A Brill Calendar: June 1

Few long-term aspects of scholarly publishing are as fascinating as the languages in which texts used to be written, published and disseminated.

The desire of learned men and women that their work should be understood beyond the reach of their mother-tongue is certainly as old as the decline & fall of the Roman Empire, which endowed the Mediterranean and environs with a remarkably flexible ‘new’ Latin, capable to execute communicative tasks. The idiom ‘lingua franca’ originates when crusading knights - ‘Franks’ - tried to understand the 'strangers' on their way to Holy Cities. From the 17th century onwards, Italian, French, English and German languages emerged as alternative modes of scholarly expression, while post-classical Latin continued to be written and spoken until well into the 19th century.

The present stature of English as trans-national ‘lingua franca’ didn’t exist before the end of World War II. Somehow, it was foreseen by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt: the statesmen appointing in alliance a committee with the mission to study promotion of its use in the world at large in 1943.

The work to be done then by linguists and diplomats had been prepared by Charles Kay Ogden (Fleetwood, Lancashire, June 1 1889 – London, March 20 1957), designer of a basic English idiom – cum matching vocabulary – as a standardized, easy to learn vehicle for verbal communication. The proposal had been published in 1930. With all these recent developments in mind, it is seldom acknowledged that good old scholarly Latin had to be learned in class by everybody, and in an egalitarian way; not as a ‘dead’ language – a ‘contradictio in terminis’ - but as a medium lacking native speakers, implying a democratically distributed expressive power. For centuries that common language nursed coherence in Western intellectual traditions.