These first artificial language projects rested on the idea that words stand by themselves, that there is an unequivocal relationship between the word and its referent, as the myth of the Adamic language suggests, where words directly convey the essence of things. The book of Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, light and darkness, just by naming them. In the Adamic myth the things and their names are one and the same. Like- wise the artificial language projects of the seventeenth century were based on a narrow conception of language. Their goal was to create a perfect lan- guage: a language that conveyed the true essence of things and concepts straightforwardly, as if naming something were tantamount to giving it a dis- tinctive identity.
A different conception of language in the eighteenth century put an end to these projects. A basic tenet of this new conception, advanced by the Ideo- logues, among others, is that there is no fixed, one-to-one relation between a word and its meaning. Such a relationship can be posited for mathematical terms (the concept "angle," for example, has a fixed and unambiguous mean- ing), but not in other realms. To quote Destutt de Tracy, who anticipated twentieth-century semantic theory, "it is impossible that the same sign has exactly the same value for everybody who uses it, or even for every one of them every time he uses it."12 Even if it were possible to agree on an interna- tional word for "honor," for example, this word would still elicit different meanings to different people and contain ambiguity. Moreover, it is precisely language's context-specific nature that makes it such an efficient tool for everyday communication.
Rather than looking for an impossible perfect language, the Ideologues asserted that a more feasible and helpful task would be to use a common lan- guage with as much precision as the context required, or to reform it as nec- essary by producing, for example, unambiguous scientific symbols or nomenclatures.13
This was a turning point in the history of linguistics.14 The abandonment of the search for a perfect language encouraged those interested in the study of language to concentrate on fluidity and context-specific meaning. The idea emerged that languages, rather than mechanically reflecting a fixed reality, change and evolve in conjunction with the people who speak them, and in ways that satisfy their communication needs. This idea heralded a more distinctive organicist, or Romantic, view of language. According to this vision, the spiritual or cultural progress of a people—its genius, soul, national character, or Volksgeist, as it was later called—could be captured in the lan- guage spoken by that people. This is one of Johann Gottfried Herders basic tenets (1744-1803). He argued that "each nation speaks in accordance with its thought and thinks in accordance with its speech."15 Wilhelm von Hum- boldt (1767-1853) expressed it more plainly: "The mental individuality of a people and the shape of its language are so intimately fused with one another, that if one were given, the other would have to be completely derivable from it. . . . Language is, as it were, the outer appearance of the spirit of a people; their language is their spirit, and their spirit is their language; we can never think of them sufficiently as identical."16
Franz Bopp (1791-1867) was the father of comparative linguistics and a scholar of the genealogy of language families. He further reinforced the or- ganicist view of language. The discovery of the Indo-European language, com- parative studies by Bopp and his contemporaries, and the ethnicization of language as proposed by Herder and Humboldt opened the way to a racialist understanding of human societies. Comparative linguists originally coined the terms "Aryan" and "Semite" to refer to the peoples who spoke a language in the Indo-European or Semitic family. But by the mid-nineteenth century these terms conveyed a distinctly racial meaning, which invited comparisons of the moral qualities of the two races, the Aryan and the Semitic, and claims about the supremacy of the former over the latter.17
Although Bopp led the way in referring to languages as "organisms," the Darwinian influence in the second half of the nineteenth century closed the circle. Biology and linguistics were linked in a way that necessarily had po- litical valence. In his Die darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language [1863]), the German linguist August Schleicher placed languages on par with living organisms. Languages are born, and they die. While some strive and produce more offspring, others disappear or languish in isolation. The fate of a language ultimately reflects that of its speakers, involved as they are in a constant struggle for life.18 This naturalization and ethnicization of language moved vastly beyond the traditional understanding of language as a purely communicative tool. It put language at the forefront of politics and imbued it with other mean- ings. If language and ethnicity are overlaid, then an ethnic group could be identified if it had its own language. Even more significantly, as Fichte put it, language legitimated claims to national self-determination. "Whether a par- ticular language is found," he said, "there exists also a particular nation which has the right to run its own affairs."19
The abandonment of the artificial language solution heralded a new and politically charged conception of language. Languages were invoked to prove or certify claims to national identity, to make an argument for the strength of one nation vis-a-vis other nations, as well as to delineate the proper or "natu- ral" geographical boundaries between them. By the era of nationalism in the
late nineteenth century, languages were already first-rate political weapons.
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It is precisely when languages were most politically instrumentalized that we reach the second juncture in the European linguistic regime. Economic his- torians refer to this period as the first wave of globalization, from 1870 to 1913.20 New transportation and communication technologies (railways, steam- ships, the telegraph, and telephones) abolished the tyranny of distance, re- duced freight costs, and fostered international trade. European international trade, at current values, increased by 294 percent.21 The state of relative peace between the main European powers and the adoption of the gold standard also contributed to this unprecedented expansion of international trade. In- ternational migration was equally paramount. From 1850 to 1880 an aver- age of 300,000 Europeans a year emigrated to other continents. At the turn of the century the number exceeded 1,000,000. 22
A more interconnected world demanded broader cooperation and new international bodies. The International Telegraph Union was established in 1865 and, nine years later, the Universal Postal Union. The International Me- ridian Conference agreed to establish standard coordinates and time zones in 1884. But cooperation at the international level was neither confined to the field of communications or trade agreements, nor exclusively championed by public actors. The International Committee for Relief to the Wounded was founded in 1863 in Geneva, which paved the way for the first Geneva Con- vention a year later and the founding of the Red Cross in 1876. Meanwhile, the trade unions had already established their First International, also in Ge- neva (1866). World fairs were held regularly after the success of the Parisian World Fair in 1867. They gave participating countries a chance to show off their scientific and technical acumen. The modern Olympic Games, first staged in 1896, and the Nobel Prizes, established in 1901, created new arenas for international competition.