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Erik R. Seeman, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America. By Edward G. Gray. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv, 185 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-691-01705-0.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1050–1051, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700412
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Given this book's somewhat cryptic title, Edward G. Gray's aims should be made clear at the outset. New World Babel is not an ethno history of native speech practices, nor is it a history of Indian language development. Rather, it is an intellectual history of European and EuroAmerican attitudes toward American Indian languages from roughly 1600 to 1850. Within these parameters Gray is a steady guide through previously uncharted territory. For an interdisciplinary book indebted to linguistic theory, New World Babel stands out for its rare combination of incisive analyses and lucid prose.
Gray demonstrates that European ideas about language underwent a profound transformation during the colonial period, a change that had dramatic effects on European and EuroAmerican attitudes toward Indians. Seventeenthcentury Puritan and Jesuit missionaries were separated by many differences in religious outlook, but they were united, Gray argues, in their beliefs about the origins of linguistic diversity. Relying on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Puritans and Jesuits understood the world's plethora of tongues as the result of divine will. A nation had no control over the language it spoke; all languages were comparable to one another in their ability to express complex ideas. These beliefs entailed a certain optimism about the potential for crosscultural understanding, as speakers of any language could, with enough instruction, understand the truths expressed in the Bible.
