ETHNOLINGUISTIC NOTE 29

Links to pages: 445, 447

Comments Welcome

George W. Grace

University of Hawaii

August 26, 1987

ETHNOLINGUISTIC NOTES

Series 3, Number 29

THE POST-LINNEAN WORLD-VIEW AND LANGUAGES OF UNIVERSAL TRANSLATION

What I want to propose here is that what someone (I think it was Uriel Weinreich) called "languages of universal translation" came to exist in response to a change in the way Europeans conceived of the world and their relation to it. I am using the phrase "post-Linnean world-view" to refer to this new view of the world, which I imagine to have been an unprecedented one at the time when it first appeared. My suggestion is that this view took shape in Europe at about the time when what has been called "the age of exploration" was drawing to a close.

I suggest that Europeans had come to believe that they had by this time discovered the bounds of the natural world and the essentials of its internal structure. The grand scheme was known in which each animal, vegetable, and mineral had its appropriate place. Although they would readily have acknowledged that more facts still remained to be discovered, it was now expected that each new fact would find a natural place within the already-established scheme of things.

In the resulting world-view, the bounds of the possible are fixed and known (with some latitude for adjustments of detail); if the full details are not known, at least the main principles are. In this new world one need no longer reckon with the possibility that men with the heads of dogs or men with their eyes in the middle of their chests are waiting to be discovered. Since the work of Linnaeus appears to be particularly representative of the new view, it seemed appropriate to call it the "post-Linnean" world-view. The essential point about the post-Linnean view is that, in it, the world appears as a closed system.

As to the concept "language of universal translation", I encountered it somewhere years ago. As I indicated above, I have the idea that it was Uriel Weinreich who used it, but I can't recall the circumstances. What I understood it to refer to was a language which aspires to be (or more precisely, of course, whose speakers aspire to have it be) capable of expressing anything whatsoever that is sayable at all. As I understand the concept, all of the national languages of Europe today qualify as languages of universal translation, as do many national languages elsewhere in the world.

The polar opposite, presumably, is a language for which no such pretensions exist--no pretensions beyond that of expressing whatever needs to be expressed in the particular culture with which it is associated. (1) But such a language may also be thought of as an instrument for representing anything whatsoever in the world as long as it is understood that the world in question is just the world as it is conceived and perceived by those people who are that particular language's speakers.

Thus, the language of universal translation differs from its opposite only in that the world which it is capable of representing is the post-Linnean world--a world in which no fundamental mysteries remain. (2) The point of this note is to suggest that the post-Linnean world-view and the notion of the language of universal translation are historically connected--that it took the closed world of the post-Linneans to make the language of universal translation conceivable, while the notion that languages of universal translation are possible in turn lends support to the post-Linnean view of the world as a closed system.