Lives of the Great Languages

Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

Karla Mallette

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226796239
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The story of how Latin and Arabic spread across the Mediterranean to create a cosmopolitan world of letters. In this ambitious book, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning—classical Arabic and medieval Latin—as they crossed the Mediterranean. Through anecdotes of relationships among writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists, Mallette tells a complex story about the transmission of knowledge in the period before the emergence of a national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity.Mallette shows how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life. These languages took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice. The book offers insight for anyone interested in rethinking linguistic and literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world.

[Part One]

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Group Portrait with Language

[ Chapter 1 ]

A Poetics of the Cosmopolitan Language

The story that I will tell in this book is, in a sense, a tragedy. Modernity has not been gentle with the cosmopolitan language systems whose trajectories I follow, Latin and Arabic. Arabic survives today as lingua sacra, and it maintains a notional identity as a unified cosmopolitan language. Most Arabs believe that the language they speak is the same as the language they write and the same as the language that was written in the ninth century of the Common Era, although they recognize that it has changed substantially over time. Extensive training is required in order for a speaker of colloquial Arabic to be able to read any of the written registers: Modern Standard Arabic, the classical Arabic of the ninth century, or Qurʾanic Arabic.1 Latin is (by any standard used to measure language vitality) dead as a doornail. The website Ethnologue, a resource that tracks the vitality of all languages, spoken and written, in use on the planet, has posted its epitaph. “No known L1 speakers,” it says of Latin—no one, that is, speaks Latin as a first language or mother tongue; “no ethnic community.”2 Literary historians typically describe the passing of Latin in another mode, since its demise made way for the triumph of vernacular literatures. Partisans of vernacularity have perceived the cosmopolitan languages as deadwood to be cut away so that local genius may flourish, the stifling weight of history and convention that must be shifted in order for innovation to emerge. My aim in this book is to construct a counterweight to such descriptions of the megalanguages of literary history: to describe and (for the most part) to eulogize languages that modern men and women of letters often view with suspicion, contempt, or disdain. This book is a ballad for a language that is dead.

Why celebrate linguistic instruments that (literary modernity teaches us) can only alienate the writer’s creations from the lives that inspired them? My aim is to honor writers who worked to take on languages that were not their birthright but rather became theirs, slowly and by grace of sustained effort. I describe language that gives provincial intellectuals equal footing with cosmopolitan elites, because neither provincials nor cosmopolitans learn the language effortlessly as infants; rather, they earn it by the sweat of their brow. I sing the praises of the cosmopolitan language as a way to opt into empire. I watch the arcane maneuvers of Alexandrian languages whose structure was formalized millennia ago, whose vocabulary has a musty glamour: a foundation cut into living rock. I recognize the allure of writing in an acquired language: a whetstone that hones thought. I admire the cosmopolitan language for its capacity to demand an ethical commitment and an ethical stance from the language worker. By taking on the cosmopolitan language, as we will see, the writer or reader, copyist or printer takes on a way of being in the world, an ethics of engagement that is baked into that language and the texts that carry it through the world.

The framing of this book may appear atypical, even eccentric. Literary historians typically focus not on languages but rather on the texts created in language. Those who study language as such typically are not literary historians but linguists, trained to deploy research methods and strategies designed to study language. This book takes a different approach. I take languages themselves as objects of analysis, but I study them as literary historian. My aim is not to produce sustained philological analyses of specific texts, although I advance my argument using philological strategies. At times, too, I use other approaches: I describe languages as historical actors and as agents of historical change. Or I sketch a quick portrait of language in its natural habitat: the choreography of behaviors and investments that link author, tongue, and text. Because we typically know languages—we hear, interpret, love them, and sometimes hate them—as they are instantiated in texts and in the mouths of speakers, I use emblematic texts and exemplary speakers as stand-ins for the languages themselves. Yet in a sense speakers and texts are incidental to the story I tell, part of the background noise that language generates in its labors to articulate and sustain itself. As we zoom out from language workers to the global span of the language, as individual humans fade from view, the language itself emerges in greater relief.

The geochronological focus of this book is in part suggested by the languages I take as objects of study, Arabic and Latin. Both languages have a vast chronological range (both, in fact, like to think of themselves as immortal). This study will focus on a particularly eventful moment for both of them: what the Christian West refers to as the Middle Ages, when these two languages connected more writers and readers than ever before or since. The geographical valences of the languages are equally impressive (both, in fact, fancy that they are universal). This book studies the heartland of Arabic and Latin during the Middle Ages. My discussion ranges from Abbasid-caliphate Baghdad and Basra—where the Arabic language was refined and standardized as literary medium—to early modern Italy, where Latinity made its last stand as the common tongue of literary life. Arabic and Latin were blithely unaware of each other for most of their history. Each interacted with other languages: each translated from Greek, for instance; Arabic had a special relationship with Persian and, later, with Ottoman Turkish; Latin was symbiotically connected to the Romance vernaculars that would supersede it. But the Arabs knew little and cared less about Latin letters. Latin did acquire scientific texts from Arabic, and I address this translation movement below. I also discuss those places where writers of Arabic and Latin and speakers of Arabic colloquials and the European vernaculars came into contact: the port cities of the Mediterranean. Thus, the geochronological coordinates of this book stretch from the Abbasid East (mainly between the eighth and tenth centuries CE, with a special emphasis on Baghdad and Basra) to the sixteenth-century Mediterranean (focusing on the Italian Peninsula).

Arabic and Latin are incommensurate languages in so many ways, and it is part of the aim of these opening chapters to spell out how they differ. Despite their differences, however, Arabic and Latin shared one quality: they had the ability to draw men of letters (and the occasional woman) to them. This book studies the attractions of the Alexandrian languages, which inspired writers to set aside the mother tongue as literary vehicle and to embrace them as the truest expression of the truest thought. Because of this conceptual focus, the argument doesn’t track chronologically: writers and books are chosen to illustrate attributes and behaviors of the language they used as medium and thus are not arranged in historical order. In this chapter, I outline the structure of the argument, with an abundance of internal references to aid the reader in navigating the nonlinear organization of the book. In the next chapter, Bashshār ibn Burd—an Arabic poet of the Abbasid age—and in chapter 3, Petrarch, who is remembered for his Italian poetry but wrote most of his works in Latin, appear to introduce the languages they served. I begin with a concession to chronology: thumbnail histories of the two languages.

The Latin language, emerging from the murky depths of history as the Romans consolidated their power at the heart of the Mediterranean (ca. third century BCE), developed its literary chops through translation from Greek.3 Carried out of Rome on the pathways of empire, it spread through the imperial capitals and made some headway in the countryside. But in parts of the empire—in the eastern and the southern Mediterranean, in particular—it struggled, because of competition from other languages (Greek, Syriac, and Armenian) in the east, and because of the sparseness of human settlements along the southwest quadrant of the Mediterranean shore. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, as the institutions of empire failed, the language suffered considerable entropy. Scholars disagree on the precise timing and mechanics by which Latin lost the hearts and minds of the population.4 Most scholars believe that, although literacy rates were low, the general public understood the formal language orally in much of western Europe (what is now France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and parts of the UK and Ireland) through the seventh century. In 782, Charlemagne invited poet and grammarian Alcuin (ca. 740–804), who got his Latin in York, to join the palatine school. Alcuin would write a number of treatises on Latin and become a central figure in the language reforms of the Carolingian era. When a young scholar from a land where a Germanic language was spoken had to correct the Latin used by speakers of Romance languages derived from spoken Latin, scholars agree that the umbilical cord between written Latin and the spoken tongues had been severed.

From the ninth century onward, formal, written Latin and the vernaculars were distinct languages, even in Romance-speaking parts of Europe, and written Latin had to be learned through study.5 French, Occitan, and Italian were no longer spoken registers of the formal language but, rather, independent languages. Grammatica, the first topic studied at school, taught Latin as the foundation of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and as point of entry for all future study. Breakaway vernaculars challenged the hegemony of Latinity: first in the north (parts of the oldest treatise on Irish grammar may date to the seventh century), then in Mediterranean Europe (Occitan poetry first appeared in southern France around the turn of the millennium; see chapters 5 and 11 below for the rise of the vernaculars). Latinity endured longer in the Italian Peninsula than most other parts of the Latin West, for a variety of reasons: because the Italians felt ownership over it and over the city of Rome, its sentimental capital; and because the language was identified so closely with the Catholic Church, which was also felt (within Italy, at least) to be a peculiarly Italian possession. Petrarch’s championing of Latin and his reforms of the language, bringing it once again into line with classical practice, would do much to extend the life of the language in Italy (see chapter 3). During the fifteenth century, the century of humanism, when most other European regions had happily negotiated the transition to vernacular composition, Latin flourished in Italy.6 The end game of the venture of Latinity—the competition between Latin and the Italian vernacular(s) for literary dominance during the era of humanism—marks the end of the vitality of Latin in the Italian context, although Latin survives still in Italy as the idiolect of the Roman Church.7 Scholars trace the neo-Latin tradition from the Renaissance, with its reconsolidation of Latinity on the foundation of classical Latin, through the nineteenth century (at least).8 But most readers look elsewhere for early modern and modern European literary milestones.

The trajectory of Arabic was quite different.9 Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 622 CE, it burst forth from the Arabian Peninsula, carried with the armies of Islamic expansion. At this early stage, the language had little real-life experience. The literary record consisted of a corpus of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾan, both known and transmitted primarily orally (although the caliph ʿUthmān [d. 655] gathered scholars and witnesses to correct the text of the Qurʾan and spread copies to all corners of the Islamic world).10 Under the Umayyads (661–750), following this period of rapid expansion, the domain of Muslim rule extended from the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco in the West to the shores of the Caspian Sea and central Asia in the East. Administering this vast empire put a great deal of pressure on the language; Arabic grew up quickly. Following the Abbasid revolution in 750, the explosive rate of territorial expansion slowed, and Arabization and Islamization slowly transformed the population. The emergent language and the new religion both drew converts to themselves; the Arabic language grew apace, fueled by a burgeoning literary life, intensive grammatical self-examination (the topic of chapter 6), and a vibrant translation movement (chapter 8), which taught the language new behaviors. The Arabic language faced peculiar challenges in certain times and places. In the eastern Mediterranean, for instance—where Latin stumbled, in part because of the daunting linguistic complexity of the region—it had to learn to share territory with a plethora of other languages. The Arabs’ genius for coalition building (exemplified in their extension of most of the rights of citizenship to non-Muslim monotheists—mainly to Christians and Jews) served them well, too, as a language policy. The eastern Mediterranean remained a place where multiple languages coexisted but the language of record—for science, literature, and imperial bureaucracy—was Arabic.

Inevitably, given the enormous burden placed on the Arabic language, Abbasid language policy was not monolithic. The territorial extension of the lands of Islam, the quantity of spoken and written languages that coexisted with Arabic, and the portfolio of literary, bureaucratic, and diplomatic duties imposed on it made the language at times magnanimous and at others churlish. With one hand, Abbasid men of letters welcomed the philosophy of non-Arabs into the language and accepted the contributions of non-Arabs to the establishment of its grammatical sciences and its literature. With the other, they snapped at those non-Arabs, who did so much to promote the vitality of Arabic as literary language and who wielded their Arabic as a tool of social and cultural mobility (see chapter 8). The duality of ethnic Arabs’ attitudes toward non-Arab litterateurs who used Arabic as literary register was mirrored in the attitudes of non-Arab Muslims. Some were silent about their lives outside the reach of the Arabic language (like Sībawayhi; see chapter 6). Others took the occasional snipe at Arabs, even as they deployed Arabic as cosmopolitan language (like Bashshār; chapter 2). Finally, some opted out of Arabic and chose to bushwhack a literary path in New Persian, for instance, or (later) in Ottoman Turkish.11 The earliest recorded debates around ethnicity and language choice in the Arabophone world emerged around what is termed the shuʿūbiyya movement (discussed in chapters 2 and 6). Those debates never disappeared; at times they become more fraught and charged, at other times less. In the face of this background noise of competition over ownership of the language, however, the Arabic language never stopped being an object of desire for non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Muslim Arabs never had a proprietary hold over the language. It was an important literary language for Mediterranean Jews throughout the Middle Ages. Christian Arabs, too, used it (and still do) as a literary instrument; Lebanese Christians contributed to the modernization and codification of the language during the nineteenth century (see chapter 10). Despite the battles over legitimacy occasioned by the use of Arabic by writers from such diverse linguistic origins, from so many different lands, and for so many different purposes, Arabic retains a promise of openness and remains a powerful literary instrument to the present day.

Or one could tell the story differently, emphasizing the entanglements of the actors rather than separating them for the purpose of analysis:

When Arabic burst onto the scene, in the seventh century CE, Latin had already passed the first bloom of youth. It had flowered and faded in the eastern and southern Mediterranean. It thrived now only in the corridors of power and the monasteries of its former heartland; we are in the chasm between “Late Latin” and “Medieval Latin.” Arabic was (and is) buoyed by its status as lingua sacra (see chapters 2, 7, and 13). But Latin had a relationship with scripture that can only be described as complicated, reserving a fuller discussion of the question until later (chapter 7). In 711 CE, Muslim armies reached the Iberian Peninsula. There, Latinity had already faltered, thanks to the expansion of the Visigoths—no littera...