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Lectures et critiques

Most, Glenn W., Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, eds. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in Many Tongues

Leiden : Brill. (Ancient Languages and Civilizations, 3). 2023. xvi, 484 p.
Maxime Maleux
p. 231-235
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Most, Glenn W., Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, eds. 2023. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in Many Tongues. Leiden : Brill. (Ancient Languages and Civilizations, 3). xvi, 484 p. ISBN 978-90-04-46466-7

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1In recent years, research on multilingualism in ancient and non-western cultures has received increased attention from researchers. Multilingualism in the Greco-Roman world – notorious for its disregard for languages other than Latin or Greek – has been addressed by Cassio & Kaczko (2023) and by Roure (2023), to cite but a couple of examples of such books published only in the last year. But while these publications usually stem from conference proceedings and usually contain specialized contributions without a strong common theme, the book under discussion, Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship, has a more ambitious scope (as the title suggests). Although the authors limit themselves to forms of scholarship – thereby excluding documentary evidence of multilingualism, which is covered, for example, by Roure (Roure, Lippert, Ruiz Darasse, Perrin-Saminadayar, 2023) – both the temporal and spatial boundaries might look staggering, ranging from the second millennium BCE to the 13th century CE and from Spain to Korea. Such an impressive demarcation requires an interdisciplinary team of scholars familiar with the different languages and literatures of these periods and places, as well as with the history of the respective linguistic traditions. The editors have, in my opinion, succeeded in this formidable task, and the result cannot be classified as a collection of unrelated papers on specialized topics. Instead, the subjects of the contributions are well chosen and fit harmoniously into the larger body of topics.

2The volume consists of five parts, each devoted to a relevant aspect of ancient learned plurilingualism – namely, language diversity, etymology, lexicography, translation and writing systems. These parts, appropriately called “fundamental themes” (p. 11), are divided into several chapters, each dealing with a specific text or author relevant to the central theme. Part one addresses the topic of language diversity and appropriately begins with the Tower of Babel passage in Genesis, followed by accounts of primarily Greek scholars (Herodotus, Epicurus, Diodorus of Sicily, and Strabo) and two Chinese perspectives (Xunzi, Hong Mai). The second part contains eight key texts related to etymology and is more diverse and systematic, as multiple linguistic traditions are juxtaposed in their treatment of this linguistic activity, showing that the Greek conception of “etymology” as relating to the true meaning of words is not shared by all traditions. This part contains accounts from Indian (Yaska, Vasubandu, Sthiramati, and Paramartha), Greek (Plato, Cornutus), Roman (Varro, Isidorus), Chinese (Zheng Xuan), and Italian scholars (Hugutio of Pisa). The third part on lexicography is more concise and focuses on Mesopotamian word lists, Greek glossaries, Byzantine dictionaries (Hesychius, Photius, Suda) and the Chinese Dictionary of the Imperial Capital. Part four focuses on translations and translation practices ranging from Sumerian to Akkadian, Hebrew to Greek to Latin, Sanskrit to Chinese, and Greek to Arabic to Latin. Finally, the fifth and final part takes into account the writing systems that have accompanied the languages under discussion. The authors zoom in on the origins of the Greek script, the Arabic abjad, the Jurchen and Manchu scripts and the Korean Hangul. Only chapter 5.3 – on the origin of language as treated in the Sanskrit work Laṅkāvatārasūtra – does not seem to fit well within the theme of writing systems.

  • 1  For instance the Old Irish Auraicept na n-Éces (“The scholar’s primer”) and the Old Bulgarian O pi (...)

3The choice of texts is of course subjective to some extent, but the selected works appear all representative and relevant. Of course, one could cite several other relevant texts and languages that would have fit perfectly, but the limitation of space is merciless.1 Although there seems to be a preponderance of Greco-Latin literature on the subject, the choice of languages and authors is mostly balanced. It stands to reason that, within the intended scope of the editors, numerous equally relevant and interesting texts on plurilingualism had to be quietly passed over, as all these could impossibly fit in one book, but would require a series of their own. I therefore dare to express the hope that this book is only the first building block of a monumental series on plurilingualism in ancient and early modern scholarship.

4One of the advantages of the broad scope of the work is that it allows the reader to compare already familiar concepts and ideas with works he or she is not familiar with. It seems that thinking about language in two distant cultures does not always produce significant differences. The Chinese scholar Xunzi (c. 310 - c. after 238 B.C.), for example, had ideas about the plurilingual reality of feudal China and the need for a standardized illustrious language that would not have sounded foreign to the medieval Italian scholar Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who entertained a similar idea in his De vulgari eloquentia for the vernacular Italian language. Perhaps a synthesis or epilogue at the end of the volume would have been useful to draw such parallels.

5In my opinion, one of the most attractive features of this volume is its schematic structure in which concise contributions provide the necessary information to place the fragments discussed in context. At times, however, these introductions come across as somewhat terse and lapidary. For example, Pontani’s otherwise excellent piece on Lucretius contains a footnote (p. 49, n. 50) in which the author mentions the Greek term prolepsis but does not elaborate on what this particular concept means. For the uninitiated reader, this may hinder optimal understanding.

6The target audience is certainly academic, but the work could also be put to good use in undergraduate lectures. Classes in classical (i.e. Greco-Roman) linguistics, for example, could benefit greatly from a comparative exercise with counterparts in cuneiform culture – which indeed exerted considerable influence on Mediterranean cultures and literatures – or counterparts in less obvious literatures. As such, the volume presents new horizons for the student without the need to delve into the study of those languages or consult text editions and scholarly works in which the relevant material is hidden.

7There are but a few minor points about which I had questions while perusing the work. First, the transcription systems of some languages did not seem entirely consistent. For example, Greek words are sometimes transliterated into the Latin alphabet, but most are rendered in their own Greek script. When transcribing Akkadian, Assyriologists use a specific set of diacritics to represent certain phonemes. One of these is <ḫ>, which is usually described as a voiceless velar fricative. In this volume, however, the phoneme is consistently transcribed as <h> (e.g., p. 242: muhhum). This, in my opinion, is a misrepresentation, because Akkadian once had an aspirated /h/ sound that in historical times was lost. Finally, Chinese words are transcribed using the widely known pinyin system, but without displaying the tones. This seems like a missed opportunity to cater to readers who are learning Chinese and want to know the exact tones of the words under discussion.

8As for the native scripts used, I find it odd that the Biblical Hebrew section in chapter 1.2 is rendered unvocalized. Biblical Hebrew texts are conventionally printed with the so-called Masoretic vowels and accents – which were devised in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages to establish correct Biblical pronunciation and recitation – while post-Biblical Hebrew texts are typically unvocalized. One could argue that offering only the consonant texts is a more faithful representation of the authentic text as composed in the first millennium BCE. However, a vocalized text is probably better for students learning Biblical Hebrew or related Semitic languages who want to use this book. On a related note, it is not entirely clear to me why the Sanskrit texts are nowhere rendered in a native Indian script such as Devanagari. While this may be useful for those few readers who do not know Devanagari but have a grasp of Sanskrit grammar, it is inconsistent with, for example, the Chinese and Arabic portions that have not been transliterated.

9In their introduction to the part on etymology (p. 104), Most, Schäfer and Loporcaro note that “[e]ven texts that work only within the terms of a single language can be said to be multilingual in a wider sense, insofar as they postulate earlier stages of the same language.” I would nuance this bold statement because premodern etymology is typically ahistorical. Texts by Yaska, for example, do not seem to contain a preconception of an older language stage or a proto-language that can be reconstructed as we know it today.

10As for layout, when reading the PDF version of the book, one notices that footnotes occur sometimes on a different page than the passages they comment on (e.g., on p. 44-45). This minor annoyance is probably not a problem when reading the book in print.

11Finally, I am confused by the use of the term “Palavi” (seemingly offered as equivalent to Sanskrit) on pages 399-401. As I am not an Indologist I can be mistaken, but this name seems to refer to Pali, the important Buddhist literary language which was a later Prakrit dialect of Sanskrit. In addition, there seems to be some confusion of language and script when the authors refer to Sanskrit as script: “Sanskrit and Palavi are derived from earlier Kharoṣṭhi and Brahmi scripts of the third quarter of the first millennium B.C.” (p. 400). Since the Sanskrit language was written in several scriptures (of which Devanagari is perhaps the best known), it is unclear to me which scripts are being referred to.

12In sum, apart from these few comments, I can only conclude that this rich volume is a fascinating read and a stimulating resource that can benefit scholars and interested laymen alike. All contributions are elegantly written in accessible language, and some chapters are enriched with high-quality color images of the manuscripts discussed. This book is useful in a didactic context, introducing students to the history of linguistic thought, not only to canonical works and ideas such as those of Plato in his Cratylus, but also with typically lesser-known authors. For example, the chapter on Varro’s De lingua Latina is well suited to a course in Latin historical linguistics (for which the present reviewer has used this exact text recently). As such, the book is not only a multilingual, but also a multifunctional tool useful to both scholar and student.

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Bibliographie

Cassio, Albio Cesare & Sara Kaczko, eds. 2023. Alloglōssoi. Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe. Berlin : De Gruyter.

Roure, Réjane, Sandra Lippert, Coline Ruiz Darasse & Éric Perrin-Saminadayar, eds. 2023. Le multilinguisme dans la Méditerranée antique. Pessac : PUB.

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Notes

1  For instance the Old Irish Auraicept na n-Éces (“The scholar’s primer”) and the Old Bulgarian O pismenĭhŭ (“On the letters”) by Črĭnorizĭcĭ Hrabrŭ come to mind.

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Maxime Maleux, « Most, Glenn W., Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, eds. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in Many Tongues »Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 46-1 | -1, 231-235.

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Maxime Maleux, « Most, Glenn W., Dagmar Schäfer & Mårten Söderblom Saarela, eds. Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship. Thinking in Many Tongues »Histoire Épistémologie Langage [En ligne], 46-1 | 2024, mis en ligne le 03 juillet 2024, consulté le 09 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hel/5345 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/11y10

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Auteur

Maxime Maleux

Faculty of Arts, Department of Linguistics (QLVL), KU Leuven

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