Word Notes
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LANGUAGE AS “ENGAGEMENT IN THE WORLD”
[Synopsis: Le Directeur du British Museum deviendra dès le premier janvier 2016, l’un des co-directeurs fondateurs de l’Institut Humboldt. Neil MacGregor, enfant du “baby boom” a bâti sa carrière sur l’idée que la langue représente un “engagement dans le monde” et sur une vision de l’allemand comme expression de l’universalité linguistique et culturelle européenne. ]
Fascinated by the idea that language is an “engagement in the world”, British Museum director, Neil MacGregor, 69, will become one of three founding directors of the Berlin, Humboldt Forum.
MacGregor, a linguist, lawyer and art historian has built his professional life around the idea of language and culture, going so far as to defend the idea of Europe as a single linguistic space, with differences and connections but a shared culture.
His fascination with the German language and culture arose from an understanding of how the German people over a millennium internalized the idea of “a wide cultural space without political frontiers”, unlike the English or French. As a result, MacGregor continues, Germans find common ground in language, a language that was “deliberately shaped by Luther to speak to ordinary people across this huge area”.
The issue of German aggression and the unspeakable barbarism of the Nazis is not a minor question. But the real question, beyond the nature of evil, “is the terrifying fragility of civilization, all civilizations”.
