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Thus the volume's first essay,
"Introduction: historians and language" by Penelope J.
Corfield, adds materially to the study of Saussure's linguistic
thought, and to the more recent but fast-growing research into
communication systems. He revises current ideas about languages
which are used and articulated within historical contexts,
"as part of the complex experience of human society
itself," and, therefore, argues for a greater understanding
of how languages are much more complex than what we think of
them, and how, within the temporal universe, rules and
structures are subject to "time and the potential
change." On the whole, nevertheless, the sheer mass of
Corfield's erudition has produced a thought-provoking,
comprehensive introduction, which will surely remain the
standard reference on the topic it covers for many decades to
come.
"Estates,
degrees, and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and
Stuart England," and "Hidalgo and pechero: the
language of 'estates' and 'classes' in early-modern
Castile," the next two essays, debate a growing corpus of
ideas from historical sociology, semiotics, linguistics, and
political economy. In "Estates, degrees, and sorts,"
Keith Wrightson, for example, takes up the task of explaining
the plasticity of social identity, the mutability of social
alignments, the clash of interests, and the power of a dynamic
society in the seventeenth-century England. However, there are
some problems in these essays. There is little effort to be
concise, or to avoid repetition.
Other pieces in
this collection which follow a similarly detailed approach are:
Roger Mettam's "Definitions of nobility in
seventeenth-century France;" J.Corfield's "Class by
name and number in eighteenth-century Britain;"
J.H.Milton's "The emergence of Society in eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century Germany; and Geoffrey Crossick's "From
gentlemen to the residuum: languages of social description in
Victorian Britain." These essays concern themselves, in one
way or another, with the argument that the terminology in regard
to terms as "class," "people" and
"gentlemen" in France, Britain and Germany was no
ready reflection of "a changing social world, but an active
force defining that world, an intervention within it."
David
Washbrook's "To each a language of his own: language,
culture, and society in colonial India," is an interesting,
if limited, attempt to show how Indian society has accommodated,
and then "subverted" to its own
"predilections," the entire "gamut of Western
invention," that is, from Marxism to democracy to "the
internal combustion engine." And by so doing, how it has,
as Washbrook claims, plotted its own "idiosyncratic course
in the context of an increasingly uniform world" to expose
"the piety and the contradiction of that perspective on
modern history which would speak of the latter simply as the
triumph of the West." The essay lacks something in clarity,
and shows its origins as an academic piece in its rather
laboured presentation.
The concluding
essays, such as, "The language of representation: towards a
Muslim political order in nineteen-century India" by
Farzana Shaikh, "Chinese views of social
classification" by Philip A. Kubn, "Languages of power
in the United States" by Daniel T. Rodgers and Sean Wilentz
probe the language of representation, its richness, its power
and its variety, conveying how Indian Muslims in
nineteen-century apprehended the society in which they lived,
how Chinese dealt theoretically with social mobility, and how
the historic development of languages of dominance in America
"paralleled contemporary trends in England."
Scholar of language, history,
philosophy and social structure will find this book at once
interesting (spiced with frequently amazing antidotes),
provocative and genuinely scholarly and rich in information. It
will surely stimulate further study and debate.
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CRITICAL
and insightful dissection of linguistic communication has
today raised central questions about human conceptual powers
and the nature of knowledge itself. Everything is subjected to
scrutiny. In fact, an awareness of fertility and complexity of
language and its significance in formulating and expressing
meaning is having an increasing influence upon research. That
has particularly been noticed in social, cultural and
intellectual history. For example, there is now a growing
interest in the role of political language in framing and
defining the political action. Language, therefore, is not a
question simply for language experts but "a matter of
concern for all."
