I still remember quite well how, a few years back at the Harvard University Bookstore, the Loeb Collection of Latin And Greek Classics, with their crimson and green covers respectively, were no nowhere to be found on the shelves. And a slim store clerk when asked told me those books on “dead languages” were no longer carried at the store. If this anecdote transmits anything is precisely the central question that still lingers from the pulsating notion of “dead languages”. What does it mean that a language is dead; if there is, in fact, such an ontological status for any language that has been traced from our past? This question returns to us today with some urgency as the most recent avatar of cybernetics, “Artificial Intelligence”, positions itself high above not just the alleged “dead languages” of the antiquity that many readers cannot longer master, but also the living spoken languages of human race as a whole. 

Prophetically, this was the problem confronted by W.H.D Rouse in a short text titled “Machines or Minds”, and published in The Classical Weekly in winter of 1913. And as we know, Rouse, a trained philologist who translated Homer and Plato, was also the creator of the Loeb Classical Collection published by Harvard University Press beginning in 1912. The task of reviving the “dead languages” in Rouse’s program was a way to contest what he saw as the collapse of civilization in the face of rise of machine and the colonization of “leisure time”, as it was becoming a world of pure “electric force” (a topoi of modern civilization that will also finds its place in the writings of Warburg, Schmitt, and Florenski as we have recently noted ). 

In a description that resonantes in form and depth with Carlo Michelstaedter’s forecast that the future of language will amount to an international language composed of technical terms, Rouse was more refined and precise in defining this instrumental transport by connecting the rise of science with that of English as a homogenous planetary language. Thus, inverting the assumption that “dead languages” are the defunct and no longer spoken idioms of past civilizations and archaic cultures; for Rouse it is “English”, and more specifically, scientific English that is ultimately a dead language, as it transmits nothing, being fundamentally detached from linguistic experience and imagination. As Rouse writes in one moment of his essay: “The very languages give what English does not give. Modern English is full of roundabouts, of metaphors without meaning, verbiage, shams; Greek and Latin are plain. The English language is largely dead: Greek and Latin are living languages. […] The scientific English sentences are all dead: they either wrap  a single sense in meaningless words, or they seem to have a meaning when they have none [1]. The rhetorical artifice to which language succumbs expresses itself not through the use of words, signs and icons, but in a proliferation of discourse that no longer communicates anything precisely because it has communicated everything out of the fallacy of absolute representation and absorption of a flat system of wordless objectivity. In Rouse’s indictment of human decline finds its correspondence in what language’s entry into what he called the “Dagon of Science”, opening a new scenario for human historical destiny: “never was there a world that cared less for truth in speech and thought” [2].

There is a huge risk in reading Rouse’s defense of the “classical languages” (Latin, Greek) as a humanist blueprint for a forthcoming revival of classicism, a nihilist strategy that is being fulfilled in the United States a parodic repetition of the Winckelmann’s neoclassical imitation ideal.  Against the reification of dead languages as fictive “living languages” positioned as tools for knowledge and expertise, division of labor notwithstanding, what was fundamental for Rouse in the dead languages of the past – and in this sense, any language – is the ability of bringing about the experiential dimension of its use, thus connecting thinking and the experience without separations [3]. In other words, Rouse, very much like the last Émile Benveniste, found interest in classical languages not as a moral principle of civilization and identity foundation, but rather a site for the immediate experience between speakers embedded in a degree of the lived” [4]. This is also why a poet like Eliseo Diego would state in Conversación con los difuntos (1991) reading other languages is a form of friendship beyond presence of the living. The conversation in languages is a way to maintain the passage from the living to dead and back.

And whoever lives in language dwells in the memory and traces of all the dead languages, inscriptions, voices, and rhythms, because these contain the past as a reservoir of the figure of life. The consolidation of basic English as the hegemonic medium of communication with the return of extreme nationalism can only lead us, as Erich Auerbach wrote from his Istanbul exile, “to a ruse of providence designed to lead us along a bloody and tortuous path of an International of triviality and a language of Esperanto”. In this scenario, the slow annihilation of the human species takes place outside the world; that is, in the field of language, which has now become the central historical program of domination against the lived experience of languages both dead and living. As languages become an autonomous frame of order and force, human beings’ existence is transformed into a mobile receptor of rhetoric, information, and opinion.

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Notes 

1. W.H.D Rouse. “Machines or Mind?”, The Classical Weekly,  V.6, 1913, 85.

2. Ibid., 86.

3. W.H.D Rouse. “Latin as a Universal Language”, Nature, February, 1916, 706.

4. Émile Benveniste. Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 67.