While participation in the European experiential sciences was able to develop under the super-canopy of an encyclopedic book phantasm, it was the task of linguists and ethnologists to work away at the linguistic outside in a wealth of individual encounters with different foreign languages. The European explorer-languages found themselves faced with a semiotic multiverse of incredible variety comprising at least five thousand authentic languages (6,700 at a recent UNESCO count) and a virtually inestimable multiplicity of dialects and sub-dialects that always include mythologies, ‘religions’, ritualisms, arts and gestures. Considering this diversity, which defies any attempt at an overview, the dream of an all-integrating hyper-language must disappear almost automatically. Only two strategies offered themselves to the discoverers and the discovered alike to find their bearings in this neo-Babylonian situation: firstly, the forced establishment of the colonial rulers’ languages as general languages of interaction – which at least succeeded in the cases of English, Spanish and French, with varying success in different parts of the world – and secondly, the infusion of the individual languages with the translated words of the new masters. Both paths had to be taken simultaneously, and on both of them, learning languages – and translation along with them – proved the key to the regional spheropoetic processes. Whether one leans towards pessimistic or optimistic theories of translation, bilingualism or plurilingualism performed one of the most important canopy functions during terrestrial globalization. It remains a fact that the language of the European rulers pulled the local languages over to its side, rather than the respective indigenous languages absorbing the idioms of the colonizers.1 It testified to the wise intuition of the politician-historian Winston Churchill that he wrote the history of the British world power not only as that of an empire, but also that of a language area: History of the English-Speaking Peoples (4 vols., 1956–8). He evidently foresaw that the most long-lived aspect of the Commonwealth would be its commonspeak. This arrangement not only satisfied the English need to present the rift between Great Britain and the United States as a mere question of pronunciation; it also kept open the option of new political groups and cultural circles entering the club of English-speaking peoples. As far as the language criterion is concerned, all natural scientists, pilots, diplomats and businesspersons have indeed been incorporated into the inescapable Anglophone language network like artificial new peoples – followed by the brave new world of pop music. In Anglophony, as in religion and the most basic forms of entertainment, the medium is the message.
As far as the Christian message is concerned, it could not wait in its second missionary cycle for demand to arise among the five thousand foreign languages; it had to translate itself into the language of the others in order to explain its salvific significance to them. Probably the work of Christian translators in the last five hundred years to express their faith in other languages, at least in quantitative, and perhaps also in qualitative terms, constitutes the most extraordinary cultural achievement in the history of mankind – at least, the self-translation of modern Christianity into the countless individual cultures is, for the time being, the most powerful testament to the possibilities and difficulties of an operatively concrete trans-cultural ecumene. (If anything, it would be comparable to the number of Homer translations into the plethora of European and non-European idioms.) At the end of the twentieth century, the New Testament had been translated into over 1,800 genuine languages – from which connoisseurs of the linguistic atlas can conclude that the Christian message has gained access to at least one in three language communities on the planet, including more than a few in which the New Testament was the first book ever published.
This fact, which could be described in church-historical immanence as the continuation of the Pentecost miracle by Gutenbergian means, at once reveals the insurmountable particularity of even the most inclusive message: the inaccessibility of ‘small’ languages places a limit on the effectively universal spread of the Gospel. Consequently, the apostolic methods of dissemination, as invasive as they may have been, were unable to fulfil the dream of erecting a worldwide message empire, penetrating as far as the capillary level, founded on Mediterranean transmitters and content providers. This observation could only be retracted if one interpreted the triumphal procession of the natural sciences through the modern nations as a missionary success of Hellenism in its modern phase – perhaps Athens as a sender can reach the places where the missives from Rome and Jerusalem cannot be read.
In any case, Hollywood, the Pacific metropolis of images, outstripped the Mediterranean emission bases for morals and mysteries – Rome and Jerusalem – half a century ago. Its messages were never directed at the smaller cultures, whose markets are too narrow for the products of the new amusing imperialism. If they can be promoted in two dozen dubbed versions, however, they promise adequate profits.