3
P
rince
of
A
sturias
A
wards
1981-2014. S
peeches
Laureates. Excerpts
Dreams are the neutral ground of contradictions. The dream of a common language, spoken
and understood by all human beings on this small, fragile planet is as ancient as history itself.
In innumerable versions, expounded by theology, by liturgy, by myth, we find the motif of an
“Adamic” tongue. At his creation, man spoke a divinely imparted language. This language was
tautological, this is to say that words correspond exactly, with no possible falsehood or ambiguity,
to that which they designated and communicated. Speech was identical with truth. Hence the
possibility of direct exchange with God, of a direct comprehension of His discourse. In the
beginning was the Word (
logos
) common to both man and creator. This single language would,
presumably, have sufficed for all mankind had the children of Adam and Eve dwelt in Paradise,
had there been no original sin and expulsion from Eden. For a time, and although tainted with
possibilities of error and of falsehood, this primal idiom continued to be spoken. The second Fall
came at Babel, with the shattering of an Adamic and unified tongue into countless other languages,
mutually incomprehensible. There is hardly any mythology or cultural legend known to us which
does not include some version of the Babel story. The causes of the disaster are narrated in many
different modes: a crime against the gods, a fatal oversight, a mysterious accident. But there is
universal agreement as to the consequence: henceforth, human communities and individuals are
divided by linguistic barriers, by reciprocal deafness or misunderstanding. Every act of translation
carries within it a trace of this primal catastrophe.
The dream of repairing the damage, of restoring the human condition to the unison of pre-
Babel, has never ceased. At various points in history, different languages have put forward claims
to original universality. Hebrew has never renounced an aura of original and originating privilege.
Classical Greek aspired to uniqueness and supremacy as contrasted with “barbarian chatter”. Via
the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, Latin sought to demonstrate as self-evident its rights
of universality, of legislative
auctoritas
over mankind. Calvinist divines argued for the purity, for
the closeness to man’s pre-destined origins, of Dutch. The French have perennially harboured the
suspicion that God speaks French. Charles V voiced the same intuition with regard to Castilian.
But as it became clear that no natural language would restore the world to universal
harmony and accord, the search began for an artificial interlingua, for a linguistic system which all
men would want to share. From the 17th century onward, this dream has engaged great
minds and energies. Among them a Comenius, a Leibniz and all those who, like Spinoza, were
persuaded that human quarrels and errors would cease if all men and women could communicate
with each other in a shared tongue. Esperanto is only one among a dozen systematic constructs of
a “world-speech”. Today, and for the first time, such a “world-speech” is tiding across the planet.
It is Anglo-American which, by virtue of economic, commercial, technological and mass-media
domination will soon be spoken, either as a first or a second language, by three-fifths of the human
species. All computers derive from Anglo-American and immensely reinforce the codification of
all other languages into a basic Anglo-American.
George Steiner
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Communication and
Humanities
2001
Excerpt from the speech given on the
occasion of receiving the Prince of
Asturias Award for Communication
and Humanities on 26/10/2001.
