French without tears

This month Ask Oxford launches its new modern languages section, so it seems like a good opportunity to look at some noted views of the role of languages. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, explains of his Memoirs that, "all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language." The 19th-century German soldier and statesman Field-Marshal Moltke is described as being "silent in seven languages," and in the 20th century the sharp tongue of Dorothy Parker says of an acquaintance, "That women speaks eighteen languages, and can't say no in any of them."

French itself generally gets a good press. Lewis Carroll's Alice is advised by the Red Queen to "Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing." The suggestion would have been applauded by Antoine de Rivarol, who in the previous century argued that "What is not clear is not French." Voltaire, writing to Catherine the Great of Russia, quotes a lady of the Versailles court as saying, "What a dreadful pity that the bother at the tower of Babel should have got language all mixed up; but for that everyone would always have spoken French." Other Latinate languages also get a look-in: "I must learn Spanish, one of these days," says the protagonist in Browning's poem "The Flower's Name", and more recently, in the 20th century, Italo Calvino pointed out that "Italian is the only language in which the word vago (vague) also means lovely, attractive".

Romance languages are often viewed more warmly than Germanic. "I don't know why you waste your time with Anglo-Saxon instead of studying something useful like Latin or Greek!" said the mother of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges to her son. Mark Twain remarked that he "once heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective," and Flann O'Brien commented tersely that "Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill." But in the end, perhaps, the value of all languages is asserted most notably by the Bulgarian-born writer and novelist Elias Canetti when he says, "There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth."

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