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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
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>> Edward Widmer: Hi everyone, welcome. I have the same document printed out twice in different point sizes because -- my -- ever since I started wearing glasses, my eyesight has just gotten so bad. Before I forget, I want to say, especially on a beautiful day like this, why not go to a dark establishment, whoever wants to go, let's have one of our readings tune in the Kluge Annex just down Pennsylvania Avenue. It's a great pleasure to introduce our friend to all of us,
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Shaden Tageldin, who is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, where she is also the director of the African Studies Initiative, a title VI African Studies National Resource Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. From 2013 to 2015, she was director of graduate studies in that department as well as for the Interdepartmental Graduate in Moving Image Studies.
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She is the recipient of the 2014 to 2014 Motley Exemplary Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts. In her teachings, she focuses on 19th and 20th century literature in English, Arabic and French. Her research engages several fields within a transnational and a translingual compass empire and postcolonial studies, critical translation theory, trans-African and trans-Asian studies, the historiography of literary and cultural renaissance, the politics of idealogy of language,
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literary form and literary genre, and literatures of migration and diaspora. She earned a PhD in comparative literature from UC Berkley in 2004. Her first book, "Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt" came out with University of California Press in 2011 and received honorable mention for the 2013 Harry Levine prize of the American Comparative Literature of Association. He was an old professor of mine in Harvard
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and her doctoral dissertation won the ACLA's 2005 Charles Bernheimer prize. She's currently here as a Frederick Berthark [phonetically spelled] residential fellow and she is writing a new book, provisionally titled, "Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature," and that is the title of today's talk, so please welcome Shaden. Thank you.
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>> Shadon Tageldin: Thank you very much, Ted for that kind introduction. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you very much for coming on this lovely Tuesday afternoon. It is a great honor and pleasure to speak at the Library of Congress today. I've been fortunate indeed to spend this academic year in residency here at the library's Kluge Center as an American Council of Learned Society's Burkhardt Fellow. Few research centers offer an environment as warm, collegial,
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productive, and, yes, provocative for thinking with others in different disciplines, changes the questions you ask, the sources you explore and the answers you find. I would like to thank Ted Widmer, Mary Louriker [phonetically spelled], Travis Hensley, Dan Torrelo, Anastasia Jones, Kaley Mosley Jackson, former Kluge staff members, Joanne Kitchins [phonetically spelled], and Denise Robinson, yes, I had to name everyone as well as each and everyone of the Kluge fellows I have met and engaged
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over the past nine months for making my time here such a pleasure. Finally, I warmly thank Dr. Fossey [phonetically spelled] Tethorus [phonetically spelled] and his colleagues in the African and Middle Eastern reading, as well as Eric Frasier and [inaudible] Ashmen [phonetically spelled] and Rare Books and Special Collections for their assistance in locating research material, which is ongoing. I also thank Cheryl Adams in the main reading room, Erica Spencer in the European Reading Room
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and Dr. Tomoka Finne [phonetically spelled] in the Science Reading Room for their assistance at various points in my research thus far. The title of my lecture today, once again, is "Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature." Taking the case of Arabic English and French from the late 18th century through the early 20th, my lecture is today is part of a book in progress that traces the rise of modern comparative literature
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to a new global regime in which a language acquired power in the world empire in so far as it held the power to observe and to capture the world exactly in empiricism. In the shadow of imperialism and in empiricism, languages like Arabic that once had styled themselves incomparable, larger than life, now were urged to point unambiguously to all that they name, to simulate life, the really seen and really heard. This term from artificial to natural literary language
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as newly bound-ward to world, making incomparable languages comparable, comparable that is in their newly shared sense that words should be life-like. In this determination of life, language was conceived in increasingly smaller, we might say, molecular units. For the British orientalist, Sir Williams Jones, literatures could be made comparable only by breaking down and translating their literatures or their languages into lowest common denominators, plain spoken words, shun of ornament
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or particularizing styles and sounds softened of all foreignness. Indeed the word denominator was not low or common enough, comparison with demand at times and even freer radical. For French orientalist, like [inaudible] and Ernesto Renov [phonetically spelled], the life of a language has its majority, has its comparability, hedged on whether or not its vowels were written seen. For Egyptian and Syro-Lebanese intellectuals like Abdul Nadeem and Amin Shamil [phonetically spelled] on whether
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or not its cosmonauts translated were heard across time and space. The epistemic conditions of possibility that ground modern comparative literature then demanded that the world's diverse language be comparable to the letter. Not only must the graphing, written signs and phoning sounds of those languages be mutually intelligible, but so too the very relation, the very understanding of what the proper connection between a graphing, a written to a phoning sound should be.
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Even today, comparative literature ascribes its disciplinary origins to Europe and the United States, often eliding develops elsewhere at the theoretical level. I ask by revisiting this share, yet occluded history of language and life, can we develop a transcontinental theory of modern comparative literature?
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Before his conscription into the ranks of imperial government in Bengal and into imperial views of the relationships between the world's languages and literature, the young British orientalist, William Jones, not yet Sir William Jones, understood that literary comparison called on its practitioner to see with other eyes and to hear with other ears. That is not to assume that the real or the knowable world ended with the seen and the heard, not to misapprehend the unknown, unfamiliar
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or invisible world as unreal, or worse as inferior to one's own. Jones opens his [foreign language] dissertation on oriental literature and the title page is up here, written in French and published anonymously in London in 1717 with a counter-factual parable, a cautionary what if that marvelously inverts European imperial perception and I quote, "A king of [inaudible]," a present day [inaudible] "could not imagine that there could in the world another kingdom than his own.
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He had in truth heard word of a race of animals that inhibited the oxidants, but he had never seen them. For it meant nothing that Louis XIV had sent missionaries with the singular proposition that he abolish the cult of his ancestors and believe mysteries despite himself. His courtier told him that that race was nothing but a race of monkeys. His priest added that it was not capable of the metamorphosis of the great Funchiham [phonetically spelled] and his philosophers assured him that,
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according to very ancient traditions, each inhabitant of this barbaric country had only one eye in the center of the forehead. The king having, as he must, lent faith to these discourses. It since had become a fundamental dogma of the siamese that occidentals only had one eye. We are, with respect to the orientals, in nearly the situation that the inhabitants of Siam are with respect to ours. If the little that we know of their visage prevents us from saying
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that they have only one eye, we do worse for we deny taste and soul." To read literature comparatively, Jones suggest, across languages and cultures, one needs the consciousness, if you will pardon the pun, a siamese twin. The ability to apprehend one's prejudices, today, we might say racism and the limits of one's knowledge by watching or listening to oneself being watched or overheard by another, in this case by seeing the west represented and hearing play back
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through the eyes, ears and voice a fictional or fictional lies, King of Siam. Comparativeness is the critical recognition that what you cannot see, cannot hear and do not know, nonetheless, exist apart from you and is worth knowing on its own terms and with awareness also of the self. Notice that I do not say what you do not see and do not know and do not hear. Jones tells us that it does matter to the king of Siam that he actually has seen occidentals, the Jesuit missionaries
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who have visited his kingdom if one by seeing, one means sense perception. He has seen these beings but cannot see them or the foreign peoples they represent for the human beings they are for his mind's eye, sight beyond sense perception, conceives these foreigners as nonhuman animals, as monkeys, and thus so on the basis of the discourse to which it is routinely exposed, what courtiers, priests and philosophers say. Saying trumps seeing, rationalism, what the mind conceives
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on its own, trumps empiricism. I speak of this remarkable passage as the opening of Jones' [foreign language] yet even before that opening the book's epigraph invents the 18th century western reader to relocate the very impulses of exploration and comparative knowledge from Europe to other continents. It is a pronouncement in Arabic, as you will see on the slide, [foreign language]. Jones translates, "Seek knowledge be it in China." Later, Jones identifies the prophet, Muhammad,
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as the author of that pronouncement, arguing that it proves "that letters and fine arts are held on the greatest esteem by the orientals." The statement is a well-known hatidith [phonetically spelled] or the saying of the prophet whose earliest followers in the 6th to early 7th century Arabia, China would have marked the limit of the known world. If one orient, Siam, sets the stage for counterfactual parable that unmasks the dangers of Eurocentrism
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and of all intellectual absolutism, another orient, Islam, moderns for Jones anecdote to absolutist thinking, the quest for knowledge beyond one's sight and hearing and thus the project and the profit of comparison itself.
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Even though Muhammad here only speaks of China metaphorically, writes Jones later in text, we might hear it literally for we are persuaded that Chinese literature is as useful as it is interesting. Still, in invoking the orient as a possible model for comparative knowledge, Jones consigns Arabic Islamic comparative to metaphor, to figurative language, to saying. Seeing is the province of the European, who is able to conceive of China literally to the letter.
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The orient may model an idea but the occident is poised to put that idea to empirical test.
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I quote from Jones, "Those who do not know the languages of orientals, make incompetent judges of their poetry but here is an experiment," and his term is [foreign language] "that would obviate that error, which one advises you to try, that one would two odes," and here he shifts to another orient, "one Arabic or Persian, the other Greek or Latin, translate these almost word for word in a language of common use with no ornament or disguise grant what is due to the diversity of idioms,
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places and customs of both sides equally and that then one would pronounce without prejudice between the productions of orientals and the works that we admire everyday." Presaging contemporary U.S. comparativists like Gayatri Spivaka and Emily After [phonetically spelled] who see language acquisition as key to a comparative literature that shuns the world dominance of English, Jones argues that those who do not know oriental languages cannot judge their literatures.
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Yet he proposes a work around that permits such judgment, one that depends, in fact, on translation into a third language, a language of common, [foreign language], known both to writer and reader and moreover to the plainest form of that language, a linguist and stylistic lowest common denominator. To make two literatures comparable, Jones tells us, the scholar must, in affect, sheer away all ornaments, all markers of style, which he associates not only with excess but also with disguise
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and translate both literatures nearly word for word into the plainest prose one can. Then one can judge, he says, then one can compare. This experiment reconverts comparison into an act of empirical observation and Baconian induction or generalization from observed particulars even if they are reduced particulars. For if poems from two different languages and literary traditions can be translated into a third language of common use, their features, supposedly,
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will be more easily discernible to the naked European eye and ear. Jones proceeds to illustrate his method. To bring an alien orient into comparison with a familiar west, he translates two odes, one from Persian by Hafez, the other from Latin by Horace and [inaudible] opposes these. Having done so, he conceives that the reader who does not know the original expressions and the literary traditions of these poems will fail to grasp the felicity of their expressions
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and the elegance of their illusions. Yet he insists that any such reader can look at Hafez and Horace, reduced to plain to French, and decide ultimately which of the two odes is the more poetic, a quality he premises on, what he calls, charming simplicity. While he says that it is not up to him to decide, he drops heavy hints in favor of the Persian, but when the comparativist or translator breaks language down into, what we might call, molecular units, hear words, where does style go.
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Jones wants the European reader to hear the music of oriental poetry, yet translation pressed into the service of comparison, what it would seem, reduce the unique musical phrasing of the Persian and the Latin respectively to mere strings of common simplified, de-contextualized notes more readily exchangeable. To demonstrate the aesthetic value of oriental literatures to the European reader, Jones ultimately must prove the soundness in all senses of their languages, that is the sounds
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of those languages are melodious enough to merit and justify the name poetry. Translating the sense of the Persian into common French words is not adequate to that task. Thus Jones goes onto transliterate into Roman characters, the Persian ode by Hafez that he has just translated and placed in comparison with the Latin ode by Horace. What is striking here is the apology that follows this transliteration and I quote from Jones, "Although one should only judge the sweetness
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of the language by the ear, we fear that the majority of readers were appreciated by the eye and that they will be put off by the frequency of consonants and of hard letters [foreign language] that they will there, but the organ, i.e., the tongue articulates the "huz" as easily as it does any other consonant. It is the Tuscan pronunciation of 'ch and of 'c' in the word, 'cavalo, which has something very gentle about it when it is not too affected."
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Thus the Persian "kh," it's transliterated as "kh," which appears once in the word, "khulk," which in Arabic means temperament, in the transliterated ode, is assimilated to the Tuscan "ch" or hard "c" like the "c" in cavolo, where it's not a "ch," but it's an attempt to render the sound "ch." From common sense and sensibility, we enter the province of common sound, the comparison of letters. Literature, is rooted here in the letter,
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a common denominator more radical than the word, a written character or grapheme, who shared spoken or forcibly shared spoken or phoneme the European reader is invited to hear. With his turn to the speech of Tuscany, the dialect of Dante, to bring the literatures of the Arabic- Islamic orient to life for the European reader, Jones inaugurates, perhaps in spite of himself, a new tendency in the discourse of European literary comparison. That tendency would replace orient with occident
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as its fundamental model.
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In comparative literature 1886, the first English language monograph to explicitly articulate the nature and the method of the modern discipline, the Irish barrister and classist, Hutchinson McCauley Pasnet [phonetically spelled] traced the root of comparative literary method to Dante's De vulgari Eloquentia on "Eloquence in the Vernacular," written between 1302 and 1305, which argued that the time had come for the spoken dialect of Tuscany to [inaudible] with, if not suppliant,
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Latin as a language of writing. And here I show you the particular edition that happens to be in the Rare Books Collection of the Library of Congress. There are many such editions, of course, in libraries elsewhere but this one was owned by Walt Whitman and there is a little card from I think the old card catalog, or replica thereof, which shows that Walt Whitman listed the half title pages, listed all of the pages where his name appeared in Pasnet's study
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of comparative literature, so our typical egocentrism is at work. You will see that volume was part of an international scientific series, which is interesting in terms of the placement of comparative literature in the modern 19th century sciences. So I quote now from Pasnet from the relevant passage, where he speaks of Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia." "When Dante wrote the "Eloquial Vulgari, this is Pasnet's reference, it's usually called either, "De Vulgari Eloquial,"
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or "De Vulgari Eloquentia," he marked the starting the point of our modern comparative science, the nature of language, a problem not be lightly overlooked by the peoples of modern Europe, inheriting unlike Greek or Hebrew, a literature written in a tongue whose decomposition had plainly gone to make up the elements of their own living speech. The Latin, followed at an interval by the Greek renaissance, laid the foundations of comparative reflection in the mind of modern Europe."
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Pasnet rightly identifies the nature of language a key starting point of modern comparative literature, yet not just any language; for Pasnet invokes as a key force that throws language and literature open to comparative reflection as he calls it "The rise of modern Italian or French," once spoken variance of Latin, the written lingual Franca of western Europe as languages of writing in their own right. Thus a particular register of language, the vernacular,
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grounds the literature that comes to be defined as the proper object of modern comparison. To enter the zone of the modern comparison, as Pasnet defines it, it seems, a literature must be living speech, realized in writing. In the language of a comparable literature, death can only survive if it is an intrinsic part of life. Death must be transmuted into dying, decomposition and it must also, in being so transmuted, reconstitute the living in perpetuity. Forms of language that precede
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and exceed living speech suddenly seem a waste of breath. It is not that language is inassimilable to living speech, don't breath; they do even their respirations are sometimes unvocalized. In this regime of the modern of comparison of literature, they can't breath. They're not allowed to breath. I turn the page now one century earlier to Vulni's [phonetically spelled] "Simplicacion de [inaudible] oriental," "Simplification of oriental languages," published in Paris in 1795, a text that,
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as I have also learned in the Rare Books collection of the library Thomas Jefferson once owned and Jefferson, in fact, owned many works by the [inaudible] Vulni who voyaged, in fact, to Egypt and Sierra in the 1780s and writes another text on that series of travel. In addition to the rise of the vernacular, Pasnet noted the European discovery of the new world as a decisive element in the emergence of modern comparative sensibility; yet in Vulni's estimation,
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Europe did not need to voyage so far away to discover the sort of radical difference that awakens the impulse of comparison. It's familiar. The Arabic-Islamic world was, in many ways, its most radically foreign. A dividing line of contrast has stubbornly persevered, Vulni writes, "For many centuries between the Asiatics, above all the Arabs and European peoples. We are separated by only 60 nautical hours from Algeria and from Tunis, just 14 days take us to Egypt, to Syria, to Greece,
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18 to Constantinople and yet one would say that these peoples inhabit another planet that, though contemporaries, we live separated by several centuries. The crude observer, Luvir [phonetically spelled] Kharf [phonetically spelled] is content to see as the reason for these contrasts, the difference between religions, [inaudible] customs, but this difference, itself, has its causes and one finds that the most powerful, indeed, perhaps the only such cause, consists of the difference of languages."
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End of quote. While various points in the Ottoman empire are within short sail from Europe and all seem on the surface temporarily proximate, [foreign language], contemporaries, they are to borrow the phrase of Johanna Fabian in "Time and the Other," denied co-evilness with Europe. They're not allowed to occupy the same time, the same chronology. The most spatially proximate is the most historically distant, separated by centuries and the historical gulf between is measured
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and fathomed in through and as language in the nautical mile of a vernacular vision of language. And I quote again from Vulni, "I account for little the contrast and the movement of Arabic script, which while we trace our lines from left to right, traces its own from right to left and begins a book where we finish it, but a third difficulty, the most serious, the most radical, is its alphabetic system, itself. It is the incomplete, indeed, perverted," the word used here is [foreign language],
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which has a strong moral cast, "indeed perverted manner in which Arabic depicts the spoken word," and the phrase is [foreign language]. In our languages of Europe, every element of that word, vowel, consonant, aspiration, all is painted or depicted with detail, precision, scruple and clear images pass through to the minds. We even regard a language as all the more perfect in so far as its script more exactly paints or depicts all of its pronunciation
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as that language is written as it is pronounced. By contrast, Arabic and its analogue, [inaudible], Persian, Turkish, not only does one not write as one speaks but one writes really half of one's words in the main, only consonants are outlined, which are its principle base and the four long vowels depicted in the alphabet, the three short vowels that played a greatest role in pronunciation and that are an integral thereof are suppressed and implied.
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One must supply these from imagination and do so impromptu." End of quote. What makes Arabic and its users so radically different from the languages of Europe and their users, Vulni suggests, is incomplete and even perverted binding of letter of written sign, grapheme, to sound phoning to image and ultimately also to sense. Arabic writing, so goes the charge, does not depict spoken words or does not paint them with sufficient faithfulness to the sounds they ostensibly must recall
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or to the images they ostensibly must conjure forth. In such a system, enunciation is not simply a question of [foreign language], taking the floor, you know, launching the spoken word, it is rather a question of [foreign language], painting or depicting the spoken word. And to the extent that the writer of Arabic writes only half words, he or she eats them, no longer able in Vulni's judgment to communicate and thereby to enter the sphere of positive comparability.
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Failing to mark in most cases the short vowels that would make its rendering in script fully identical to sound, fully representative and transparent, calling on its reader to supply sound from silence, to fill in the blanks, swirling above and below the lines of text from the realtime reservoir of his or her imagination to bring voice to mute speech, Arabic enters this French regime of comparison as defective and defects from this world.
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Vulni's argument inflicts Ernest Raunak [phonetically spelled] reading of written versus dialectal or spoken Arabic in his [inaudible] historic general system compare [foreign language], general history of and comparative system of Semitic languages first published in 1855. Here, as in Vulni, the absence of presence of the vowel in Arabic letters marks an opposition of the death of Semitic languages to the contrasting life of their endo-European counterparts.
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I quote from Raunak, "The habit of not writing vowels, thereby effacing the subtle nuances, in which adheres all individuality of the dialect, reduces Semitic text to a sort of skeleton, excellent for the anatomical study of language but hardly proper to the study of movement and of life. In a language that is not life for [inaudible] is not historical and not comparable. Languages must be compared," he writes, "to living beings of nature.
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Their life, like that of man and humanity, is a perpetual becoming." What emerges as an opposition of endo-European languages, which occupy a distinctly Hegelian state of perpetual becoming and are thus living because historically, historically because living to Semitic languages. These languages, Arabic in particular are dead, because in [inaudible] invocation of terms that the German philosopher, Hegel, infamous reserved for Africa, they "no longer have a history," [foreign language].
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Dubbing Arabic, the last survivor and "soul representative of Semitism," an interesting statement in itself, Raunak sees it as absolutely unique the incomparable distillation, summation and perfection of a family of languages whose lives have ended, "written without the slightest nuance of dialect," Arabic and other Semitic languages are fixed in what he calls, "a metallic rigidity that blocks all developed interior life. Compared with Endo-European languages, so essentially vegetal
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and living," Raunak, writes, "Arabic and its kin are inorganic and mineral. Everywhere," he writes, "an ancient language gives way to a vernacular [foreign language], modern dialect corresponding to a progression of analysis, clearer more explicit, separately that which the ancient assembled, breaking the mechanisms of the former language to grant to each idea and to each relation its isolated expression." "Formal Arabic," Raunak suggests, " is an exception.
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It has not evolved toward the modern dialect, the vernacular. Arabic is in a word 'o compose.' Failing to decompose, as vegetal life does, into isolated fragments, Arabic and its Semitic cousins supposedly have not followed the natural way of language toward simplification but held fast for a problematic complexity, read artificiality." And I quote again from Raunak, "This ancient of decomposition is entirely missing from Semitic languages. No a single letter has been lost.
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Guarded by closed and precise mouths, they have very rarely fallen in jargon. The three fundamental articulations of each root have remained a sort of bone structure that has preserved them from all softening. The Semitic script system for its part has contributed in no small part to this phenomenon of persistence. One cannot say that Semites write in a manner as perfect as the Endo-Europeans. They represent only the skeleton of words. They render the idea rather than the sound.
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Latin and Italian, written after the Semitic manner, would hardly differ one from the other but one cannot deny that this writing, so inconvenient to the foreigner, has not been excellent for the conservation of roots. It has maintained the root as a sort of perfectly pure diamond across all grammatical accidents." Both the letter and usually trilateral root of formal Semitic languages jealously guarded by the essentially closed mouths of its speakers and by extension equally mute pens
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of its writers not only do not change but also do not sound. As bone structure skeleton, perfectly pure diamond, Arabic and related languages are mineral in Raunak's most charitable reading, precious mineral, yet dead, nonetheless, in their immunity to alteration. Rather than going the way of Latin to Italian and undergoing the decomposition associated with living speech as Pasnet too later would suggest the language of comparable literature must, they have fossilized.
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For Vulni and Raunak, Arabic is [inaudible] wants limitless test and the limit of comparison for the sciences of the European long 19th century. Arabic letter, in every sense of that term, spell the fate of what enters the sphere of comparison and what lies beyond its pail. This too is true for the modern discipline of comparative literature. I return to Pasnet. In so far as Pasnet's roots, modern comparative literary method, as we have seen, in the rise of the vernaculars in Europe,
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and insist in turn that that method must be historical, the degree to which a written language coincides with its spoken form signals its historicity and comparability. Small wonder then that he invokes the Arabic-Islamic literary tradition as the avatar of incomparability and I quote, "If we are determined to lay down the dogma that Shakespeare or Dante or any other poet wrote above space and time, above the social and physical conditions under which he lived,
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we really exclude historical propriety by a creed of literary inspiration, which has been frequently asserted, if not believed in, with theological insurance. We imitate the criticism of the Arabs and make a literary croon out of our Shakespeare or Dante." The literary croon is Pasnet's metaphor for the transformation of Shakespeare and Dante by the western critics who canonized them into incomparable divinities whose ambit is universal and timeless rather
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than historically grounded in place and time. "Those critic methods," he argues, and I quote, "it's almost as fatal to true historical science as the Muslim belief that the language and ideas of their Bible came direct from God, himself." The entanglement of the doctrine of the inevitability of the Quran with the incomparability of its language, Arabic, is now a kind of shorthand for a theological impulse that must be banished epistemic sites of comparative literature,
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which must be true to historical science. Paradoxically, Shakespeare and Dante are often divinities of this new historical scientific literary order. Marshalls tightened the umbilical cord between the vernacular and the rise of modern properly comparable European literature. It is thus in the negative as that which is deemed incomparable, uniquely defective in its other worldly perfection by most western scholars and increasingly over the imperial course of the long 19th century in complex ways
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by Arabic speaking intellectuals that Arabic enters a transcontinental theory of modern comparative literature. Together, they would ask, what kind of language forms a properly modern and worldly Arabic literature? Writing in 1893, in the Kirov [phonetically spelled] of [inaudible], Sir William Wilcox called on Egyptians to shed formal written Arabic [foreign language] a reportedly artificial dead language, he calls it such, and to write in the vernacular colloquial Amia instead.
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Lack of natural, embedded, living literary language, he [inaudible], stymies the originality that drives scientific invention, hence [inaudible]. An Anglo-Indian engineer, Wilcox arrived in Egypt in 1883, one year after the British occupation. He redesigned Egypt's irrigation system and as director general of reservoirs, designed and supervised the construction of the first Le Swan dam between 1896 and 1902. Wilcox maintained that just
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as British engineering had freed the Egyptian peasant from force labor, so too would British promotion of Egyptian Arabic unshackle the Egyptian intellectual from coercive artifices. Indeed, his first paper on the language, itself, delivered in formal Arabic. It was delivered before a Egyptian club and this is a printed text, transcript, of the talk, "Argued that modern Egyptians had lost the scientific creativity they had possessed in ancient time because 'the authors
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of their scientific secular books write language hard as rock, literally like mountain," and "set down thoughts and books to die, never to return to life as if they are attuning them in page and burying them between the covers of books." Contrast English with the rise of vernacular English, Wilcox argues, came not only the works of the celebrated English poet, Shakespeare, but also those of Sir Francis Bacon, who he writes, "pend the lessons to which the European sciences owe their
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first appearance. In June 1893, in the same journal [inaudible], Wilcox would attempt to bring his point to life, publishing his translations of passages, short passages, from Shakespeare Henry IV and Anthony and Cleopatra into colloquial Egyptian Arabic. What follows these translations is an Arabic language discussion of hydraulic engineering by an Egyptian that appears to bear out Wilcox correlation of lived language to scientific ingenuity were it not for the inconvenient fact
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that that discussion is forma written Arabic as was Wilcox's original call for the use of the colloquial as a language of science. Paradoxically, the language of empirical science is often at odds with its philosophical premises. Empiricist discourse privileges matter over mind. Indeed, it insists that direct observation of matter should decide human axioms about nature and in effect make up our minds. Yet, it couches its findings in standards languages very often
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that occupy an abstract relation, these of the daily texture of material reality. In using formal Arabic to [inaudible] empiricism, Wilcox brings home a bacon he surely meant to leave behind for although opposed bacon as an exemplar of vernacular ingenuity, Bacon wrote his "Nuevo [foreign language] "New Organin," 1620 in Latin, not English, and the same problem, in fact, afflicts Dalte. He has to write his apology for Tuscan in Latin in effect in order to make it reach a wide audience.
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Wilcox's essay struck a cord with epistemic anxieties of the 19th century Arabic speaking intellectuals. Writing 1893 in his periodical, "El [foreign language]," "The Teacher, whose pages up to that point did often did feature articles in the Egyptian colloquial, the Egyptian nationalist, Adbul Nadeem, debunks Wilcox's assumption that written Arabic is not up to the task of modern science or modernity, itself. How could Wilcox allege that formal Arabic had stalled Egyptian
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capacities for scientific invention, he opines, when renaissance Europe had taken much of its science from Arabic? Moreover, even modern Egyptians, who have learned European languages, and Nadeem writes, "still use Arabic as a language of intellectual production writing books, newspapers, and stories of their own as well as translating European scientific text into Arabic. Twelve years earlier in 1881 issue of his first weekly [foreign language] which can translate
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as raillery and reproach and Nadeem writing in the long wake of the 1798 to 1801 French occupation of Egypt and on the eve of the 1882 British occupation, perceived the seduction of French and English in the shadow of European imperialism. In an essay titled, [foreign language], "The loss of language is a surrender of the self," he warned against the abandonment of Arabic, taking the form of an open letter, the essay's salutation reads, [foreign language], literally oh you
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who pronounce the letter dalth [phonetically spelled], meaning "oh, you, who speaks the language of the dalth," which is a common epithet for Arabic. With that direct address to his reader, Nadeem signals the uniqueness of Arabic, hence its incomparable, or at least its non-exchangeability but invoking the consonant "dalth," the hard "d" sound, said to occur in no other language. The letter opens with a series of impassioned interrogations. "For what do you exchange your language?
41:56
What is comparable to it? for whom do you abandon it when you are its guardian, grantor? What have you found so beautiful in other language and so ugly in its analogic features? I ask you to swear by God, have you found in the modern languages what your ancient language encompasses? When you express something with a word from a language besides your own and then wish to elaborate on it with another expression, do you find even one synonym for it as you find
42:20
in your language a cluster of synonyms for any given word? Are you the one ignorant of the power of your language?" What Europeans like Raunov regarded as a feature alongside its unwritten short vowels, that makes Arabic incomparably defective, namely the abundance of words that express the same idea, is what makes Arabic for Nadeem rich. That would then Arabic lie infinite possibilities for exchange is precisely and paradoxically
42:47
for him what should inhibit, if not prohibit, its speakers and writers from exchanging Arabic for other languages. And Nadeem recognizes, however, why his Arabic language readership has come to compare its language with others. He understands that his readership judges the currency, the modernity of a written language by its proximity to living to speech and thus is tempted to exchange a dead, ancient Arabic for live modern languages. Yet the threat of the foreign, and in the case for Nadeem,
43:16
the foreign is deeply linked to colonialism-- he was an anticolonial nationalist, fighting the British occupation as well as involved in anti-Turkish agitation. Yet the threat of the foreign, and Nadeem counters, has historically what has divided written from spoke Arabic and Arabic secure in its power need not reject speech. it is the failure of Arabic, historical and contemporary, to ward off the intrusion of foreign words on its grammar
43:46
that gradually separated, he argues, the Arabic of the pen from that of the tongue, making its pages defensive, and I quote from Nadeem, "I do not prohibit you from other languages besides your own, rather I wish only to remind you that your language was once spoke [foreign language] without the study of a manuscript, without a book. With the intermixing of the foreign word, it was somewhat corrupted. It feared of its loss. It was recorded in the bowels of pages.
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Its power remained in writing until its foreign words grew so numerous that writers opted for these. Then foreign words multiplied, such that it, the original language, was exchanged for a conventional language, the word is [foreign language], language born of usage, that followed no grammatical rule. The catastrophe has grown. Writers have crowned the transformation by speaking the colloquial with long expression, a third which is foreign to both its original and its conventional languages."
44:45
Notice that Nadeem positions Arabic in historical cycles of corruption by an incorporation of the foreign, here in original Arabic in which the spoken and the written coincide give way, thanks to the intrusion of foreign words to a conventional Arabic that is no longer pure enough to obey rules but operates instead as a hybrid language whose correctness can be determined presumably only by contingent usage. That Arabic, in turn, has given way to a loose colloquialized writing
45:15
so replete with foreign words, in his estimation, that it transgresses even convention. Respecting, we might say, neither statutory nor common law, this Arabic has broken with all pasts. Nadeem's polemic provoked a powerful rejoinder from Amin Shamil [phonetically spelled], the Cyril Lebanese publisher of the journal [foreign language] writes or law, writing within the month in Nadeem's newspaper, so [foreign language], Shamil challenged the vitality of formal written Arabic.
45:45
For Shamil, that Arabic increasingly lacked a market, even among its native speakers. The conjunction of imperialism and global capitalism drives his suggestion that speakers of Arabic abandon their language, at least as a language of writing and embrace French or English as the lengua Franca of imperial power, capital, and modernity. Insisting that "language is but a material instrument in which the exchange of ideas and meaning is transacted between human individuals," Shamil premises the life
46:16
or death of language on history. Understood neither his continuum nor a cycle as a Nadeem would have it but as rises and falls that are the upshot of material causes, contingencies of power and money. In as much as language is for Shamil only an instrument [foreign language], it "Holds no precedence as such. Its might and the decline the status are rather the outcome of the attributes of its people, power and weakness." Language, he writes and "A mirror
46:49
in which the self images of its people shatter." Rather than represent the position and the power of a people in the world, language refracted that position through material filters of political power and scientific progress. Rather than a one-to-one reflection, you have a refraction. Absent power and progress, the capacity to compare or compete with the modern and to convey the modern, no beauty or eloquence, Shamil argues, can save a language.
47:21
Languages die, he might say, naturally with the decline of the people who use them and rightly so. In this fate, he suggests Arabic will join [inaudible], Greek and Latin, languages whose long canonicity, hence, survival, makes them "more closely resemble the living and the image of the dead." Shamil now assumes in reverse the empiricist posture of the young William Jones. He advises Nadeem and his ilk to undertake an experiment and to observe what they see, to place Arabic literature
47:53
in a purely material comparison with foreign, read European literatures, and witness the shattering of, in every sense, Arabic's currency and I quote, "Go to our lending libraries and our mercantile centers," Shamil writes, "and see how much in Arabic," which he calls [foreign language] so uses the letter "dalth" to signify Arabic, "see how much a book in Arabic rents for versus how much a book in a foreign language," which he calls [inaudible] softy sound, "rents for.
48:25
Then write a book entirely in Arabic, spend your whole life on it and offer it to your people and you will see that there is no market for your goods." Shamil attributes the decline of Arabic in modernity to its exceptional-ism to precisely the sort of incomparability Nadeem in shrines in the letter "dalth," that hard "d" sound said to occur in no other language. To pronounce the letter "dalth," is to interdict or to forbid the comparability and thus the exchangeability of Arabic
48:54
and to declare that the no language can adequately compensate for another. "To enter the world of commodity exchange of the profitable production and consumption of knowledge," Shamil intermits, "Arabs should go the way of the world, the letter [inaudible], the ubiquitin soft "d" sounds that Arabic shares with other languages and that makes Arabic almost at the molecular level of the phoneme comparable. Oddly recalling Vulni and Raunak, as well as Jones,
49:22
this vernacular turn again hinges on the letter. Yet by accenting the consonants, not the vowel, as the locust, both of Arabic incomparability to date and its modern potential to be comparable. Shamil's literary comparativism on this point, like in Nadeem's, which equally accents a consonants, also reverses and subverts the terms of European scholarship. In Nadeem's essay of 1893, correlates Wilcox's call on Egyptians to write in the vernacular, this is later essay
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of 1893, correlates Wilcox's call on Egyptians to write in the vernacular, which Shamil's earlier call on Arabic speakers to write in foreign languages. He sees both as calls to abandon literary Arabic. Against Wilcox and Shamil, Nadeem writes, "The correct language is the living, given its use by the wise of the community," and he is referring to by "correct language," to the formal language, formal Arabic, "is the living, given its use by the wise of the community, elite or common
50:25
and the colloquial language or the vernacular is the dead, give its disuse for all but the necessities that a language, less animal requires." It's quite a statement. Speech exiled from grammar, which is not always tandem out to writing, but is often fixed and secured through writing is speech exiled from the past, and the historicity is for a Nadeem the ultimate corruption, collapsing the human into the nonhuman animal. The life he imputes to correct Arabic rests
50:56
in its continuity with the past. Its capacity is culture barer and barer of belief. Its capacity to carry time for all who use it across Christian, Muslim and Jewish lines in this particular context and to carry belief across time for Muslim in particular since former Arabic is structurally speaking the language of the Quran. The dialectal is dead because it is presentence more easily divorced from the long historical continuity of Arabic-Islamic tradition
51:26
that it changes with the moment is born out by the fact that foreign words compose 1/3 of its lexicon. Yet a Nadeem makes it clear that he is not opposed to the influence of the foreign on Arabic; 19th century Arabic writers, after all, have successfully translated many European language works into standard. His point is that formal Arabic is adequate to the foreign and responsible to the self, a language into which modernity is translatable even as it preserves
51:56
and reinvigorates, so called, tradition. For Nadeem [inaudible], Shamil called to abandon the incomparable language of the "dalth" for a more easily language of the "del" is by Arabic terms [foreign language] in [inaudible] is a distortion that the level of the letter, which in Arabic is [foreign language], they share one roof, of Arabic's potential to be worldly, be modern and at the same time be itself. "Lift demands artifice, the formal preservation of writing, of continuity to brave death."
52:31
I shift here toward a conclusion, moving in a different vein. In 1899, Saleem [inaudible], a Cyril Lebanese portrait artist, resident in Cairo, -- Skip ahead. This is one of the portraits that [inaudible] painted --
52:55
received a U.S. patent for new Arabic typefaces for typewriters for printing presses. In his application, [inaudible] argued that his invention had reconstructed and reduced to a mere 58 character, the 638 different characters required to represent the 29 letters of the Arabic alphabet in the relative positions to other letter, initial medial terminal, stand-alone. By 1904, typewriters featuring [inaudible] keyboard were in use in Cairo [inaudible] as well as by Turkish
53:27
and Persian officials right here in Washington and [inaudible] traveled to the United States for an extended period to promote their mass production. In 15 of May of 1904 issue of the major periodical, [foreign language], "The Crescent" published in Cairo [inaudible]'s Arabic typewriter features prominently an unsigned article detailing his invention, presumably penned by the [foreign language], argues that mechanized writing, faster and clear than handwriting has become in "European nations
53:59
and the rest of the civilized world." There's a strong accent on "civilization" in his piece. On 21, August 1904, "The New York Times," in turn published an unsigned interview with [inaudible] trumpeting his invention thus. "An artist inventor from Mount Lebanon, Salim [inaudible] new alphabet and typewrite will facilitate study of oriental literature." Conjoining the languages and capitalism, the Times praises [inaudible] for having conquered the complexity
54:31
of the Arabic alphabet and reduced it to the requirements of a business office, more to the point of my lecture today, it conflates two kinds of Arabic letters, the Arabic alphabet and Arabic literature, and imagines that the simplified machine translation of the Arabic alphabet will extract oriental literature from the obscurity to which its alphabetic complexity supposedly has doomed it and make it accessible to the world, presumably by permitting its mass production
54:59
and circulation to wider leadership. I quote from this article, "The whole world will be enabled to know the wonders of oriental literature, which has been hitherto impossible, except in a very slight degree to scholars. Even a foreigner, who has merely dipped into the subject of oriental literature, knows of their wonderfulness and luxuriance. The difficulty of research will be rendered far less. The peculiar bulk and complexity of the Arabic alphabet have made the riches of these literature
55:27
as inaccessible as unmind gems." Seen through the eyes of its U.S. observers, [inaudible]'s invention takes us back to the 18th century of Jones and Vulni. Jones struggled to make the wealth [foreign language] was his term of oriental literatures accessible to European readers by simplifying Persian letters, first translating words into the plainest French, then transliterating sounds into Roman script, into an assimilated script. Vulni complains that Arabic failed to paint its words faithfully,
55:59
that is failed to visually represent all of its sounds to the letter. He, too, sought to simplify Arabic, Persian and Turkish by devising a Roman script that would articulate their hidden sounds. By the end of the 19th century, thanks to the invention of [inaudible], a painter, no less, modern Arabic print culture would heed the silent song of simplicity; yet, it would do so in a different key. [Inaudible] adapted the structural logic of the Arabic to that
56:28
of the languages of imperial Europe, that is he reconstructed a script, whose letters articulate movement, changing shape with the relative position within a word to behave as much as possible like the isolated letters of printed English or French. Yet the Arabic of his new century caligraph, like the Arabic of thinkers is diversion as Nadeem and Shamil, did not give the consonant, the hard letter, as the mediating principle between the past and future of Arabic
56:57
or between Arabic and other language. [Inaudible] Arabic keyboard seem to resist the obligatory marking of short vowels, Vulni and Raunak so desired. His patent application specifies no keys for those characters. In a new century that reiterates the simplification of Arabic as a condition of its entry into world literary space, Arabic unwritten short vowels, which continue to rely speech, vocalized in the mind's ear to sound their hidden movements mark a large and enduring difference
57:33
from a common ground still overdetermined by western norm. In that difference, like other such differences in the world, a revolutionary theory of transcontinental comparative literature, one that no longer centers Euro-U.S. paradigms but embraces polycentrism must hear. Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you very much. Yeah, I [inaudible] I missed somebody. [ Inaudible ] Sure absolutely. Right. [ Inaudible ] That's an excellent. Vulni really struggles with this question in his "Simpificacion,"
59:06
he asked to [inaudible] at various points that European languages are not necessarily anymore rational in their ways of rendering sounds in alphabetic form and while he doesn't always touch French, his own language, which after all has silent letters and other such oddities, if you will, that cannot be reconciled, he does point out that there are numerous failures also of transcription in European languages and so part of that argument goes into inform his larger interest
59:45
in a purely rational universal alphabet that will somehow eliminate all uncertainties of pronunciation across tongues, but oriental languages are still, nonetheless, singled out as being particular defective for their tendency not to mark short vowels, which, after all decide in many cases not just the pronunciation of the word, but also its meaning, you know the difference between two words in Arabic with the same consonantal structure hinges very often
1:00:30
on how the short vowels, marked or not are read, right? So this becomes a particular problem for Vulni but it also is a test case for a larger attempt to rationalize script systems. So, no, you're absolutely right and Arabic critics of the impulse towards vernacular-ization someone like Abdul Nadeem points out, "Well, English language scientific text," he says are not written in the same register of language as spoken English." That there are differences in register in the languages
1:01:08
of text too, and so he tries to poke holes in what he sees as the false claims of Wilcox, for instance, that a language that approximates that of daily life is somehow a necessity for scientific invention, ingenuity, the production of scientific literature. He recognizes that argument as tendencious. Nonetheless, it also worried. It worries intellectuals like Nadeem. It worries his contemporaries. They are concerned that Arabic may lack the currency
1:01:40
to somehow convey the modern and they are, in various ways, approaching the question of language reform from that space of anxiety. So yeah. [ Inaudible ] Yeah, that's a very good question. Initially, it seems to have been manufactured in -- it may have been manufactured in the Middle East because there were machines said to be fabricated in handsome white and gold but don't look like the new century caligraph in circulation, the [foreign language] of Egypt at the time [inaudible] II owned one,
1:02:27
the Sultan of the Ottoman empire, [inaudible] II owned one. All the departments of the Egyptian government, which at that time was a colonial government under the British, kind of a loose colonial structure under Cromer, owned one and all of these departments were using the system. Apparently, when he came to the states, he came under the Egests of his financier, Ismael [inaudible], who was the grand mason of the, basically, chapter, the masonic lodge of Cairo at the time
1:03:10
and self the descendant of a Ottoman Turkish notable and Ismael [inaudible] had financed [inaudible]'s trip and also financed the larger scale manufacture of these typewriter and he came to the U.S. to seek basically a corporate partnership to take this invention to a much larger scale, and so the American Writing Machine Company new caligraph typewriter was very popular in this first decade of the 20th century and Arabic keyboard appears to have been one such. Yeah, it's very interesting.
1:03:53
So, yeah, he was here about 18 months promoting the invention and connecting with factories in the U.S. [ Inaudible ] Thank you. [ Inaudible ] Yeah, that's a really wonderful question. Thank you. I think you may have been referring to Shamil from 1881, who basically calls for the abandonment of Arabic on the argument that Arabic now lacks a market even among its native speakers, right -- the Arabic language text, I should say, lack a market, yeah. Absolutely, you're right.
1:05:36
There is a kind of an attention to audience there. It's a specific sort of audience. First of all, it presumes a literate audience. It presumes an audience literate in English and French, the dominate European languages that would have been read in greater Syria at that time or Egypt at the time, so when somebody like Shamil says, "We should be writing in foreign languages," meaning larger, we should be writing in English and French, he's speaking about a very specific, largely, elite, by elite,
1:06:06
I'm speaking somewhat loosely, you have an emerging [foreign language], you have an emerging middle class, but in a certain sense an elite who had been educating at European institutions and Europeans schools and who are reading these languages. There are problems right there with a particular conception of audience and [inaudible] too is thinking about audience. Some of his articles prior to Wilcox's [inaudible] were published in the Egyptian colloquial.
1:06:34
This is by somebody who's arguing against the vernacular. Why did he do this? He saw Egyptian colloquial as effectively a kind of set of training wheels that would enable a less literate population, no wholly illiterate because it's a slice of population, in this case, Egypt, "The Journal" circulated elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking world but it was deeply Egyptian in some ways. A slice of the population who at least were conversant enough with the Arabic alphabet and grammatical system
1:07:09
that they could even read colloquial Arabic transposed into written form and he saw it as a stepping stone toward learning formal Arabic. So these question of audience are there and they're there with the Europeans writers too. I mean Jones is trying to think about how to make Arabic and Persian, and Turkish poetry appeal to a French audience. So you are right that one of the things I'm trying to do is move across scales to move from this very odd, seemingly odd,
1:07:44
fascination with something as microcosmic as the grapheme or the phoneme, this minutest unit of language as a sphere in which comparability is transacted between writers, thinkers and the readers to ever widening circles, so things like form or [inaudible], or the sensibility of literature are also implicated here. Text that I didn't touch on on this talk that speaks to yet another leap in this particular discussion, and yet another leap in this history
1:08:29
of transaction, if you will, of comparability between Arabic and European literature is one from 1902 to 1904. Its' first serialized and then published as a monograph in 1904 by the Ottoman Palestinian intellectual, [inaudible], and it's a history of the discipline of literature, the science of literature among the French and the Arabs. [Inaudible] says, well, I'm writing this history basically for an audience effectively composed of the semi-literate products
1:09:02
of schools in the orient, modeled on a European paradigm, right, and it seems pejorative in a way but [inaudible] is extrapolating from that audience to a theory and a kind of a new language and literature that argues that tries to resurrect old arguments from 10 centuries earlier in the Arabic-Islamic tradition and say eloquence resides in the average word, in the word that reaches the widest possible public -- widest possible audience, that reaches the elites and the commons
1:09:37
or the masses alike, and so there's an attempt to hit a midpoint in language and then to hit also a midpoint in literary sensibility. So there's, you could say, a revolutionary political project there on the one hand but it's also a project that assimilates Arabic language and literature to some of the ideas that we heard today in that -- now, I'm just starting to speculate widely -- in that he is interested a language -- his notion of clear language
1:10:07
or transparent language is one in which word and idea correlate very, very tightly, so one word to one idea, and here you start to hear shades of [inaudible], who apart from his obsession, you know, with the question of the vowel is also very concerned with the abundance of words with polysemy of Arabic and argues that a more developed language is more analytical, one word corresponds to one idea; a language like Arabic is synthetic or complex and that is a defect for Raunak.
1:10:39
That is a sign that it has not actually progressed in the way that other languages have and so there's something of a counter evolutionary paradigm if we think of biological evolution as a progression from a simpler to a more complex organism, there's an odd reversal of that evolutional trajectory even as these theorists are talking about forms of life, where Arabic has to simplify, and so in that sense, the middle word, the middle register is revolutionary and yet also in some ways imperial.
1:11:11
So that's the beginning of an answer to your wonderful question about audience and how it inflicts arguments in these texts. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all again. [ Applause ]
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