The Harvested Slice — Summary

In 1501 Pietro Bembo prepared the Aldine pocket edition of Petrarch from a manuscript the poet had corrected in his own hand, and twenty-four years later his treatise settled the question of which language Italians should write in. His answer was one vernacular among at least fourteen, and not even its living form: the Tuscan of two writers dead for a century and a half. Machiavelli argued for the living speech of Florence and lost, partly because Bembo’s candidate had the one qualification that outweighs argument. It already existed as curated text, and a press cannot set type from speech.

Promotion has always worked this way. Hāla’s anthology preserved Maharashtri Prakrit while its sibling Prakrits went unrecorded, and the Sanskrit theorists ranked even the vernaculars into a hierarchy. Luther elevated the chancery German of Saxony. Promotion to a standard has never elevated the vernacular; it has elevated one vernacular and renamed the rest as dialect, and the promoted tongue was always the one already written, already prestigious, already convenient to the machinery doing the promoting.

The slice the machine standard is made of has been named: written, English, leisured. What remains is the accounting, and this time there was no Bembo. No treatise, no named candidate, no argument. The slice selected itself by three properties: it was already written, when most human registers leave no deposit at all; it was in the languages that dominate the web, with English far beyond its share of speakers; and it was produced by people with the leisure and the reasons to write at length in public. Then filtering, deduplication, and preference tuning narrowed it further, and no pass was performed by anyone who understood themselves to be choosing a national language.

The Counterparty’s amendment and the harvested slice are one selection question at two depths. The amendment describes the filter at the moment of reading: what pays and what inflames gets read. This essay describes the filter at the moment of formation: the nephrologist’s knowledge fails the filters, and before the filters ever ran it failed the harvest, because it was never written. The formation depth is the deeper, because it sets what everything else gets translated into.

Which is the fate. Bembo’s standard sat above the dialects as different material, and they persisted for five centuries against it. The composite standard hears the unpromoted registers and returns them in its own cadence, at the moment of hearing. Speakers get back fluent, slightly foreign versions of their own sentences, and every individual exchange feels like being understood. A dialect knows it is one; speech heard perfectly and returned in translation has no border to defend. We wonder whether the slice can be heard as a slice from inside it, since the promoted register is also the register the describing gets done in.

The manuscript Bembo built his standard from sat in his collection until he died, a dead man’s working papers with the crossed-out lines still visible. The promoted tongue was somebody’s draft. It always is. The difference now is that nobody signs the treatise, and the draft belonged to several hundred million people who were never told they had written a standard.