I MIGHT WRITE IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE, FOR THE MANY RATHER THAN IN LATIN FOR THE FEW

Publication as contribution to the Brecht Symposium, Goethe Institute, Athens, 1998, held by the Society for the Study of Human Sciences, published by nissos Publications. © Hanna Schimek & Gustav Deutsch

Starting with the sentence: “I might write in the language of the people for the many rather than in Latin for the few” from the play The Life of Galileo” by Bertold Brecht from 1938, we question the meaning of this sentence 60 years after Brecht and approximately 360 years after Galileo Galilei. We survey the names of all languages in 1998 in countries where the illiteracy rate is more than 50% and list these in a publication. At the symposium we will read the names of these 239 languages from 24 countries around the world.