Philologie und Mehrsprachigkeit ed. by Till Dembeck and Georg Mein (review)

Philologie und Mehrsprachigkeit contains nineteen chapters, within which twenty authors discuss encounters between German and other languages. These encounters occur through interlingual translations, multilingual literary texts, and heteroglossic geographic and virtual spaces. Till Dembeck introduces the book by announcing Yasemin Yıldız’s diagnosis: modern institutions enforce a “monolingual paradigm,” which fails to account for contemporary “postmonolingual” experience. Rather than summarize the chapters below, I will extract the book’s key points of orientation: criteria for distinguishing between languages, grammar’s role in defining language, the unrestricted multilingualism of the Middle Ages, and the implicit questions that modern multilingual literature direct at the monolingual paradigm.

Multilingualism implies a concept of lingualism, or languageness (Sprachlichkeit), which distinguishes one language from another. The distinction between monolingual and multilingual texts presumes the existence of discrete languages. David Gramling finds that linguists acknowledge only “those languages that could be transposed into other languages” with ease and transparency (116). Clearly delineated languages then become bases for ethnolinguistic nationalism. The UK and Germany exhibit “post-ethnic logics of linguistic citizenship,” which require immigrants to join the nation by speaking the national language (126). In nations with multiple national languages (like Switzerland and India), linguistic citizenship relies on several languages’ enumerability, not one language’s singularity. But identifying with a single language becomes attractive if you believe that languages are transposable. “Diplomatic” transposability replaced linguistic relativism (127).

Georg Mein suggests that another force differentiates languages besides the belief that all languages have commensurable effects. Before perceiving foreign languages as sharing Sprachlichkeit, speakers experience their own Sprachigkeit, their feeling of mastering a language. This depends neither on competence nor on interlingual transpositions, but on the familiar experience of not comprehending speech in other languages. Such incomprehension inspires the hermeneutically engaged translation (83). Aware of our incomprehension, we interpret carefully. Proceeding only “as if” we understood, we recall Kant’s view that aesthetic judgments are hypothetical (90). Mein claims that translating foreign languages exposes the provisional nature of all linguistic meaning. Dieter Heimböckel looks not to translation, but to immigrant literature, particularly Yoko Tawada’s work, for expressions of skepticism toward the referential function of language (137).

Other chapters discuss whether linguists have overrated or underrated grammar’s value in defining language. Remigius Bunia argues that idiom and rhetoric structure the mechanics of language, but do so with respectively more and less rigid rules than grammar. By overrating grammar above rhetoric and idiom, we have exaggerated the boundaries between languages à l’academie française. Rhetoric allows the occasional use of foreign phrases, whereas idioms require such precision that they often splinter languages into dialects (68). Peter Colliander, by contrast, argues that the recent translation of a German novel into Danish could have more systematically marshaled grammatical resources of Danish (99). If language regulation and instruction have wrongly reified grammar, then translation studies may focus on comparative lexicography at the expense of comparative grammar.

During the Middle Ages, systems of meaning bled together more fluidly than they do today. As David Martyn describes, medieval poets considered foreign vernaculars or Latin more apt vehicles for poetry than their mother languages. They deemed poetic language a Distanzsprache, a language apart from the familiar (40). The fluidity of medieval linguistic boundaries led to frequent use of foreign loan words in written language, according to Heinz Sieburg (243). Multilingual medieval poetics feature prominently in poems like Bruder Hans’ gloss of “Ave Maria,” which has both a repeating rhyme scheme (aabcddccec) and a repeating pattern of line-by-line language shifts between German, French, English, and Latin (GFELFRELLGEF) (211). Modern multilingual literature would suggest that even polyglot readers want to follow the grammar of one language per sentence, even if a text utilizes lexica from multiple languages. Eugenia Kelbert quotes Eugene Jolas using standard English grammar in his dictionary of “Atlantica,” an invented language that he dreamed would be spoken in a future America (283).

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