Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages, when Europe had still to emerge, new languages came slowly into being. It has been calculated that toward the end of the fifth century people no longer spoke Latin but Gallo-Romanic, Italico-Romanic, or Hispano-Romanic. While intellectuals continued to write Latin, bastardizing it ever further, they heard around them local dialects in which survivals of languages spoken before Roman civilization crossed with new roots brought by the barbarian invaders.
It is in the seventh century, before any known document written in Romance or Germanic languages, that the first reference to our theme appears. It is contained in an attempt, on the part of some Irish grammarians, to defend spoken Gaelic over learned Latin. In a work titled Auracepit na n-Éces (The precepts of the poets), the Irish grammarians refer to the structural material of the Tower of Babel as follows: “Others affirm that in the tower there were only nine materials and that these were clay and water, wool and blood, wood and lime, pitch, linen, and bitumen. …
These represent noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, interjection.” Thus the Gaelic language constituted the first and only instance of a language that overcame the confusion of tongues. It was the first language created after the fall of the tower by the seventy-two wise men of the school of Fenius. They were said to have implemented a sort of (to speak in computer jargon) cut-and-paste operation on all the languages born after the dispersion. All that was best in each language, all there was that was grand or beautiful, was cut out and retained in Irish. Wherever there was something that had no name in any other language, a name for it was made up in Irish. This firstborn and consequently supernatural language retained traces of its original isomorphism with the created world. As long as the proper order of its elements was respected, this ensured a sort of natural link between names and things.
Why did such a document appear at this particular moment? A quick look at the iconographic history increases our curiosity. There are no known representations of the Tower of Babel before the Cotton Bible (fifth or sixth century). It next appears in a manuscript perhaps from the end of the tenth century and then on a relief from the cathedral of Salerno from the eleventh century. After this, however, there is a flood of towers. It is a flood, moreover, that has its counterpart in a vast deluge of theoretical speculation about the confusion of tongues. It was only at this point that the story of the confusion came to be perceived not merely as an example of how divine justice humbled man’s pride but as an account of a historical (or metahistorical) event. It was now the story of how a real wound had been inflicted on mankind, a wound that might, in some way, be healed.
It thus happens that as soon as Europe was born as a bunch of peoples speaking different tongues, European culture reacted by feeling such an event not as a beginning but as the end of a lost harmony, a new Babel-like disaster, so that a remedy for linguistic confusion needed to be sought. I have already told the story of this quest.1 It is a quest that took two different paths: on one hand, people (from Raymond Lully to Leibniz and further) looked ahead, aiming to fabricate a rational language possessing the perfection of the lost speech of Eden; on the other hand, people tried to rediscover the lost language spoken by Adam.
Two different paths, but they did not remain strictly separate. Even when thinkers dreamed of a new language of universal reason, the model for that language was based on a theoretical idea of the possible aboriginal Hebrew of Adam. Since the story (which lasted for at least one thousand years and under certain points of view has not yet finished) has to be told here through several shortcuts, let me consider the case of Dante Alighieri.
Between 1303 and 1305, thus before finishing the Divine Comedy and certainly before writing Canto 26 of the Paradise (of which I must speak later), Dante Alighieri wrote his De Vulgari Eloquentia. Though it appears to be a doctrinal treatise, it is a self-commentary in which the author tends to analyze his own methods of artistic production, which he implicitly identifies as the exemplar of every poetic discourse.
Dante’s text opens with an observation that, obvious though it may be, is still fundamental for us: there are a multitude of vulgar tongues, and all of them are natural languages, opposed to Latin, which is (or which had become by Dante’s time) a universal but artificial grammar.
Before the blasphemy of Babel, mankind had known but one language, a perfect language, a language spoken by Adam and his posterity. The plurality of tongues arose as the consequence of the confusio linguarum. Revealing a knowledge of comparative linguistics exceptional for his time, Dante sought to demonstrate how this fragmentation had actually taken place. First, languages split up into the various zones of the world and, using the vernacular word for yes as a measuring rod, the languages (within what we today call the Romance area) further split into the oc, oil, and si groups. Then, even these vernacular languages further fragmented into a welter of local dialects, some of which might, as in Bologna, even vary from one part of a city to another. All these divisions had occurred, Dante observed, because man is—by custom, habit, language, and according to the differences in time and space—a changeable animal.
Dante’s project was to discover one language, more decorous and illustrious than the others, which had to become the language of his own poetry. To create such a language Dante had to take the various vernaculars in turn and subject each to a severe critical analysis. Examining the work of the best Italian poets and assuming that each in his own way had always gone beyond the local dialect, Dante wanted to create a vernacular that might be more illustris (“illustrious,” in the sense of “shining with light”), useful as guiding rule, worthy of being spoken in the royal palace of the national king, if the Italians were ever to obtain one), and worthy to be a language of government, of courts of law, and of wisdom. Such a vernacular belonged to every city in Italy and yet to none. It existed only as an ideal form, approached by the best poets, and it was according to this ideal form that all the vulgar dialects had to be judged.
The second, and uncompleted, part of De Vulgari Eloquentia sketches out the rules of composition for the one and only vernacular to which the term illustrious might truly apply: the poetic language of which Dante considered himself to be the founder. Opposing this language to all other languages of the confusion, Dante proclaimed it as the one that had restored that primordial affinity between words and objects that had been the hallmark of the language of Adam.
An apology for the vernacular, De Vulgari Eloquentia is written in Latin. As a poet, Dante wrote in Italian; as a philosopher, he stuck to the language of theology and law. Dante defines a vernacular as the speech that an infant learns as it first begins to articulate, imitating the sounds made to it by its nurse, before knowing any rule. The same was not true of that locutio secundaria, called “grammar” by the Romans. Grammar meant a rule-governed language, one, moreover, that could be mastered only after long study to acquire the habitus. Considering that in the vocabulary of the Schoolmen habitus was a virtue, a capacity to do some specific thing, a present-day reader might take Dante merely to be distinguishing between the instinctive ability to express oneself in language (performance) and grammatical competence. It is clear, however, that by grammar Dante meant scholastic Latin, the only language whose rules were taught in school during this period. In this sense Latin was an artificial idiom; it was, moreover, an idiom that was “perpetual and incorruptible,” having been ossified into the international language of church and university through a system of rules established by grammarians from Servius, between the fourth and fifth centuries, to Priscian, between the fifth and sixth, when Latin had ceased to be the living language of the Romans.
Having clarified this distinction between a primary and a secondary language, Dante went on to proclaim in no uncertain terms that, of the two, it was the first, the vernacular, that was the more noble. Vernaculars were the first languages of mankind, “though divided by different words and accents” (I, i, 4).
This choice confronted Dante, however, with a double predicament. First, although assuming that the most noble language must be natural, the fact that natural languages were split into a multiplicity of dialects suggested that they were not natural but conventional. Second, a vulgar tongue is the language spoken by everyone (by vulgus, or common people). But in De Vulgari
