English as she is spoke.
Apr. 29th, 2003 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsTry to remember, for a moment, the last time you had to talk to someone who didn't speak English at all, yet your getting home on time, or to a meeting, or to a bathroom, depended on clear communication. Try to remember your frustration at reading a fabulous book only to realize that the author's sixteen other works were available only in some local tribal dialect of Andorra. Consider the number of "some assembly required" manuals poorly translated from the original Korean: "feed wire she is inserted into receptacle on south side of green box with little careful force. Morningsunshinelight is now illuminate."
We romanticize foreigness-- until we get a close look at it. The naked harem girls are cute, until we get a more in-depth look at the misery under which they spend most of their lives. The acceptance "It's okay, that's their way" does not stand up to close examination when we watch the barbarous cutting of the scalp with swords often forced on young boys, or read about the mutilation of a young girl's genitals, hear about two young lovers hung from a tree in an Indian village because they were from different castes. French is the language of love as we've all been informed by Miss Piggy, who swooned when she was told, "Vous sentez comme un camion d'ordures" (You smell like a garbage truck).
We've lived for ten thousand years with this division of language. Most religions describe it as a curse from the Gods, a problem to be overcome, a situation that will end when we reach paradise.
If that's true, why are people like Andrew Dalby, a professor at Columbia University, so worried about it? Dalby has written a book entitled Language In Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat To Our Future, the thesis of which is obvious. "The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from its heritage ... an irreparable loss for us all, the loss of opportunities to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience."
Y'know what? The end of the Aztec religion is also an irretrievable (I should hope) separation of a people and their heritage, and a loss of opportunities for the survivors to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience. Did we, as a people, "lose" anything when the Aztecs were conquered? Sure. But I would argue that the end of a religion that sacrificed men, women and children by tearing still-beating hearts from their chests is a much bigger gain than it is a loss.
Dalby complains that their used to be 98 different languages used among the 150 tribes of the Territory of California, and today not one of those languages is in use. This sounds tragic until one remembers that language barriers did not stop those tribes from warring with one another. Whatever unique "insights" they had into life provided by their tongues, any drought, any crop failure, and the regular pressures imposed by a polygamist system that deprived lower-class males any access to women except for conquest would regularly drive these tribes to bloody, fatal combat.
Dalby's approach is sophistry of the most ivory-tower type. Whatever the elites may feel is being "lost" by the slow spread of a universal tongue can be supplemented by the inclusion of their concepts into the global language: elites already bat about "weltanschauung" and "schadenfreude" and if those words are useful to us, we'll all adopt them. For you and me, what's more important is that the more fundamental and straightforward knowledge and pleasure of reading, listening, and so on, be available at first pass.
Dalby's concern is the classic naturalistic fallacy: this is the way it is, and changing it is bad. We've invested huge amounts of intellectual and emotional capital in reassuring ourselves that our language, and the distinction between all languages, are both important, and we've invested time and money into compensating for those distinctions. Dalby would have us continue spending all of that to compensate.
I, for one, don't want to continuing spending resources on something that doesn't deserve preservation. The languages, the original materials, yes, they need preservation. But if we need communication, if we need translation, the loss of understanding is existent and automatic; no amount of handwringing is going to bring Proust, or Genin, or Tolstoy to the masses. They are not going to learn French, Japanese, or Russian. If we want to give most people access, pay the price of translation.
For Dalby, confusion and misunderstanding, even though it frequently leads to tragedy, is the neccessary price to be paid for... what? Nebulous claims of uniqueness. A sense of superiority for those who have access to what the rest of us, through sheer ignorance, most of it borne not of laziness but of a simple lack of time.
We are all human beings, and we all share a common reality. A common language for describing that reality should be seen as a desirable goal.
But Dalby and many like him prefer that tragic confusion and fatal misinterpretations to put a sense of mystery into our souls. For Dalby and his ilk, we need that sense of mystery more than horrible, fearful consensus and understanding.
We romanticize foreigness-- until we get a close look at it. The naked harem girls are cute, until we get a more in-depth look at the misery under which they spend most of their lives. The acceptance "It's okay, that's their way" does not stand up to close examination when we watch the barbarous cutting of the scalp with swords often forced on young boys, or read about the mutilation of a young girl's genitals, hear about two young lovers hung from a tree in an Indian village because they were from different castes. French is the language of love as we've all been informed by Miss Piggy, who swooned when she was told, "Vous sentez comme un camion d'ordures" (You smell like a garbage truck).
We've lived for ten thousand years with this division of language. Most religions describe it as a curse from the Gods, a problem to be overcome, a situation that will end when we reach paradise.
If that's true, why are people like Andrew Dalby, a professor at Columbia University, so worried about it? Dalby has written a book entitled Language In Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat To Our Future, the thesis of which is obvious. "The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from its heritage ... an irreparable loss for us all, the loss of opportunities to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience."
Y'know what? The end of the Aztec religion is also an irretrievable (I should hope) separation of a people and their heritage, and a loss of opportunities for the survivors to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience. Did we, as a people, "lose" anything when the Aztecs were conquered? Sure. But I would argue that the end of a religion that sacrificed men, women and children by tearing still-beating hearts from their chests is a much bigger gain than it is a loss.
Dalby complains that their used to be 98 different languages used among the 150 tribes of the Territory of California, and today not one of those languages is in use. This sounds tragic until one remembers that language barriers did not stop those tribes from warring with one another. Whatever unique "insights" they had into life provided by their tongues, any drought, any crop failure, and the regular pressures imposed by a polygamist system that deprived lower-class males any access to women except for conquest would regularly drive these tribes to bloody, fatal combat.
Dalby's approach is sophistry of the most ivory-tower type. Whatever the elites may feel is being "lost" by the slow spread of a universal tongue can be supplemented by the inclusion of their concepts into the global language: elites already bat about "weltanschauung" and "schadenfreude" and if those words are useful to us, we'll all adopt them. For you and me, what's more important is that the more fundamental and straightforward knowledge and pleasure of reading, listening, and so on, be available at first pass.
Dalby's concern is the classic naturalistic fallacy: this is the way it is, and changing it is bad. We've invested huge amounts of intellectual and emotional capital in reassuring ourselves that our language, and the distinction between all languages, are both important, and we've invested time and money into compensating for those distinctions. Dalby would have us continue spending all of that to compensate.
I, for one, don't want to continuing spending resources on something that doesn't deserve preservation. The languages, the original materials, yes, they need preservation. But if we need communication, if we need translation, the loss of understanding is existent and automatic; no amount of handwringing is going to bring Proust, or Genin, or Tolstoy to the masses. They are not going to learn French, Japanese, or Russian. If we want to give most people access, pay the price of translation.
For Dalby, confusion and misunderstanding, even though it frequently leads to tragedy, is the neccessary price to be paid for... what? Nebulous claims of uniqueness. A sense of superiority for those who have access to what the rest of us, through sheer ignorance, most of it borne not of laziness but of a simple lack of time.
We are all human beings, and we all share a common reality. A common language for describing that reality should be seen as a desirable goal.
But Dalby and many like him prefer that tragic confusion and fatal misinterpretations to put a sense of mystery into our souls. For Dalby and his ilk, we need that sense of mystery more than horrible, fearful consensus and understanding.
