Musings Of An Indie Writer| « | His doctor asked President Obama to cut down on his drinking. My question, what’s he been smoking. |
»
|
|
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Safire’s Ghost: English Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow
[in a deep, Hitchcockian drawl] Good evening. Among your Curmudgeon's manias is the destruction we of the English-speaking world have experienced through the abuse of the English language. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that a typical English-speaker of a century ago would have difficulty making himself understood by the typical English-speaker of our time. The reasons are many and fascinating, which is why your Curmudgeon has decided to inaugurate this new series of essays. (Besides, his Co-Conspirators are holding down the political end of things rather well, so why get in their way?)
Long, long ago, on a Website gone but not forgotten (see the Screeds section), your Curmudgeon argued for strict prescription in the teaching of the English language. His contention, which remains as it was, is that strict rules that are never violated make it easier both to learn a language and to use it effectively. When all the language's speakers hew to the same set of strict rules, there's little or no possibility of misunderstanding among them: a far cry from our current milieu.
That opinion drew quite a bit of controversy. You might have thought that your Curmudgeon had advocated bastinado for any teenager who says "y'know, like." (Yes, he's taken that position in the past, but only among close friends.) The notion that strict prescription might somehow impede the acquisition of language skills is apparently widespread among Americans today, but it's one he's never understood.
English is reputed to be the hardest of all contemporary languages to learn. There are a number of reasons for this:
- English has a huge vocabulary: well over two million words and growing rapidly.
- English is rich in "synonyms:" words that mean almost the same thing, but not quite.
- English has a complex syntactical structure that incorporates elements from many older languages.
- English possesses a large number of idioms: word combinations whose meaning is difficult to deduce from the individual words.
- English has a propensity to import words from other languages, but not always in the strict sense they have in those languages.
- Because of all the above, and because of its geographical dispersion, English suffers from regionalization -- that is, the creation of regional dialects distinguished from one another by regional usages, regionally popular idioms, and pronunciations -- far more than most other languages.
Yet, despite all that, English is the international language of our time. The dominance of the most important communications-intensive enterprises -- aviation, finance, and data processing -- by English speakers has compelled the world to accept it as the international lingua franca. The most difficult language in the world to learn is thus the language everyone is expected to speak!
And most persons whose mother tongue is English barbarize it routinely.
The process starts in our schools. They're called grammar schools, but the term is ironic rather than descriptive. Grammar of the prescriptive sort is no longer taught in them. Rules of structure and usage might inhibit the little tykes from expressing themselves, with God-knows-what deleterious effects on their self-esteem. We can't have that!
High school and college students are seldom "graded down" for poor grammar or syntax. After all, there are more important things to discuss, such as whether the poor have a right to federally funded abortions, the brassiere is a tool by which the evil capitalist patriarchy oppresses womyn, or the war to depose Saddam Hussein was a CIA-Halliburton plot. On many campuses, twitting a young woman for saying "Mary and me want to get married" is a prosecutable offense.
The accelerating specialization of our commercial culture adds to the problem. It's become impossible to gain expertise in any of a huge number of fields without first learning its "jargon:" its private language of terms, references, and conventions an outsider would find impenetrable. While this might be an unavoidable consequence of our ever-ramifying division of labor, it also creates "communities of communication" whose members can understand one another, but who can be understood by no one else. Inevitably, such jargons penetrate the "common" tongue, at least deeply enough to support the marketing, sale, and support of the associated products, which complicates the language still further.
Given all that, the proliferation of GruntSpeak and the unending repetition of "like" and "y'know" and (worst of all) "y'know like" to fill conversational lacunae is understandable. It's the persistence of a Remnant to whom the distinction between a participle and a gerund really matters that's the miracle.
The late William Safire was one of your Curmudgeon's heroes. Safire was a master of the language, more advanced in his comprehension of its rules and norms than any other writer of his time, not excepting the much loved and mourned William F. Buckley. He bent great effort to conveying the rules of good, grammatical English to his readership, and strove to exemplify those rules in everything he wrote. His loss is a great loss to the English-speaking world.
As much as anything else, this series of essays will be a tribute to Safire's ghost, and the great work his passing has left unattended.
Watch this space.
Comments
Vivid recollection: thirty-*mumble* years ago, sitting in a Greek class. Whole days of my life were wasted in that class as the professor had to explain basic language terms like “participle” and “article” and others. *sigh* My classmates were all, supposedly, graduates of some college or another. Well over half of them were stumped by simple, basic terminology, because they’d never—even in those days of yore—been exposed to the basics of English grammar, let alone another language.
Today, it’s even worse, if my experiences since then in public schools and with college students is any indication. Simple reading skills are declining, if one is to believe the core data (ignoring the hype) of the National Adult Literacy Survey.
And when basic language and reading skills are in such sad repair, how can there be any question about the state of history and civics literacy? There were very good reasons the Founders attempted to chain democracy, not the least of which could easily have been,
“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom
I’ve used various languages with varying degrees of fluency in the past, but my “mother tongue” has always remained my favorite in part because English is a language that, as some wag once said, lures other languages into dark alleys and mugs them for useful participles.
Posted by David on 03/09/2010 at 11:58 AMIs that your finger in the dike trying to hold back the ocean?
I frequently “correct” my kids English lessons given to them by the “English” teacher. Little things like:
“Can I go to the washroom?”. No, that’s “May I go to the washroom”. I assume that by now you are old enough and able to do it by yourself. What you are really asking for is permission, not confirmation on something you already know.
Sadly, the teacher then points me to an online dictionary that defines “Can” and “May” as interchangeable.
So I put another finger into the dike, teach the kids as I was taught, and go about my day.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/09/2010 at 12:08 PMwomyn… this string of characters always renders as wyrm somewhere between my eyes and my brain, bringing dragonladies to dance in my head.
“Can” may be used in place of “May” in informal speech. It is not a suitable equivalent for written material. Neither is it appropriate for a time when one is teaching a child the proper usage of words. Bless your finger.
Looking at the graded papers of my daughter in high school used to give me heartburn. No deductions for spelling or syntax errors. Also, no deductions were made for vulgarity. No wonder these kids cannot express themselves, they don’t know how.
Posted by Deb S. on 03/09/2010 at 12:47 PMIf you haven’t already read this, I highly recommend it: Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell.
Posted by Russell on 03/09/2010 at 06:11 PMModern education is impacting English in ways that are making us loose the ability to speak clearly. Your right about that. There’s lost of things that can be done about this and your series of essays will be a welcome step in the right direction. I respect a man that cares. Thanks for doing your part to help Americans improve there language skills.
Posted by Col. B. Bunny on 03/09/2010 at 07:57 PMThis is wonderful news. Fran’s writing not only frequently brings a smile to my face, it is also always grammatically perfect. I look forward to this series.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/09/2010 at 09:08 PMMarketing needs to take its caning as well. For instance, we have cream and we have creme. Creme can be a fine spray of ersatz milk flash-dessicated with high heat, or more unfortunately, a flavored lard used in cookies. There are others. Such concoctions would seem to rate a fitting spelling, namely: creem. Then there’s lite. Perhaps being one letter less than light was a stab at the subliminal. Such things chew at the perimeter rather than gnaw at the core, but pain is pain regardless.
Posted by Ol' Remus on 03/10/2010 at 12:37 PMThis turns out to be tangential to your main point, but what the heck:
English is reputed to be the hardest of all contemporary languages to learn.
Mastering English is difficult, although I’d be dubious of any argument that it’s harder than other main contemporary languages. Picking up enough English to get by, however, is easier than for many other languages. You will hear of people who got started on English with untranslated TV programs, for instance: possible because of its simple grammar and few inflections. This easy initial buy-in has probably helped English become the world’s global language, though not as much as some other factors.
(Written English is harder than spoken, because English spelling really is among the world’s most difficult.)
Your 6 reasons are a similar mix of correct and incorrect:
1 & 2 are right: English does have a remarkably large vocabulary. Much of this goes back to the duplication between the Germanic base language, and the Latinate overlay added after the Norman conquest.
3. English has a complex syntactical structure that incorporates elements from many older languages.
No, English structure is actually fairly simple compared to many (most) other languages.
4. English possesses a large number of idioms: word combinations whose meaning is difficult to deduce from the individual words.
So do other languages. I doubt that English is unusually bad in this respect.
5. English has a propensity to import words from other languages, but not always in the strict sense they have in those languages.
True. Borrowing is common, but mostly from languages that have higher status. It’s fairly remarkable that English has kept this up despite its rise to high-prestige.
6. Because of all the above, and because of its geographical dispersion, English suffers from regionalization—that is, the creation of regional dialects distinguished from one another by regional usages, regionally popular idioms, and pronunciations—far more than most other languages.
Not true at all: English has fewer dialects than German or Italian, let alone widespread non-European languages like Arabic or Chinese.
The reason is that all languages used to be strongly regionalized into dialects. In modern times this got ironed out; the classic example is Parisian French steamrolling all the others. English went through that process earlier than lots of other languages. Although there are some signs of English diverging again—and if it happens, the global dispersion means that it could go very far—at the moment it’s still a fairly unified language by comparison with other languages that went through Unification later and less thoroughly.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/10/2010 at 03:39 PMI stand by my contentions.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 03/10/2010 at 03:44 PMI’m sorry Colonel Bunny, but in a comment about the loss of grammar skills in modern English, you really should be more careful. Remember: Preview is your friend.
(Corrections are in italics.)
Modern education is impacting English in ways that are making us loose (lose) the ability to speak clearly. Your (You’re) right about that. There’s lost of (There are many) things that can be done about this and your series of essays will be a welcome step in the right direction. I respect a man that cares. Thanks for doing your part to help Americans improve there (their) language skills.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/10/2010 at 04:28 PMUnless it was tongue in cheek, Sir.
You missed one. It’s not “impacting,” as I take that as being an irremediable change in usage, however uncongenial, that unfortunately has replaced “affecting.”
And it’s not “lost,” a regrettable typo.
Oops.
Posted by Col. B. Bunny on 03/10/2010 at 05:45 PMIs not the international “sucess” of English intimately associated with the expansive, creative culture that it represents ?.
In the words of the old saw (paraphrased): you can’t invent a torpedo unless you have a language that permist you to conceive of it, and the Latin-rooted English is (I think - amateur speaking here) a portmanteau language that facilitates creative thought: tar-mac, sub-marine, omni-bus, auto-mobile.
Simple/simplistic illustration. If an advanced culture arrives and impacts on (putting it politely) a less advanced culture, and brings with it, say, the steam engine, and says to the other culture “This is called a Steam Engine”, what else are they going to call it? Hence the integral spread of English along with the culture it facilitates, codifies and revivifies daily.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/10/2010 at 06:57 PMUnless it was tongue in cheek, Sir.
Oh good. I was hoping that was the case, but you never know for sure.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/10/2010 at 07:39 PM*chuckle*
I live in a place where English is not the primary language of the people who live here. Surprisingly, they enjoy trying to communicate in English, both written and spoken.
I’ve gotten so used to automatically correcting mistakes mentally, that I no longer see the errors. It took conscious effort on my part to see Col Bunnys mistakes.
(gah, and I’ve forgotten how and when to use the apostrophe properly)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/10/2010 at 08:20 PMPS, before anyone bothers: excuse my typos above, they are merely typos-in-haste; I do know how to spell
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/11/2010 at 12:12 AMRussell, I love that essay. Thank you for sharing.
Posted by Deb S. on 03/11/2010 at 08:34 AMBut you were on the qui vive, Roy.
Mr. WAKE UP, I don’t think the flow is necessarily from English to another tongue. We use “typhoon” which is from the Chinese “da feng” or “great wind.” I think the British appropriated a great many other terms from local languages around the Empire. My American parents in Africa used “muti” (Bantu?) all the time for “medicine.”
Western technology in China didn’t roll over the Chinese language in the case of, say, “steam engine,” which the Chinese rendered as “fire vehicle” maybe “fire cart” or “fire wagon” more precisely. Ditto “pistol,” which came out as “hand spear.” Both are imaginative, adaptive uses of language.
I think a language like English morphs and blooms as people living in a basically rational culture allow their minds to roam freely, unhindered by, say, anything like the periodic French campaigns to root out “le box lunch” or “le weekend” from the excellent purity of French. It’s not that English facilitates the imagining of a sub-marine craft, it’s that English readily supplies the building blocks for new conceptual terms. I doubt it’s unique in this regard, however.
Chinese is certainly flexible and adaptive. It is, alas, a v. hard language to learn to read and write, though not to speak. Looking up an unfamiliar word in Chinese is quite an involved process with occasional guess work for less accomplished students. To me, it seems like it imposes a considerable processing tax or burden on Chinese children and limits the gross numbers of Chinese who can contribute intellectually. Those who master their language are formidable intellectual actors by all appearances.
Posted by Col. B. Bunny on 03/11/2010 at 02:37 PM
Comment Form
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
