Francesc Feliu

Olga Fullana

If, as we believe, the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity, enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory, then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities. The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and, as a consequence, has made the ancient, intrinsic diversity of all languages visible, at least to the extent that this is still possible. Nowadays, then, the old linguistic diversity of dialects, of parlances, of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these, of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way, the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.

The Intricacy of Languages

National linguistic ideology has been at the base of most historical processes that –whether they are complete or not – have brought us to the current reality: a world of languages that represent, with greater or lesser exactitude, the diversity – and convergences – of human groups. Various of today’s thinkers have predicted the decline or even the end of national ideologies. In the area of language, postmodernism would make the linguistic affiliation of the community individuals irrelevant, de-ideologise language use, and extend plurilingualism and language alternation in association with a new distribution of (physical or functional) spaces of linguistic practice. But is this true everywhere? Are languages now nowhere the core of collective identity? Or are we witnessing a distinction between languages that, because of their magnitude, status, strategic position, etc., can continue to exercise the function of national languages and languages that have to renounce this function? Has national linguistic ideology really ceased to make sense? What other strategies should the historic language of a given geographic area employ if it wants to continue forming part of the life of the community that is set up there? What kinds of languages are desired by politicians, intellectuals and philologists? This book aims to bring some thoughts about these questions.

Languages as objects of national ideology

Desired Language

Joan Ferrer Costa

Delcor (1919-1992) is responsible for a translation of the Book of Daniel, which is the only Catalan version of a book of the Bible produced by a North Catalan author to be included in Fundació Bíblica Catalana’s 1968 Bible. This unique circumstance was the inspiration to recover this translation and publish it in a scientific edition collated with the original texts from which Delcor worked. The introduction situates this singular work in the context of the long history of biblical translations in Catalan and offers an exegetical approach to this work that tradition has transmitted in three languages of the ancient world: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. English equivalents of all of the texts have been added as a further point of comparison.

Francesc Feliu

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