Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare

know that being on the margin of communities starts when they are considered inscrutable or untranslatable. They also know that those who call them untranslatable are excusing themselves from engaging in acts of interpretation.”¹⁸ So too eighteenth-century anglophones. Reading them as inscrutable is no reading at all. Reading them in Derridean terms as always estranging language from itself in the interest of the linguistic community is more useful.

      This is the interpretive attitude that I bring to the wonderfully “rotten” and “weird” works of long eighteenth-century anglophone writing. I believe it is incumbent on us, as scholars and students of Standard English literature as well as anglophone literatures and histories, to rethink the history of our aesthetic sensorium so that it is truer to aesthetic creations of the past and the present. It is in this spirit of expanding our sense of the historical multiplicity, incommensurability, and aesthetic importance of linguistic difference and diversity that my critical intervention seeks to dephilologize, dedialectologize, deethnographize, and depathologize texts and subjects that literary posterity has relegated to anaesthetic discursive traditions that cast little light on contemporary linguistic, political, and aesthetic issues.

      Anglophony and Standardization

      Dictionaries have in all Languages been compiled, to which, as to Storehouses, such Persons may have Recourse, as often as any thing occurs in Conversation or Reading, with which they are unacquainted, or when they themselves would speak or write properly and intelligibly.

      And as such Helps have been thought useful in all civilized nations, they appear more eminently necessary in the English Tongue; not only because it is, perhaps, the most copious Language of any in Europe, but is likewise made up of so great a variety of other languages, both ancient and modern, as will plainly appear to any one who shall peruse the following Dictionary. Of the Reason of which Mixture, and by what Accidents it was brought about, I shall give the following Account.¹⁹

      The eighteenth century, and in particular the second half of the eighteenth century, is unprecedentedly generative for the production of discourses about anglophony, almost all of which allude to the language’s “Mixture,” as in lexicographer Nathan Bailey’s description of dictionaries included above. For the rest of this chapter and the next, I describe the production of two of these metalinguistic discourses, standardization and translation theory, in terms of how they relate to the evolution of aesthetic criteria in the period. I emphasize how standardization and translation theories arise out of and interact with their eighteenth-century linguistic environment. Central to standardization is a concern with remediating anglophone multiplicity. Central to translation theory of the period is controlling the effects global linguistic multiplicity has on Standard English. The discursive ferment surrounding anglophony was—especially as it relates to standardization and translation—crucially conditioned by a pronounced interest in internal and external linguistic multiplicities. An example of this can be seen in the coupling of local and global that Bailey performs when he ratchets up his initial description of Standard English as “the most copious Language of any in Europe” toward the more bombastic claim that Standard English has “become the most Copious and Significant Language in Europe, if not the World.”²⁰