A Brill Calendar: December 20

Von Ranke and "Lingua Franca"

Few champions of an imminent ‘knowledge economy’ this side of the present millennium fail to observe that English is the ‘lingua franca’ lording this Promised Land.

Many publishers and services catering for interests of scholars and scientists on a world-encompassing basis now abstain from providing texts in the several thousand existing other languages. Please note, that ‘lingua franca’ is a concept worded in Latin; with the proviso that it wasn’t current idiom in Classical Antiquity. It originated probably in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean world, early in the Crusading Era, when Frankish knights entered civilizations much older and more sophisticated.

Since the emergence of universities – knowledge generators of a structure and breed unique to early Europe – Latin acted as an ideal ‘lingua franca’ serving every alumnus Son with an ‘Alma Mater’ anywhere; a most equitable medium of ‘communication’ (etymologically taken ‘changing together’). Since Antiquity Latin hadn’t been anybody’s mother tongue, so situations allowing native speakers an unmerited expressive advantage over their peers were pre-empted. Its second blessing made for easy migrating for scholars, students, ideas and ideals. A Leyden Arabist – let us, for instance, choose one of the many Schultenses – could start and teach at, say, Cracow University without insurmountable trouble, even if his Polish or German was poor or lacking.

It is seldom that the present enhanced status of English is contrasted with its real equivalents earlier. During the epoch of the great historian Leopold von Ranke (December 20, 1795 – May 23, 1886) for instance, German was the fashionable trans-national medium of exchange when it came to academic and scholarly knowledge; having replaced the ‘salonfähigkeit’ in this respect of French, during the preceding ‘Age of Voltaire’.