Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Let’s assume that the EU body that first thought of exempting certain classes of trucks from general rules was thinking about trucks full of potentially rotting and smelly flesh. What’s of interest here is not the ECJ’s final judgment, with which we can easily agree, but the reasoning it used to justify itself. The reasoning is of a very simple grammatical kind: it says that qualifications preceding a list of nouns apply to all nouns in the list. This semantic principle is made manifest in the Dutch version, but all the others, which for grammatical or stylistic rules put the qualification at the end of the list, must be taken as expressing the same thought.

The reasoning does not make sense in most of the languages of the EU and especially not in the court’s working language, French, where all kinds of qualifiers, including simple adjectives attached to single nouns, follow and do not precede the noun. Where does the ECJ’s insight into the clarity of Dutch come from? The most likely answer is the grammar of English. It is English, not French, Spanish, or Hungarian, that lends intuitive support to the view that “not-intended-for-human-consumption animal carcasses and waste” is a less ambiguous expression than “animal carcasses and waste not intended for human consumption.” Despite the huge and conscious efforts it makes in precisely the opposite direction, the ECJ cannot resist the slow but steady homogenization of the languages it uses to uphold European law.

I don’t mean to snipe at this particular judgment or to undermine the important work that the legal-cum-linguistic contortionists of Luxembourg do. However, the comparative method used to establish the ultimate intention of a law—a method that can be likened to Saint Augustine’s practice of biblical exegesis—must itself be conducted in a language. Suppositions and assumptions about the meanings of words, grammatical structures, and rhetorical turns are necessarily rooted in one language, not suspended on a hook from a supralinguistic legal sky. In the polyglot corridors and canteens at Kirchberg, however, where you may start a conversation with a Spanish judge in French and switch to German to say hello to a nice person from Prague, it’s a truth that is easy to forget. As one lawyer working there said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time—he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side. The outcome of such unconscious linguistic determinations of legal finagling is that the meaning and grammar of twenty-four languages have begun to merge into an ECJ language culture that is all its own—sui generis, in Saussure’s terms, or “Euro-speak” in common language. As one of the few scholars to have studied the language maze of Luxembourg closely puts it, “The unique situational factors in the production of European jurisprudence have led to a hybridization of law and language.” It seems to me—admittedly an outsider and an amateur in this field—that the underlying structure of this new hybrid, even though it is formally expressed through the medium of French, is provided by the English tongue.

Some people from both “Europhile” and “Euroskeptic” factions think that it would be better if European institutions were run in English anyway. This is because the language-parity rule of the EU is a constant cause for delay and also tends to make official decisions and opinions more contorted and obscure than they really need to be. As stated earlier, the rulings of the ECJ come into force when they are published, simultaneously, in all the official languages of the EU. Judges are therefore under constant if discreet pressure from their permanently overworked lawyer-linguists to keep it short. European jurisprudence is thus typically tight-lipped and does not provide the many pages of argument and justification that normally accompany a ruling from the House of Lords or the U.S. Supreme Court. The laudable political aim of treating all the languages of Europe as equal produces the unwanted but perhaps inevitable result that ECJ rulings are sometimes so pithy as to defy comprehension in any of them.

TWENTY-TWO Translating News

In 1838, when traveling on a slow boat to Trieste, the poet Robert Browning imagined how in times past news was brought from Ghent in Belgium to Aix in Germany:

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I gallop’d, Dirck gallop’d, we gallop’d all three …