Bungo Is (Not) Dead

[LeRon Harrison]

The title of this post borrows from the titles of the reissued versions of the classic anime Evangelion but arises from a recent article about the Collegiate Utaawase. This is an issue that should be discussed in this forum but has remained undiscussed for various different reasons. I am attempting to start a discussion about it by following the fourth Gricean maxim of conversation and merely leaving quotes that speak to this issue, largely from two books on Latin.

David Birch, Latin Prayer: Aspects of Language and Catholic Spirituality, p. 26

"GK Chesterton (1874-1936) famously said in 1929 that every language is a dying language, but for it to become immortal it has to die completely. Some think of Latin as that dead immortal language and see its 'unchanging' nature, as a result of that 'death,' as a perfect vehicle for expressing the unchanging truths and liturgy of the Catholic Church. But that is not my position here. Latin is not more suitable for prayer and liturgy because of its 'deadness.' As Chesterton recognized, pagan Latin may have died, but Christian Latin only died to the world. It found a new, and continuing, life in the Church."

Nicola Gardini, Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, p. 6

"Even among specialists one hears the term 'dead language' thrown around. This characterization arises from a misconception of how languages live and die, and a hazy distinction between the written and the oral. Oral Language is linked immediately with the idea of being alive. But this is a bias. Latin, even if it's no longer spoken, is present in an astounding number of manuscripts--and writing, particularly literary writing, is a far more durable means of communication than any oral practice. If, therefore, Latin lives on in the most complex form of writing we've yet imagined, namely literature, is it not absurd to proclaim it dead? Latin is alive, and it's more alive than what we tell our friend at the cafe or our sweetheart on the phone, in exchanges that leave no trace. Think of it on an even larger scale.

"It's not enough that the speaker is living to say that the language he or she speaks is alive. A living language is one that endures and produces other languages, which is precisely the case with Latin. I'm not referring to the Romance languages, which were born from spoken Latin, or to the massive contribution of Latin vocabulary to the English lexicon. What I mean to say is that Latin qua literature has inspired the creation of other literature, of other written works, and, as such, distinguishes itself from other ancient languages..."

Gardini, p. 7

"... we all do something similar when we approach a classical text: we participate in the growth of tradition. Our very act of reading is not simply a private practice, but posits itself within the overarching temporality of cultural transmission, which takes centuries. By reading, we are not just living today: we are living in history transcending our biographies and entering a much broader chronology."

Gardini, p. 10

"Literary Latin has never been a spoken language. No literary language has, in truth. Who among Cicero's contemporaries spoke the way he wrote? Nobody. Not even Cicero himself, who carefully went back over the transcripts of any speeches he gave in court. And what about an even more modern writer, such as Henry James or Virginia Woolf? Can you imagine a contemporary speaking in such sentences? All literature--if we're using the criterion that a language must be spoken--is dead, because it is art, and so a construction, a calculation, stylized, like music or painting....

"Literature is life, and it lives because it generates more writing, and because readers exist, and because interpretation exists, which is a dialogue between thought and the written word, a dialogue between centuries, which halts time on its ruthless march and continually renews our potential for permanence. To label as dead a language that's written but no longer spoken is to deny the power of reading, to misunderstand how knowledge operates--even more, it is to commit an act of violence, a harebrained and arrogant act of violence; it would be like burning down the National Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum."

-LJH