Print’s fixity of language produced the image of deep national antiquity

Evidence

Second, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. As Febvre and Martin remind us, the printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially. It was no longer subject to the individualizing and ‘unconsciously modernizing’ habits of monastic scribes. Thus, while twelfth-century French differed markedly from that written by Villon in the fifteenth, the rate of change slowed decisively in the sixteenth. ‘By the 17th century languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern forms.’ To put it another way, for three centuries now these stabilized print-languages have been gathering a darkening varnish; the words of our seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way that to Villon his twelfth-century ancestors were not. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 188

Categorization

• XREF: The fabricated sense of antiquity is the same temporal construction the Islamophobia field sees in invocations of civilisational roots; connects to how invented traditions acquire naturalness. — connects to: Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 184; Printing emphasized vernacular languages and divided the European intellectual mind — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 804; National consciousness developed before mass literacy and print capitalism — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 217 (+5 more)

Related

• Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization (similarity 0.86)
• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.85)
• Latin lost its printing hegemony within a century of 1500 (similarity 0.85)
• Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities (similarity 0.82)
• Novels and newspapers supplied the technical means to imagine the nation (similarity 0.82)
• Print capitalism’s sacral-vernacular split enabled nationalist imagination (similarity 0.81)
• Print alone is not revolutionary; capitalism is the decisive factor. (similarity 0.81)
• Printing emphasized vernacular languages and divided the European intellectual mind (similarity 0.80)
• Print-capitalism emerged to re-link fraternity, power and time after cosmology split from history (similarity 0.80)
• Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.80)
• Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable (similarity 0.80)
• Print created unified language-fields where unrelated speakers understood each other (similarity 0.79)
• Technological and print-capitalism advances enabled imagining parallel lives across oceans (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Printing emphasized vernacular languages and divided the European intellectual mind #corroborates (0.82) — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 804
• National consciousness developed before mass literacy and print capitalism #contradicts (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 217
• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry #corroborates (0.78)
• Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization #complicates (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175
• Nationalism’s invented antiquity structurally aligns with modern autobiography’s inner premises #corroborates (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25