In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  Of course, technological development did not end there. The development of film and more especially television in the twentieth century has undermined the importance of the written word. Many people are now more accustomed to having stories told to them in images. This creates two fundamental problems I have already mentioned. Firstly, we have not been designed by nature to assimilate our stories through images and there may therefore be some kind of psychological deficit. In other words, the written or printed word may be artificial but it relates to an instinctive activity, but the moving picture’s artificiality is wholly alien to our way of thinking, although those who have lived with it all their lives undoubtedly develop a sophisticated understanding of the moving image. Secondly, film and television are capable of great art, but cannot produce the ethical, psychological and philosophical nuances that can be produced by the written word. The result is that a story can rest entirely on its visual impact and lose all its explanatory purpose. This produces powerful results in terms of the generational transference of moral concepts and ways of understanding. Some of these consequences have been positive and other negative, but the more general result may be a more superficial and fragmented society.

  In spite of all the hype, computers have probably had less effect than television. Essentially computers have taken the development of the social mind and the atrophy of the individual mind one stage further. Doctor Johnson wrote that there are two kinds of knowledge: what we know and what we know how to find out. The computer and the internet have considerably increased our access to information (perhaps not always very reliable information). The computer has increased the tangibility of the social mind, and some might think that immediate access to information through human memory almost redundant. But it is precisely the oceanic vastness of the Internet that lessens its potency. The blogosphere records society’s chatter on an unprecedented scale, but its superabundance and amorphousness are both exhilarating and self-defeating. Blogs and e-mail may well be finishing off the process whereby the written word increasingly resembles the spoken word, but what is understandably inarticulate in the spoken language becomes unnecessarily indolent in the written one. Of one thing we can be sure, recent technological developments have shattered the supremacy of the word, which reached its zenith in the first four centuries of printing. Inasmuch as the word remains powerful, it is because it is so intimately connected to the essence of what it is to be human.

  Chapter Five

  Big is not beautiful, but merely more profitable

  The PhD student in agricultural management set out early in the morning to discover the wild and alien nature of the land in which he found himself. He was glad to be alone. The students’ hostel was a dull place and the other students stiff and unapproachable. He missed his own climate, but he had to admit the bracing air was strange, exhilarating and not unpleasant. He skirted the lake and began to climb the foothills, taking whichever path attracted him most. The day wore on, and pleasure turned to tiredness. The way back did not seem entirely clear. Like most inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, he knew three “native” languages. They were called native by the Europeans to imply simplicity, paucity and ease-of-learning. In reality they were not closely related and were dense with different interpretations. He also spoke perfect French, passable English and poor Russian, which only confirmed the prejudices of those of his fellow students who were Russians. Just before tiredness turned to exhaustion and uncertainty over his bearings turned to panic, he noticed the bar just outside the village that led back to the college. It was a grey box of a building with a flat roof and jutting shelter, the only non-utilitarian element presumably added as a feeble gesture of homage to modernism and the defiance of reinforced concrete. The only colour on its side was a chipped enamel advert for a certain cigarette, on which a young woman smiled from another age with other tastes in fashion. Her busty form and blond hair spoke of an aesthetics of female beauty that had been replaced several times by other modish international standards, none of which ever consulted the people of this area or any other. He knew of the bar. The students avoided it, because it was preferred by the indigenous Votyakspeakers. Driven by his desire for rest, he entered. By the time his eyes had adjusted to the poor lighting, a group of well-built regulars were marching towards him. He froze, unsure of their intentions. Their hands grabbed his arms and lifted him physically. And then came a rush of incomprehensible words. The universal language of laughter surrounded him as they pressed him to the bar and poured him an absurd quantity of vodka. They pointed upwards to intimate his jaunt in the hills, and he realised that in such a small place nothing went unnoticed by these people who were sealed into the privacy of their own language. He nodded, grinned and started to speak in his own Ekoi. It was the first time in many months that he had heard words in his own tongue spoken aloud, and they expressed an isolation that the others would surely comprehend. What did it matter that one person did not understand the other? Their words were only colour and sound, and he knew them to be friendly.

  Perhaps one of the most amusing accounts of how the new storytelling in pictures coupled with universal education was always going to challenge our linguistic diversity is a passage from Doctor Donald Macdonald’s Tales and Traditions of the Lews. George Mikes said that the English do not have a soul, they have understatement, but clearly he had never met the Gaels who build their subtle humour precisely on their use of extreme understatement. MacDonald, who died in 1961, did not live long enough to see the advent of television on his native Lewis, and perhaps it was a good thing that he too was not obliged to witness how his prescient fears would turn into depressing realities:

  We have now further education for the adult; men do not work so long, and so have more free time at their disposal, and the modern inventions, the radio and the movie van, are reaching out to every village in Lewis. Most of our natives are suspicious of what these two may bring. Will they upset their ways, and interfere with their religious beliefs, which many believe are the only real and true beliefs? I fear them more in case they are hastening the departure of our dear Gaelic language, for the searchings and probings into the wonders of the Creator will refuse to be stilled or thwarted; and I fear that in the future this go-getting Anglo-Saxon language will be the one in which these mysteries will be unfolded to the bodachs [old men] of Bragar, Brue and Brenish.1

  MacDonald was right. Language is not only the most important part of human culture; it is also the most unstable and fragile. The question is: what is also lost when a community loses its language?

  When printing was invented, there was either an infinity of languages or merely a handful according to your definition of a language. Latin was a language in the more restricted sense of the term, because, although people disagreed over what correct Latin was, they accepted that there was such a thing as correct Latin – a norm from which no one was supposed to deviate. English on the other hand was not a language in this sense, but a myriad of related vernaculars or “parlances” (to avoid that misleading word “dialects”). There was not complete equality between these vernaculars, as those spoken by the most powerful families or in the most powerful cities would be more prestigious, but over the centuries the fortunes of these vernaculars would change with the changing fortunes of the families or cities that spoke them. Thus in one century, the most prestigious vernacular was the Northumbrian one and in another century it was the Wessex one, always remembering that these “dialects” would themselves be fragmented into many often quite distinct vernaculars.

  Before printing and for some time afterwards, it did not matter greatly what language was spoken by the peasantry. Indeed, under feudalism the aristocracy preferred to speak a different language to that of the peasantry. Thus the Norman aristocracy in England spoke Norman-French to distinguish itself from the people who herded the cattle and sheep but rarely ate boeuf and mouton, while the Anglo-Norman aristocracy in Scotland spoke English to distinguish themselves from the Gaelic peasantr
y. But as ideas began to circulate, everybody’s language became a matter of concern to central government. After many long centuries first of Norman and then of English dominance, the Welsh language suddenly became a political issue in the late nineteenth century and the reasons were pretty clear. Welsh, like English, now had a standard used in the written language, although most Welsh people, like most English people, continued to speak in their own way. The continued vitality of the Welsh language threatened the security of the principality and the ability to integrate the region into the dominant culture. A parliamentary commission did not attempt to hide its hostility and suggested that the Welsh language had to be completely obliterated in the interests of political stability. The modern world does not like diversity, although the trend towards homogenisation around a select group of languages goes back a long way.

  One family of languages has been successful beyond measure. It originated somewhere in Central Asia and expanded southwards into northern India and Persia, and westwards into Europe. There it wiped out all indigenous languages with the exception of Basque. This does not mean that we all descend from the Indo-Europeans, but it does mean that we carry their linguistic DNA. Nor does it mean that Indo-European languages were superior to others; it merely means that the military prowess and perhaps the cruelty of the invaders who spoke these languages were greater than those of the other peoples. From Europe, it expanded even further on the back of European colonialism. Of the imperial languages, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Russian, the first three are neo-Latin, and the fourth is a Germanic and neo-Latin mix. In this sense, European empire can be seen as an extension of the Roman one. Hindi, another Indo-European language, and three large non-Indo-European languages, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and Malaysian/Indonesian are putting up some resistance to European domination, but they too are slayers of the languages beneath them in the political hierarchy they command.

  This steady expansion over the last four or five millennia has been a disaster for the world’s linguistic variety. But up until recently there was at least the possibility of generating new languages. All these great imperial languages are recent inventions of the millennium that has just ended. Russian is a very recent creation, and the others mostly an invention of the printing press and dynastic happenstance. The decline of the world’s remaining 6,000 languages is now dramatic. Currently, English is rising up like a terrifying behemoth that devours other languages by sucking them dry and tanning their skins so that they can be sold to the tourists. English is the quintessential bourgeois language: the language of trade, in an age when trade has become absolute power. It is linear and shallow. It is brittle and often smug. It is practical and often sensible. It is difficult to write in, because it is too easy to write in, while not lending itself to saying difficult things. It presents the writer with the challenge of its limitations, and limits the reader by its economic power and ubiquity.

  The simplicity of English grammar and the rigidity of its syntax are useful to its role as a lingua franca, but at the same time increase its danger: English turns everything it touches to stone. Once English had a certain vibrancy, and the English themselves attempted to learn other languages. Now English forces itself on the world and the Anglophone has no interest of expressing himself outside his own vast linguistic domain. It is the new Latin, but lacks Latin’s subtlety or rather it has a different kind of subtlety. It lacks ornate, circuitous and taxing thought processes, but because of its vastness it has created an enormous body of cross-references, dead metaphors and widely known quotations. Its vocabulary is rigid but also subtle and precise. These strengths and weaknesses, or more specifically these limitations and more refined tools provide an endless source for writers, but also suggest that the language is prematurely ageing. Normally a language when it reaches this stage suddenly enters a period of rapid metamorphosis, and like the Phoenix, rises anew out of its ashes, as the neo-Latin languages rose out of Latin. But the modern media do not allow for change. The British and American empires have not created new languages based on English (except in Papua New Guinea); the language remains remarkably homogeneous throughout its global domain, and that process of homogenisation continues apace. Nevertheless, it is still a pleasure to write in this language, and as is so often the case with creative activities, the limitations provide the challenge and therefore the gratification.

  The problem of English is not unique, but only a more extreme example of the steady and quickening eclipse of smaller languages by larger ones. The destruction of Tibetan by Chinese and of Quechua by Spanish is the same tragedy as the destruction of Celtic, Native American and Aboriginal languages by English.

  An Anglophone intellectual has said that a small minority language is only a code, which is like saying a small bird is a fish or a small tree is an insect. A language is a language and cannot be invented, and a code is a code and has to be invented. More than anything a language resembles a living being like an animal or a plant. It can be subject to intervention by man. Small committees and bureaucrats can alter a language, restrain it and push it in certain directions, just as animals can be bred and plants nurtured, grafted and trained, but languages cannot be invented out of nothing, in spite of the undoubtedly heroic efforts of Zamenhof and his elegant Esperanto. Ultimately a language takes its sustenance from its speakers, its history, its societies and its cultures. A language that has only two speakers left is going to die, but it still contains a vast range that goes far beyond those two people and their experience. On the other hand, a code could be invented by the cleverest of men and perfected by someone else, and it would still be nothing in comparison to the wealth of the dying language. Of course, a language will rapidly lose breadth as it falls below a few hundred speakers, particularly if they are geographically scattered, but even in the 20,000 odd words left in the dying brain cells of the very last speaker, there will be a mass of sayings, semantic distinctions, confusions, comedic methods and phonological prejudices that, even half remembered, will be a much greater edifice than anything that can be invented through the most complex code in the world.

  It has been estimated that only 10% of the world’s languages are likely to survive this century.2 Of course these figures are only approximate, but given the enormity of the catastrophe they predict, even if it were a gross overestimation, there would still be a terrible and irreversible impoverishment of our cultural resources. The rationalist mind often abhors the unknowable, and the sheer magnitude of human linguistic expression terrifies. Rationalism is commendable, and I wish we were better at it, but its arrogance (particularly when associated with power) has been satirised in many dystopian novels. It often demands that everything runs in accordance with its own economies. Thus language diversity in the modern age has been considered an unnecessary financial and intellectual cost and an obstacle to the smooth running of society. Rationalism abhors pointless effort, because of its love of efficiency. Nothing could be more philistine, although nothing could be more justifiable when resources are dangerously low. What monoglot intellectuals don’t understand is that multilingualism does not actually require much effort. Much is made of the small army of translators and interpreters needed to keep the E.U. bureaucracy going, when in reality it is fairly streamlined and its costs infinitesimal compared with the potential financial and cultural costs of transforming Europe into a monoglot or at least less polyglot state. Much is made of the cost of Gaelic television, but its costs are tiny in a sector known for its high spending. Moreover, the process of multilingualism produces cultural benefits, as I have attempted to demonstrate.

  The first thing we have to do, therefore, is to establish exactly what we would be losing, if we were to allow our language diversity to disappear. The immediate answer, of course, is that no one really knows because even the most accomplished linguist can only scratch the surface of this wonderful, chaotic multitude of complexities. We can, however, turn the argument around and state that no language can do everything. Ezr
a Pound wrote, “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”3 This is not simply because no language has yet reached perfection; it is inherent in the nature of language. Languages have character, and character always means denial of other traits. It is not primarily a question of vocabulary, because vocabulary is the most adaptable part of language, and words can be constantly borrowed (but you need the wealth of other languages from which to borrow, and a reasonable degree of awareness of other languages in a particular language community in order to provide a channel for inter-cultural exchange). The essential point is that languages are structurally different, and their different mechanisms affect the way speakers interpret the world. Of course, languages are all vast and sensitive creatures, so they can express an enormous range of concepts, ideas and emotions in various styles and registers, but the subtleties are never quite the same.

  Every language is associated with a social mind, and thus if you destroy a language you destroy a social mind. If we take as our example Tasmania, whose language (or set of related languages) the British destroyed along with its entire population in a very short period, we can be sure that this one depressingly typical event also destroyed an intimate understanding of the Tasmanian environment, unique religious beliefs, oral literature and some kind of philosophical system.4 Even if everything had been recorded in English, it would no longer be what it was. We have no means of assessing what we have lost, but we can be sure of its enormous value, because no human society has ever failed to produce a wealth of ideas, which have parallels with those of other societies but also certain unique features.