Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [263]
The comparison shows that political unification was in no way essential to the definition of a national language in this natal age for print literature. The lands where German was spoken had no single government. Nevertheless, in 1522 Martin Luther, a native of Lower Saxony and Thuringia, brought out his translation of the New Testament into his own German, aspiring all the while ‘to be understood by the inhabitants of Germany High and Low’. He added the Old Testament in 1534. Through the popularity (and excellence) of his work, he succeeded in establishing standard German in the image of his local dialects. Local editions of the Bible were made in farther parts of German-speaking territory, in Basel, Strasburg, Augsburg and Nuremberg, but localised only to the extent of adding glossaries of Luther’s more distinctively westerly terms; and for the first time, whole grammars of the German language began to be written, explicitly based on Luther’s usage.13 Thus was Hochdeutsch defined.
The Bible was cardinal also in the definition of English. Evidently, the explosion of print literacy in the early sixteenth century was a major support to Protestant ideas, which were rocking western Christianity at exactly this time. Luther was, after all, only defining the German language as a byproduct of his passionate concern that the word of God be available directly to everyone, not just the learned. Readers of English were just as avid for this boon; indeed, such enthusiasm went back to 1382, when John Wyclif’s translation had been put into circulation through handwritten volumes, only to be rigorously suppressed in 1407–9: there is always a party who believes that great blessings must be distributed only under rigorous supervision, and this view largely prevailed until the end of the fifteenth century.
A series of English-language Bibles came out in print in the sixteenth century, led off by William Tyndale’s 1525 New Testament.14 They were at first seditious documents, of course; but none the less popular for that. By the reign of Elizabeth, 1558–1603, the right to read the Bible in English* was firmly established; and with it, perhaps even more important as a text that everyone was reading, the Book of Common Prayer. Then in 1611 the King James Bible, produced by a royal committee, established the definitive text of the Bible, as it would be read in English for the next three centuries, a single work common to ten generations of English-language Christians.
With such a text justifying and fulfilling their increasingly widespread literacy,15 speakers more and more had a clear and distinct idea, indeed a single concrete model, of the English language in use. This model was soon to be transported to the uttermost parts of the earth.†
What sort of a language?
What kind of a language had English become? This was to become a question fraught with global implications. But it is a particularly hard one for an ordinary native speaker of the language to appreciate. The architecture of a language is invisible for the same reason that a conjuring trick deceives: by force of habit, everyone’s attention is on the apparent business in hand, not its means of execution. Even when the means is singled out, and a poet describes his craft, or a critic draws attention to the composition of a text, there is still a tendency to take the links between sounds and word, phrase and object, utterance and thought as either too obvious to mention, or totally mysterious. If language head has its reasons, the literary heart knows little of them, and cares less. Speakers and writers, listeners and readers deal deftly, and often intuitively, with outcomes they all accept and recognise, in a medium that is largely unanalysed—much as they breathe, digest and regulate their body temperatures.*
Nevertheless,