Book reviews: Rare Tongues by Lorna Gibb | The Grammar Of Angels by Edward Wilson-Lee

Two new books grapple with the miracle of language in very different ways, writes Stuart Kelly

It is unremarkable that language, writing and rhetoric were seen by early societies as a gift from the gods, whether it was Plato describing Thoth in the “Phaedrus”, St John’s hymn to the eternal Word or deities as diverse as Mimir in Scandinavia to Wenchang Wang in China and the Celtic Ogma to the Armenian Tir. That the belief persists is more unlikely. Yet “scientific” linguists are peculiarly god-haunted. Language is transcendental and immanent, unique and universal, infinitely creative, something each of us partakes of individually and which no-one owns in entirety. Sounds like the divine to me. Lorna Gibb is an Associate Professor at the University of Stirling and Edward Wilson-Lee a Fellow at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, and their books, though quite different, both grapple with the miracle of language. Wilson-Lee has a minute concentration, focused on the arcane thought of the Renaissance scholar Pico della Mirandola; while Gibb is more expansive and broad-brush, but takes in sufficiently esoteric material to make it more than just a primer.

Lorna Gibb was blessed – as I was – by attending a Scottish comprehensive school when Latin was still on the curriculum. Neither on its own is quite as fortunate as to have both at once. Doing Latin meant you actually learned grammar (you certainly didn’t in English) and being at a comprehensive meant you became adept at code-switching, register shifts and idiolects. It was how you became aware that dreich, overcast and penumbrous were not different labels for the same phenomenon but different things in themselves. Indeed, Gibb begins with Latin, cleverly comparing it with Manchu as two empire-spanning languages which have fallen into desuetude. It raises an ambiguity throughout her study, the tension between a “state” language associated with the suppression of indigenous languages and its use as a lingua franca between colonised peoples. This is a point that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist who visited Scotland in the late 1970s and who switched from writing in English to his native Gikuyu, made eloquently: the “redemption” of English facilitated Gikuyu to “speak” to Xhosa, albeit indirectly. With few people fluent in Gikuyi and Xhosa, English was a bridge, a proxy, ironically, a lingua franca.

The most delightful parts of Rare Tongues are the most eccentric, and in the case of Plain Signs Talk, not to do with tongues at all. I often wished Gibb had lingered longer and given more examples. The reintroduction of Hebrew merits more than nine pages, maybe if only for the anecdote of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda having the first modern conversation in Hebrew in a Parisian café on 13th October 1881 and realising that Biblical Hebrew had, understandably, no word for coffee. Gibb likewise mentions Sicilian, and the work by Giovanni Verga, best known for the story on which the opera Cavalleria Rusticana. Interesting enough, but Verga was translated by DH Lawrence: what does that mean? And Sicilian has Arabic elements: how does that square with the orientalist interests of Frederick II and his resident scholar, the wizard Michael Scot?

The chapter on whistled languages is extremely interesting, and makes a good case for it being a genuine language and not a signal system like traffic lights. “Serbo-Croat” shows some of the real consequences of linguistic specifics. Most linguists agree that Serbian and Croatian (and Bosnian, and Montenegrin) are one language but non-linguistic and lethal reasons insist otherwise. That languages – Hawaiian, Nuxálk in northern Canada, Ainu in Japan – preserve certain ecological and medicinal properties of plants not discernible in Linnaean classification merits a whole book. (Of course, the Latin names preserve other stories). There is not so much about Scottish languages, and I feel that yoking Gaelic with Tamil is perhaps unwise. Brutal though the treatment of Gaelic speakers was, it is incomparable to Sri Lanka’s genocidal policy towards Tamils. Overall though, this is a whetsome book. Is that even a word? It is now.

The Renaissance scholar Pico della Mirandola is a bewitching polymathic figure, but that presents its own problems. How do you summarise a person interested in why you never do a single sneeze, the possibility there are exactly 183 worlds or the whether God, being omnipotent, could turn himself into a block of wood, or even the Devil? Despite his 900 theses, there isn’t a single work to point interested readers to – nothing akin to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly or Machiavelli’s The Prince. But what comes closest is della Mirandola’s fascination with language, and specifically the possibility of an ur-language, above, beyond and before earthly dialects. Might their be a language indistinguishable from magic?

Wilson-Lee gleefully crams a lot into this life, and is careful to remain sceptical about the more miraculous and hagiographic accounts of Pico. Indeed, such a curiosity seems inevitably to extend to sexual and political non-conformism. The book-burning zealot Savonarola emerges as the evil doppelganger of Pico, and much of what seemed mythic might just be rare – his Chaldee manuscripts might well be Ethiopian Hebraic Ge’ez letters.

Both books are interested in the language of birdsong, and the possibility of learning it. A dream, perhaps, but more inspiring that those who would curtail, diminish and police language. That way, as both books show, is dolly steps to fascism.

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages, by Lorna Gibb, Atlantic, £20

The Grammar Of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Sublime Language, by Edward Wilson-Lee, William Collins, £25