Christian Europe’s multilingual plurality structurally required language learning

Evidence

My main concern in this paper is with communications, through interpreters and dragomans, between the two major Mediterranean civilisations—the civil­ isations of Christendom and of Islam. It might be useful first to point to one or two relevant differences between these two cultures. On the Christian side, there was a well-established need to learn languages. Christians of whatever native language had two classical languages to learn if they wished to be considered educated: Latin and Greek, and two more if they wanted to read their scriptures in the original: Hebrew and Aramaic. In addition to that, they had a multiplicity of spoken languages: Rashid al-Din, the fourteenth-century Persian historian, notes with astonishment that ‘the Franks have twenty-five different languages which they use among themselves, and nobody understands the language of anybody else’. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 150

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of translation and cultural brokerage in the Ottoman/Mamluk diplomatic world I’ve been building.