Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

It’s quite likely that this new use of humain in French will shunt its parallel sense of “humane” into the cognate word humanitaire and cause a minor reorganization of the lexical and semantic environment.

With the assistance of San Marino, the smallest member state of the UN, the Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR) encourages and disseminates translations of the Universal Declaration into all languages. The set currently exceeds three hundred, from Abkhaz to Zulu, and what is obvious from the effort so far is that, with only a few possible exceptions to add to Russian, the source language for translation is not French but English.

The intellectual, political, moral, and other consequences of the homogenization of languages into a single structure for the semantic field of “the human” is beyond the scope of this book. What we can say, however, is that the history and present state of the translation of human rights provides clear evidence that international law tends to create a language of its own. In this instance, which is undoubtedly typical, the language of international law—whatever language it seems to be in—is increasingly calibrated to English-language norms.

It could be seen as historical revenge, for England was under the thumb of Law French for many centuries. French was the language of law imposed by the Norman Conquest in 1066, but it was understood only by the ruling class. It continued to be used for centuries in the courts, in spite of or probably because of the fact that the majority of the population didn’t have a clue as to what was being said. But Law French underwent its own process of contamination from below over a period of six hundred years, adopting phrases, words, and grammatical structures from the actually dominant tongue. By the seventeenth century, the official language of English justice sounded like something out of the late Miles Kington’s comic column for The Times (London):

Richardson, ch. Just. de C. Banc al Assises at Salisbury in Summer 1631. fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony que puis son condemnation ject un Brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist, & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le Prisoner, & son dexter manus ampute & fix al Gibbet sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court.[138]

Quite different problems arise when a court of law seeks not only to prosecute defendants speaking a different tongue but to do so in a jurisdiction that has authority in a transnational sphere. The idea of there being an international law—universal norms of legitimate behavior not determined by any one sovereign state—is very recent. It first dawned in horrified reaction to the sufferings of troops in the Crimean War in 1857–58, then took its initial form in the various Geneva conventions about the rules of combat. The first major institution resting on an idea of international law was the League of Nations, set up in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was only the Second World War and awareness of the unspeakable persecutions carried out by the Nazi state that finally prompted sovereign nations to abandon their historical prerogatives and to establish a jurisdiction that sat above them all.