No sooner had the ink on my pinyin post response to Bill Haller begun to
dry when my esteemed cosmopolitan, polyglot, polymath colleague and ISA
president was on e-mail demanding, in Spanish (a language that is, to my
shame, utterly beyond my grasp), an explanation about the gibberish I'd
posted.
I'd like to expand on my post which was mainly to support Bill's point that
a strong case could now be made--but of course at the price that IW has
already noted--for extending the right to speak Eastward and Southward. On
grounds of demographics (India, China, Japan, Korea,Vietnam) would give us
a pretty good run toward half the world's population) and, I'd suggest, of
scholarly productivity, particularly of scholarly productivity whose fruits
are little known to us. This even putting aside the hegemonic shift from
Western Europe to North America toward East Asia in the late twentieth
century, the fact that has been, historically, the primary vehicle
determining the right to speak.
IW notes that the UN gave French equal status, and I suppose this refers to
working sessions, though it would be interesting to know how far English
became the defacto working language more and more over time. But the UN
did two other critical things that bear reflection in thinking about the
issues facing ISA. First, it became virtually the first international forum
in the modern world system that was not dominated by Europe/North America
(well, the Comintern is an example that might weaken that claim a bit,
depending on our understanding of the Soviet Union). Second, it set up five
working languages for the formal sessions and many reports, with documents
daily translated and circulated in addition to simultaneous translation. I
find that model exceedingly attractive, though a logistical/financial
nightmare were ISA to contemplate it.
IW rightly notes the decline of French as a spoken language in Latin
America and Latin Europe, but we should recognize the importance of its
persistence in Francophone Africa . . . one important reason for supporting
a multilingual approach involving at least French and Spanish, whatever we
may think about their position as colonial languages.
Finally, IW rightly recognizes a Japanese claim on grounds of geopolitics
and scholarly demography, but does not make a similar point about China . .
.. though he does list Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese as
possible claimants for language parity. But it seems to me that such a case
could be made on historical grounds--China as the source of many of the
organizing ideas and some of the political institutions that gave shape to
the East Asian region through the historic tributary trade system, Chinese
as the closest thing to a lingua franca throughout East Asia over more than
a millenium, as well as China's resurgence as a regional and global power
and (more debatable) the historic and contemporary contributions of Chinese
social science.
mark selden