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"In this rich, ambitious work, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning-classical Arabic and medieval Latin-as they meandered their way across the Mediterranean. In a brilliant, lyrical performance in comparative literature and literary history, Mallette tells a complex story conveyed through vignette and anecdote of relationships among language workers-writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists-their linguistic instrument of choice, and the transmission of knowledge, all before the emergence of the national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. She describes how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life, with Latin eventually giving way to the Romance vernaculars, and literary Arabic ceding space to its many spoken dialects. These elite instruments of learning took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity, and although classical Arabic survives, a prerequisite for reading the Qur'an, Latin is, for all intents and purposes, dead. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of the cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, on the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice: for example, what will happen to "global" English once England is no longer part of the EU, and can Al-Fusha, or perhaps Mandarin, the most spoken language in the world, take a lesson from English and become a new lingua franca for a new millennium? The book will be read by anyone interested in rethinking our choice of language, literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world"--
About the author
Karla Mallette is professor of Mediterranean studies in the Department of Middle East Studies and professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of
European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean and
The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History.
Summary
The story of how Latin and Arabic spread across the Mediterranean to create a cosmopolitan world of letters.
