The Art of Conversation

Peter Burke

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745665825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The Art of Conversation is a major contribution to the social history of language - a relatively new field which has become the focus of lively interdisciplinary debate in recent years.

Drawing on the work of sociolinguists and others, Burke uses their concept while reserving the right to qualify their theories where the historical record makes this seem appropriate. Like the sociolinguists, Burke in concerned with the way language varies according to who is communicating to whom, on what occasion, in what medium and on what topic. Unlike many sociolinguists, Burke adds a historical dimension, treating language as an inseparable part of social history.

This approach is outlined and justified in the first chapter and then exemplified in the remaining four, which deal with the early modern period. Among the topics discussed are the changing role of Latin, which is shown to be very much alive in the age of its alleged decline; language and identity in Italy, a politically divided region at the time but one where educated elites had a common language; the art of conversation, in other words the advice on speaking in polite company offered in hundreds of treaties of the period; and silence, viewed as an act of communication with a significance which changes over time and varies according to the setting and the persons who are silent.

The Art of Conversation will be of great interest to students and scholars in social and cultural history, linguistics, the sociology of language and the ethnography of communication.

1

The Social History of Language

In the last few years a relatively new area of historical research has developed, which might be described as a social history of language, a social history of speaking, or a social history of communication. Consciousness of the importance of language in everyday life has become widespread in the last generation or so. As the rise of feminist and regionalist movements shows, dominated groups have become more sharply aware of the power of language as well as the involvement of language with other forms of power. Again, the philosophers, critics and others associated with the movements commonly labelled structuralism and deconstruction, despite their many disagreements, share a strong concern with language and its place in culture.

Whether they are involved with one or more of these movements, or with oral history, another recent development, a number of historians have also come to recognize the need for the study of language for two reasons in particular. In the first place, as an end in itself, as a social institution, as a part of culture and everyday life. In the second place, as a means to the better understanding of oral and written sources via awareness of their linguistic conventions.¹ All the same, there still remains a gap between the disciplines of history, linguistics, and sociology (including social anthropology). The gap can and should be filled by a social history of language.

It is no new idea that language has a history. Ancient Romans, such as Varro, and Renaissance humanists, such as Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo, were interested in the history of Latin.² Discussions of the origin of French, Italian, Spanish, and other languages were published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, forming part of the debates about the relative merits of Latin and the vernaculars and the correct ways of speaking and writing the latter.³

In the nineteenth century, the dominant school of linguists, the so-called ‘neogrammarians’, was much concerned with the reconstruction of early forms of particular languages, such as ‘protoromance’ and ‘protogermanic’, and with the formulation of laws of linguist evolution.⁴ This was the approach against which the linguistic Ferdinand de Saussure, now seen as the father of structuralism, reacted, on the grounds that the historical school of linguists was too little concerned with the relation between the different parts of the language system.⁵ In Saussure’s day, however, the historical approach remained dominant. The Oxford English Dictionary, planned, as its title-page declared, on ‘historical principles’, began publication in 1884, while its French equivalent, edited by Emile Littré, began in 1863.⁶ Histories of English, French and German which have since achieved the status of classics date originally from the years around 1900.⁷

All the same, this approach to the history of language lacked a full social dimension. Children of their time, these nineteenth-century scholars thought of language as an organism which ‘grows’ or ‘evolves’ through definite stages and expresses the values or ‘spirit’ of the nation which speaks it. Their concerns were national – or even nationalist – rather than social. They studied the internal history of languages, the history of their structure, but neglected what has been called their ‘external history’, in other words the history of their use.⁸ They showed little interest in the different varieties of the ‘same’ language spoken by different social groups. On the other hand, this concern is central to contemporary sociolinguistics, which crystallized into a discipline in the late 1950s in the United States and elsewhere.

Of course, awareness of the social significance of varieties of speech is far from new. It has been argued with some plausibility that in Italy the sixteenth century was ‘the time in which language first came to be regarded as a primarily social phenomenon’.⁹ One Italian writer published a book in 1547 ‘On Speech and Silence’, organizing the study according to the modern-sounding categories ‘who’, ‘to whom’, ‘why’, ‘how’, and ‘when’, ¹⁰ thus reminding us of the debt which sociolinguistics owes to the tradition of classical rhetoric.

Other writers also made acute sociolinguistic observations at this time. Vincenzo Borghini, for example, noted and tried to explain the archaism of the speech of Tuscan peasants, arguing that ‘they converse less with foreigners than townspeople do, and for this reason change less.’ In his famous dialogue on ‘civil conversation’, Stefano Guazzo described the harsh accent of the Piedmontese, the Genoese propensity to swallow their words, the Florentines with their mouths ‘full of aspirations’, and so on.¹¹

A similar sociolinguistic awareness can be found in the plays of Shakespeare. In a famous scene in Henry IV, for example, Hotspur criticizes his Kate for saying ‘in good sooth’ because this turn of phrase was not aristocratic. ‘You swear like a comfit-maker’s wife, ’ he tells her. What Hotspur wanted to hear was ‘a good mouth-filling oath’. In the seventeenth century, Molière, as we shall see below, had his ear particularly well tuned to the social nuances expressed by different varieties of language. One might say the same of Goldoni in the following century.

Nineteenth-century novels, from Jane Austen and George Eliot to Leo Tolstoy and Theodor Fontane, are a still richer source of observations on the social meaning of differences in speech. Think, for example, of Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, objecting to her mother’s phrase ‘the pick of them’ as ‘rather a vulgar expression’, while her carefree brother Fred counters with the assertion – which has its parallel among linguists today – that so-called ‘correct’ English is nothing but ‘the slang of prigs’. When the old lawyer Standish, in the same novel, swears ‘By God!’, the author intervens to explain that he was using that oath as ‘a sort of armorial bearings, stamping the speech of a man who held a good position’. He used it, as we might say, as a status symbol.¹²

The perceptiveness and articulateness of these writers was out of the ordinary. All the same, there would be little need for a social history of language if ordinary speakers were not more or less aware of the social meaning of styles of speech, while social climbers have always been hyperconscious of such matters.

Again, it is no new idea that language is a potential instrument in the hands of the ruling class, an instrument which they may employ as much to mystify or to control as to communicate. The use of Latin in early modern Europe is an obvious example, and it will be discussed in detail below (p. 37). The use of another foreign language, ‘law French’, in English courts was criticized on similar grounds by men as diverse as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, King James I, and the seventeenth-century radicals John Lilburne and John Warr.¹³ Again, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the British sociologist Herbert Spencer was already recommending historical research on what he called ‘the control exercised by class over class, as displayed in social observances – in titles, salutations and forms of address’.¹⁴

All the same, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead once remarked, ‘Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.’ In other words, there is an enormous difference between the vague awareness of a problem and systematic research into it. In the case of the relation between language, thought and society, pioneering explorations were made from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, notably by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen, the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and the linguists Fritz Mauthner, Benjamin Whorf and Antoine Meillet.

Veblen, for example, paid serious attention to linguistic phenomena when formulating his famous ‘theory of the leisure class’.¹⁵ Bakhtin criticized the structural linguist Saussure for his lack of interest in change over time and developed the theory of ‘heteroglossia’ (raznorechie) according to which a language, Russian for instance, is the result of the interplay or struggle between different dialects, jargons and so on, different forms of language which are associated with different social groups and their diverse points of view, so that each user of language has to appropriate it from the mouths of others and adapt it to his or her own needs.¹⁶

Fritz Mauthner by contrast was a linguistic determinist. Developing Nietzsche’s idea of language as a ‘prison’ (Gefängnis), Mauthner once declared that ‘if Aristotle had spoken Chinese or Dakotan, he would have produced a totally different system of logical categories’ (‘Hätte Aristoteles Chinesisch oder Dakotaisch gesprochen, er hätte zu einer qanz andern Logik gelangen müssen’).¹⁷ Whorf’s controversial but influential essays made essentially the same point, arguing that the fundamental ideas of a people, such as the Hopi Indians – their conceptions of time, space, and so on – are shaped by the structure of their language, its genders, tenses, and other grammatical and syntactical forms.¹⁸

In France, Antoine Meillet, a former pupil of Saussure’s but committed to a historical approach, described language in Durkheimian terms as ‘eminently a social fact (‘éminémment un fait social’). He was a semi-determinist who argued that ‘Languages serve to express the mentality of the speaking subjects, but each one constitutes a highly organized system which imposes itself on them, which gives their thought its form and only submits to the action of this mentality in a slow and partial manner.’¹⁹

The French historian Lucien Febvre, a former pupil of Meillet, illustrated his theory of the relation between language and mentality in a study of François Rabelais and the problem of unbelief. In this study, Febvre argued that atheism was impossible in the sixteenth century, among other reasons because of the lack of abstract concepts in French which might sustain such a worldview.²⁰ Earlier in his career, between 1906 and 1924, Febvre had written a number of review articles on the history of language in the Revue de Synthèse Historique, praising the work of Meillet and telling historians that they needed to follow what the linguists were doing, for example the study of the introduction of French into the south of France in the centuries before the French Revolution.²¹

The subject was also of great interest to Febvre’s friend and colleague Marc Bloch. Indeed, it has been suggested that Bloch learned the comparative method of which he set such store from the linguists, from Meillet in particular.²² Historians in other countries and other fields – the church his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Social History of Language
• 2 ‘Heu Domine, Adsunt Turcae’: a Sketch for a Social History of Post-Medieval Latin
• 3 Language and Identity in Early Modern Italy
• 4 The Art of Conversation in Early Modern Europe
• 5 Notes for a Social History of Silence in Early Modern Europe
• Bibliography
• Index