Dictionaries made languages’ equality visible within their covers regardless of political reality.
Evidence
The energetic activities of these professional intellectuals were central to the shaping of nineteenth-century European nationalisms in complete contrast to the situation in the Americas between 1770 and 1830. Monolingual dictionaries were vast compendia of each language’s print-treasury, portable (if sometimes barely so) from shop to school, office to residence. Bilingual dictionaries made visible an approaching egalitarianism among languages – whatever the political realities outside, within the covers of the Czech-German/German-Czech dictionary the paired languages had a common status. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 291
Categorization
- DEFINE: Shows the concrete mechanism — lexicography — by which print-languages became central to European nationalism.
- XREF: connects to: Equality is produced by political organization, not given by nature — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 736
Related
- Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities (similarity 0.81)
- Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Equality is produced by political organization, not given by nature
#exemplifies(0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 736