevent the language from an inundation of modern foreign terminology. The Arabic language-planning agencies, whose efforts to date, despite their excellent intentions, have not exhibited stellar success, must closely examine the work of other planning organizations which have succeeded in achieving many of their goals. Efforts by linguistically and ethnically diverse Scandinavian countries to promote unified technical and scientific terminology deserve close examination by the Arab nations, along with adaptation of their flourishing endeavors to the problems that beset Arabic language planning.

The study of the unprecedented revival of Hebrew in (pre-Israel) Palestine (approx. 1890–1914) has focused on the status of the language, because the revival has been rightly viewed as resulting from status planning. However, corpus planning, or codification, also served as a critical component of the Revival. Though Hebrew had been used for almost two millennia in written form, mainly as a language of religion, codification was needed in several areas — selection and harmonization of pronunciation, unification of spelling, etc. Still, the greatest task was adapting the language lexically to the modern world. Codification went on in Hebrew, in fact, for over a millennium by generations of writers and translators of various types of texts, culminating in the formation of a modern literature, probably the most instrumental factor enabling the Revival. Lexicalization in the Revival itself was partly done by the Hebrew Language Committee, but mostly by individuals. Ben-Yehuda drew words from old texts and created his own as a scholarly activity and to meet his lexical needs as a newspaper publisher and the first Hebrew dictionary compiler. Others included the writer and journalist Ben-Avi and the national poet Bialik, who drew words from earlier texts or created their own only when they needed them. Other individuals coined countless words to meet their communication needs — writers, journalists, educators, translators, publishers, editors, and language-conscious political leaders. Apart from drawing words from old texts with their original or new meanings, methods included: coining new words from old roots; using old, dormant words as different parts of speech; reducing expressions into single words; borrowing; loan translation; popular etymology; adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes to existing words; and merging pairs of words into single ones.

The new English translation of Paolo Rossi’s now classic study, Logic and the Art of Memory, presents a useful opportunity to examine contemporary efforts to understand what its subtitle calls “the quest for a universal language.” At the same time, an old seventeenth-century philosophical romance, Thomas Urquhart’s Jewel, affords a good test case for evaluating the success of those contemporary critical efforts — including Rossi’s own. First among contemporary scholars, Rossi made it possible to study seriously the seventeenth-century universal language movement by recovering the history of an idea — the pursuit of the so-called clavis universalis, the universal key to knowledge, from the ancient arts of memory to the Enlightenment’s philosophical language projects. While Rossi’s study has clearly withstood the test of time, since it still has much to teach us about the history of an idea — what Urquhart would call “pure eloquence” — his study has less utility in clarifying the status of that idea in history. Understanding Urquhart’s Jewel requires, I argue, two different forms of history whose interplay is always complicated: the history of ideas and the history of those politically charged engagements with ideas by authors whose situation at a specific time and a specific place brings meanings to their work that transcend epistemological concerns alone.