Dying Languages

A few weeks ago I caught this story on NPR on my drive home, about the death of the last fluent speaker of the Alaskan language Eyak. I'm always fascinated by the treatment of stories of dying languages: is it a big deal?

There are those who will argue vigorously that we must save languages from extinction because of the history and culture those languages represent, and I can understand the appeal of such an argument. We're love the idea of progress, but we don't like to think about the fact that progress always includes the end of some past situation. You don't get westward expansion without trampling over the people who were already there, or without seriously altering the lifestyles of those white Americans who traveled west. Video kills the radio star.

I'm not suggesting that the linguistic development of our culture counts as "progress": it's not that language is getting better (or worse). But I'm not convinced that the death of a language is always something to be avoided at all costs. It may have been unjust for group X to drive group Y off their homeland, and a result of that may be the loss of the Y-ish language, but to preserve the active use of Y-ish artificially, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, misses the point. I don't see what's gained by keeping a language alive for its own sake. Language is just a tool, isn't it?

Or is it? I certainly also understand the argument that language forms culture rather than merely expresses it (this is the argument made by most of the writers we've read in the first part of the semester...Pinker and Hairston being notable exceptions). But it makes me nervous as we begin to elevate language above people.

This question--whether language is a cause or effect of culture--is an important one to keep in mind as we begin our unit on historical inquiry. The ways words' meanings have changed has either affect society or reflected changes in society (or perhaps in some cases a little of both). What we decide about this is going to have a big effect on the "why this matters" part of our second essay.

On Satan and Bianca

In "Real Men Don't: Anti-Male bias in English," August notes the following:

Critics of sex-bias in religious language seldom notices or mention its masculinization of evil: of those objecting to God the Father as sexist, no one--to my knowledge--has suggested that designation Satan as the Father of Lies is equally sexist. Few theologians talk about Satan and her legions.

Since my primary research area (when I'm not studying Composition pedagogy) is religious rhetoric, this passage really struck me.

I don't care to get into the theology of the Fatherhood of God or whether angels can be sexed in the same way a biological organisms--this isn't a theology course--but I think August's comment here highlights one of the biggest problems with attempts to prove sexism in language: too often our political agendas blind us to evidence that might call our beliefs into question.

To take an example from August's essay, I'm not entirely sure what he's proven by pointing out that we're called "mammals" because of something the female of the species can do. Is anybody really bothered by this? I'm just not convinced that this sort of language tilts the political balance in favor of one gender in the same way or to the same extent as does a phrase like "all me are created equal."

Perhaps a more objective attempt to examine our langauge--to adopt an outsider's perspective, to use the terms we've come across in class--is to sit down with the dictionary, as Nilsen does. But even then, I can't say I agree with all of her interpretations of the data she finds because so much depends on connotations that aren't universal. Take the etymologies she gives for some names. As someone who's in the process of deciding on a name for his child, I can't say that I expect the etymological meaning of my daughter's name to matter all that much. I care much more about how it sounds. Most folks don't know what "Bianca" means (that won't be her real name, in case you're wondering); they just respond to its aesthetics and the associations it brings up for them--for instance, other Biancas they've known before.

The bottom line is that I think we do need to pay attention to how we use langauge and how our langauge demonstrates our assumptions about gender. But if we're going to do that, we really need to pay attention to all of what's there, not just to what we think will back up our already-come-to conclusions.

Honesty

When I've had students read Nancy Maris' "On Being a Cripple" in past semesters, one thing that's frequently commented on is the honesty with which she writers. The first time a student pointed that out, I was impressed; I'd always liked Mairs' essay, and I found her language engaging, but it hadn't occurred to me that part of the appeal is the simple fact that she's telling the truth.

This especially shows up in her discussion of what she calls herself. I especially like her pointing out that to say someone is "handicapped" suggests that person has been handicapped by someone, presumably God. It's possible to overdo this sort of linguistic analysis--at some point an idiom stops meaning what it literally means--but I think in this case her attention to language is important because we seem to have a need to explain things. A word like "handicapped" at least suggests agency, which I suppose is comforting to those who aren't handicapped: if this hasn't been done to me, then it must mean God likes me better. And that's just absurd.

I read something else this week that emphasizes the importance of honesty: Plato's Phaedrus, a dialog he wrote between Socrates and a young man (named Phaedrus) in which they begin by comparing speeches. The point of the first to speeches are to convince someone that it's better to "be with" someone who doesn't love you romantically than with someone who does. And they're fine speeches, except that, as Socrates realizes afterwards, they're absolute lies. In the dialog, Socrates goes on to explain that the most important quality of any rhetoric is that it leads people to Truth. That doesn't sound like such a shocking idea, I suppose, but think about how most people use rhetoric to lead people in other directions: to ignore uncomfortable realities like MS, or to buy this certain brand of aspirin, or to get other people to like them.

What if everything we said and wrote were directed toward the honest truth? I bet, in an English class, for instance, it would lead to better essays.

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

Have you noticed that people, especially when they're writing signs, tend to use quotation marks for sometimes the most bizarre reasons? For example, above the entrance to the garage behind the stadium here on campus--perhaps you've noticed if you park there--it clearly reads:

"CLEARANCE"
"7 FOOT 8 INCHES"

Quotation marks and all. I'm not sure what this means.

The "correct" use of quotation marks is to indicate quoted speech. Often (and I think this is just as correct, though some English mavens will disagree) we also use them to indicate that a word doesn't mean what it seems to mean. Roughly this means the same as saying "so-called," as in referring to tabloids as "newspapers."

In popular sign usage, though, quotation marks are sometimes used for emphasis. I guess this might make sense, since often signs are already written in capital letters, so it's difficult to make any particular words stand out. But that creates a problem: how are we to know whether quotation marks are meant to emphasize a word, or to indicate that it doesn't mean what it says? There was a pawn shop I used to drive by in Columbia, that proudly advertised that it would buy anything "except guns." I always took that to mean that you could in fact sell your guns there, but maybe you had to go around the back and wear a ski mask if you wanted to do it.

It seems I'm not alone in noticing this. There is an entire bog devoted to reporting cases of it, actually: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. Check it out for some "good" examples.

More on Animal Language

It amazes me how things fall into place. I was at the public library today checking out some CDs (I really am a library junkie), and I picked up a college-course-on-CD about language, thinking it might be a good resource to point students toward as the semester goes on. The course is called "The Story of Human Language," and it looks to be mostly about language change and dialectology. Good stuff. But what really made me pick it up was that the first lecture is called "What Is Language?" which reminded me of what I'd just written about why Globish isn't a language.

And whaddaya know, most of the lecture centers around animal "language": how honeybees and apes and parrots can seem to have language, but only seem.

I may try ans see whether I can post some of the first lecture onto Blackboard as an additional resource for folks in the class.

Globish

Here's an article by Noam Cohen that appeared in the NY Times a while back about the nature of English as a global language: "So English Is Taking Over the Globe. So What." Cohen brings up a couple of interesting points. What stands out to me, especially at the beginning of this course on language, is this quotation:

Globish is not a language, it will never have a literature, it does not aim at conveying a culture, values.

It seems like Mr. Nerrière has a good understanding of just what a language is (and by "good," I mean one I agree with). I imagine that as we get into discussions of what defines language, people are likely to bring up chimp languages and computer languages. But I've always had a problem labeling the utterances of chimps or computers, however communicative they may be, as language. They may be impressively effective at getting certain ideas across ("give me that fruit"; "your disk is full"), but they aren't creative. In order for me to consider a system of communication to be a language, it has to be tied to a culture, and it has to be creative and infinitely flexible. And "Globish" can't meet those requirements.

Of course, neither can any pidgin. But give it a few years, a couple generations, and the pidgin becomes yet another English creole. We know that any impoverished, simplified language will get turned into a full-fledged language, given time and use by humans. What's different here is that Globish is an attempt to crystallize the pidgin by applying prescriptive rules to it before it can become a full language in its own right. And that just isn't something I see happening.

Welcome

Welcome to the class blog for Inquiry into Language (English 102-042 at the University of Tennessee). Class begins Wednesday, January 9, and this blog is under construction until that time. So don't believe anything you read here. Not yet.

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