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Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

Online ISBN:
9780226796239
Print ISBN:
9780226795904
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

Karla Mallette
Karla Mallette
University of Michigan
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Published online:
19 May 2022
Published in print:
20 September 2021
Online ISBN:
9780226796239
Print ISBN:
9780226795904
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

This book compares two cosmopolitan language systems used for literature, science, and bureaucracy throughout Western Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and Central Asia during the Middle Ages: Arabic and Latin. The cosmopolitan language is no one’s mother tongue. It must be learned as the point of entry to the transregional and transhistorical debates that drive intellectual history. In Western Europe, the modern national languages toppled the cosmopolitan language as literary medium during the late Middle Ages. In other parts of the world, cosmopolitan languages retain their currency to the present day. The book uses vignettes illustrating the lives and work of those who contributed to the maintenance of the cosmopolitan language, focusing on the Abbasid East (Baghdad and Basra from the eighth through the tenth centuries) and Italy during the fourteenth and fifteen centuries. Topics discussed include the geography of the cosmopolitan language; translation movements and the strategies that the languages used to remain current through the centuries; the aftermath of the cosmopolitan language regime in Western Europe; and the ethics of the choice between mother tongue or local language and cosmopolitan language. The book connects the premodern cosmopolitan language regimes to the rise of global English, and argues that – although the mother tongue has great appeal as cultural medium – cosmopolitan languages serve as effective tools of mobility and global communication: they allow those who learn them to opt into global conversations and trends.

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