Sacred written languages created pre-national communities out of signs, not sounds

Evidence

But Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom – which, though we think of it today as Chinese, imagined itself not as Chinese, but as central – were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script. Take only the example of Islam: if Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other’s languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless understood each other’s ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic. In this sense, written Arabic functioned like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which classical sacred communities were imagined — a community of shared writing rather than shared speech.
• XREF: connects to: Pidgin languages embody Relation negatively by belonging to no single tradition — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 477; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”

Related

• Sacred languages were imagined as emanations of reality itself (similarity 0.83)
• Pre-modern great communities imagined themselves via sacred script, not ethnicity (similarity 0.83)
• Sacred-language communities absorbed outsiders through script mastery (similarity 0.80)