Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolivar: Simon Rodriguez and the American Essay at Revolution

4. The Quest for a New World Language

138 Chapter 4 The Quest for a New World Language The objection you make to rectifying our alphabet, “that it will be attended with inconveniences and difficulties,” is a natural one; for it always occurs when any reformation is proposed, whether in religion, government, laws, and even down as low as roads and wheel carriages. —Benjamin Franklin, letter to Mary Stevenson, September 28, 1768 Max Weinreich’s famous dismissal of the distinction between a dialect and a language—“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”—draws its comic tension from the geopolitical pressures any discussion of language presupposes. An essential definition of language, it suggests, is nothing more than an ex post facto attempt to justify crass political realities in something other than crass political terms. In Spain’s case the military realities of conquest and discovery conspire with the 1492 publication of Nebrija’s Gramática de la lengua castellana to cement Castilian as the dialect that will become the Spanish language. If the history of the English language lacks such a point of historical convergence, it, too, culminates around a single publication, Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Another dictionary, The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, credits Johnson with some of the particular discrepancies between pronunciation and spelling in contemporary English, noting that his work standardized English spelling even as pronunciation continued (and continues) to evolve (466–67). Language’s foundational role is no secret to revolutionaries either, as the struggle against colonial rule in both North America and Spanish America quickly became a grammatical and orthographic battle as well The Quest for a New World Language 139 as a military one. In a study of Andrés Bello, Iván Jaksić finds connections between his subject’s 1823 “Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar y uniformar la ortografía en América” and North American lexicographer and essayist Noah Webster’s 1783 introduction to his spelling book, commonly called the Blue-Backed Speller. In a footnote Jaksić goes on to suggest that movements toward language reform on the heels of the 1918 Bolshevik revolution might point to a trend in Occidental culture in which revolutionary political change demands an accompanying reconsideration of language (68). Indeed, in the linguistic dimension as well as the political one, all three of these revolutions are rightly considered manifestations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, products of an era that saw language as the primary currency of political exchange and thus a particularly necessary field for political reform. For the American hemisphere the era of independence proved to be a time of lexicographic and orthographic experimentation, as the North American and Spanish American revolutionaries sought to distinguish their own linguistic realities from those of their former metropolis. As analogies between political and linguistic independence became common currency in both Americas, language emerged as a great hemispheric paradox once the struggle moved from the battlefield to the realm of intellectual debate. United to a metropolis whose language and literary tradition their instincts told them to claim, nineteenth-century American thinkers nonetheless chafed under the notion of intellectual or cultural servitude. Dictionary making and orthographic reform provided a relatively comfortable space to assert independence on small points while leaving the lion’s share of the linguistic inheritance intact. If Spain and Britain ruled the Spanish and English publishing industry and remained the locus for literary taste making, this reservoir of linguistic authority also proved an inviting target for reformers such as Webster and Rodríguez, who could at once show their prowess in understanding and manipulating their native tongue while making a larger argument that its future evolutionary development would take place in the New World rather than the Old. Webster, who has become the most famous name in U.S. dictionaries, came of age as a writer in much the same way Rodríguez did, as a newspaper essayist attempting to explain how the military victory that ended a revolutionary war might be translated into intellectual and linguistic independence . Like Rodríguez, Webster began his professional life as a schoolteacher , though he soon found he could earn a more lucrative (if somewhat unsteady) living writing and publishing textbooks for use in American 140 Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar schools. His first writings on linguistic independence take the form of introductions to those textbooks, short essays meant to justify the publication and...