Acculturation Modes and Samuel Johnson: 17th-18th Century Insights

Modes of Acculturation: Opening New Horizons

The Origins of Orientalism

• The beginnings of an academic interest in Oriental languages and literature in Britain can be traced back to the early 17th century.
• There were both secular and religious reasons for this interest.
• Following the Protestant Reformation and the challenge to the doctrinal authority of the Latin Vulgate, a knowledge of Arabic had come to be seen as an important adjunct to the philological skills of Hebrew and Greek Bible translators.
• At the same time, there was renewed scientific and medical interest in Arabic, once it was recognized that the Latin translations of several important medieval scientific treatises were of questionable reliability.
• Chairs of Arabic were established at Cambridge in 1632 and at Oxford in 1634.
• The religious interest in Arabic also showed itself in the first direct translation into English of the Quran in 1734.
• This followed the high tide of the “Muslim threat” to mainland Europe - the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.
• Not long after the growth of interest in Arabic came the beginnings of scholarly endeavor in the other major languages of Islam: Persian and Turkish.
• In the 17th and 18th centuries, these languages were important not merely from a scholarly point of view, but because of political, diplomatic, and commercial considerations too.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

• A native of Lichfield, son of a provincial bookseller, he contracted scrofula (a form of tuberculosis) in infancy from his nurse, and as a result, his eyesight was impaired.
• Still, he grew up an omnivorous reader.
• In spite of poverty, he was sent to Pembroke College, Oxford, but because of poverty, he had to leave without a degree.
• During six years, he was a schoolmaster and then a bookseller.
• In 1735, a London bookseller employed him to translate a book on Abyssinia, and thereafter, Johnson became a Londoner.
• In the metropolis, he prepared the semi-allegorical and almost illegal accounts of the “Senate of Lilliput,” which gave the public a sense of the speeches made in the Houses of Parliament.
• He was essentially a prose man and won high recognition in his own time as a scholar and prose moralist.
• His major reputation in his own time was due to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
• The project was commissioned in 1746 by a group of London publishers.
• They wanted to match the achievements of the French and Italian academies by preparing the first standard English dictionary.
• The Dictionary was composed with the aid of six amanuenses employed to transcribe the illustrative quotations (114,000), gathered from the best English writers.
• Johnson had a naturally defining mind, and his definitions are usually outstanding.
• But these definitions could sometimes be playful, and at other times aired Johnson’s prejudices.