In Praise of the Garrulous Page 18
Since the invention of writing, the desire for riches has been contrasted with the desire for learning. This is not just a topos; it is the most threadbare of cliches and, if it weren’t for its underlying truth, it would be embarrassing to bring up a matter that appears to be self-serving – an attempt by writers to impose their obsessions on a wider population. And, of course, this argument for less engagement with possessions and consumption and more engagement with the word can be taken too far. Epicurus, who preached a life of frugality and self-discipline, argued that extreme asceticism became just another form of fanaticism, which learning is intended to avoid (so, unlike Diogenes and the Vicar of Stiffkey, I am not advocating life in a barrel). I would go further and argue that learning is not about reclusiveness and obsessive reading (although some might accuse me of these things, and one critic did ask, “has Mr Cameron been out recently?”).5 Learning is immeasurably assisted by the written word, which gives us access to the condensed and wellordered thoughts of others – of others who may have been dead for several centuries – but it also requires conversation, and by conversation I mean the spontaneous and unhurried exchange of sound waves structured into the mutually agreed system we call a language – that great rambling pattern of enunciated thoughts that fade like intertwined jet streams on a clear day. At the risk of sounding sententious (the ultimate crime in our cynical times), learning also requires involvement as a citizen, because without that it becomes little more than intellectual athleticism. Talking is entirely carbon-friendly and reading is not far behind it, particularly if you get your books from the library. More generally, talking, listening, reading and writing add little to our GDP, but a great deal to our well-being. Society needs to consume less, and to talk and read itself back to psychological health and a better relationship with our environment.
I do not mean, let it be clear, that man is perfectible, nor do I believe, like Marx, that one day the state can wither away. Power will remain the principal necessary evil, and some human beings will always be driven by its corrupting force, which even in the best society the state can only partially bring under control. There will never be an end to conflict in society, but rules can be devised to keep it within certain limits. My argument here is this: the soothing effects of language and education will allow more people to gain some control over the self and its insatiable wants, thus lessening the pressures within society. This is almost an Enlightenment idea, although it would not have been expressed in exactly those terms, and it is certainly a classical one. However, I also see the merits of the counter arguments: the men of 1789 were arrogant in their belief that they could create a Year Zero and rebuild society from scratch, with little understanding of what worked as well as of what patently did not work. They were not wrong in the injustices they wished to put right, but they were foolish in believing that reason can take into account all factors concerning change, and in failing to understand that we, as a species, and therefore they, as a group of overconfident young men, were and are not very good at rationalism. This failure could be called the irrationalism of rationalism. Part of the problem is human language, which has a wonderfully ungainly structure, consists of a multitude of tongues which do everything in such different fashions, and provides us with the sheer pleasure of its inefficiency. Would we want it any other way? Language, as I have said, is a gift from the past, and we should always keep our ears attuned to its subtle wisdoms.
Endnotes
Introduction
1. It has to be said that many books of a general sociolinguistic nature remain anecdotal, while also asserting grand claims on the origins of language and the function of language without even entering into a reasoned analytical argument. I, at least, admit my shortcomings from the very beginning.
Chapter One. Silence, like gold, is the currency of the powerful
1. John McWhorter, The Power of Babel. A Natural History of Language (London: Heinemann, 2002), p. 9. The Roti “process silence as downright threatening and appear to talk a mile a minute.” They seem as exotic as the Hyperboreans were to the Greeks, but whatever the exaggeration, the underlying point is valid: loquaciousness varies greatly from one society to another.
2. Plato was not above parody and playing with style. In Phaedrus, Socrates says to his companion, “Haven’t you noticed, bless you, that I have become not merely lyrical but actually epic, as if the former weren’t bad enough?” (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973), p. 42.
Chapter Two. The birth of language
1. It could be argued that the effect of Chomsky’s “generative grammar” on language has been as revolutionary as that of Darwin’s theory of evolution on our perception of what humanity is. Each theory is an enormous leap forward, and has to be taken as a starting point for further investigations. This does not mean they are entirely unassailable, because science will always refine its knowledge. However, Chomsky’s principal theory does not concern the origins of language, for which there is still no persuasive hypothesis.
2. Bruce Chatwin, Songlines (London: Vintage, 2005; first publication Jonathan Cape, 1987), pp. 123-4.
3. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, Latin and Italian bilingual text (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 7.
4. C. Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Akron Ohio: The Werner Company, 1874), p. 87.
5. The Descent of Man …, p. 66.
6. If Darwin had read Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, he would have discovered that the complexity of “primitive” languages was already known.
7. “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” Hamlet (1601), Act 2, Scene 2, l.
8. J.H. McWhorter, The Power of Babel …, p. 301. McWhorter claims to have a fairly good idea about the first language spoken by man, the Ur-language, although he is wisely sceptical about attempts to reconstruct this as a “Proto-World”, and modestly admits “we will never know its words”. Given that his accounts of the origins of Italian (pp.67-8) and Urdu (pp. 69-70) contain inaccuracies, I don’t think we should take his extravagant claims too seriously.
9. R. Englefield, Language. Its Origin and Relation to Thought (London: Elek/ Permberton, 1977), p. 2.
10. McWhorter says that he is open to the idea that language is not innate, but merely an invention or “graft” (The Power of Babel …, p. 9), even though he rightly points out that “language is [just] as sophisticated in all human cultures and is thus truly a trait of the species, not a certain ‘civilized’ subset of the species” (p. 6).
11. Quoted in Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922), p. 103.
12. Please let me make it very clear to a more obtuse reader that I am not holding Rousseau responsible for the crimes of Pol Pot. His words provided an important line of enquiry and contain a truth. He cannot be blamed for their deification and the unfeeling fanaticism of those who turn myth and metaphor into certainty. Moreover, if these words have any moral responsibility, then we have to acknowledge the social goods they have produced as well as the social evils.
13. Genesis, 11.5-8.
14. Plato, The Symposium (speech by Aristophanes), 190b-192e.
15. Hesiod, Works and Days, 60.
16. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, I, vi-vii (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 13-19.
17. Dante, Paradise, XXVI, 124-6.
18. Dante, Hell, XXXI, 77-8.
19. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, I, iii (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 7.
20. Bruce Chatwin, Songlines, p. 228.
21. I deal with the shift from the hunter-gatherer society to the settled, farming society in greater detail in my novel, The Berlusconi Bonus, 2005, pp. 113-5.
Chapter Three. Words are a gift from the dead
1. Steven Pinker, The Language In
stinct (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 81.
2. The Language Instinct …, p. 57.
3. English tense use is more defined than, say, French, whose past historique tense has disappeared from the spoken language, but less defined than Kivunjo, the African language I referred to on p. 17.
4. “Babel’s Children”, The Economist, 8 January 2004. The researcher David Gil appears to have wanted to go further and question Chomskian theory as well, using the case of Riau Indonesian. Obviously I am not qualified to comment, but I am sceptical. The extremes overstate their case.
5. “Event representation: influence of aspect on thought”, Cognitive Science 1, 8 July 2005, Zhenya-Antić (slides by Lera Boroditsky).
6. B.L. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1973 (1956)), p.51. It is clear from this quote that the argument was substantially about what is a tense and what is a voice or “aspect”. Intuitively it does seem very unlikely that any human society could have no concept of time, however rudimentary.
7. Language, Thought and Reality, … p. 59.
8. S. Pinker, The Language Instinct, … p. 63.
9. The Language Instinct, … pp. 442-3.
10. Ridicule, directed by Patrice Leconte in 1996.
11. Poor Darwin was unintentionally responsible for much of this: his scientific ideas were so revolutionary and so influential that others naturally wanted to follow, even into fields where human knowledge was not yet ready for scientific exploration.
12. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (London: Heinemann, 2006), p.3.
13. Of course, this is something of a caricature, and this curmudgeonly tirade can only indicate a partial truth – a gross generalisation.
14. S. Pinker, The Language Instinct, … p. 427.
15. See the website of the Zoltan Kodaly Pedagogical Institute of Music at www.kodaly-inst.hu/kodaly/balszoveg1.htm#3.
Chapter Four. The creation of the social mind
1. This poem also appeared in my collection of poetry, Presbyopia (Sulaisiadar: Vagabond Voices, 2009), pp. 35-40.
2. I first coined this term in my second novel, The Berlusconi Bonus (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2005), p. 78.
3. Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, 1610. The quote appears in the first paragraph of the book and the dedication to Grand Duke Cosimo II.
4. This story appears in Carlo Severi, Il percorso e la voce (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), p. 3, who in turn took it from E. Wiesel, Célébration Hassidique (Paris: Ed du Seuil, 1972).
5. Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922), p.353.
6. John 8. 3-11.
7. Luke 6. 37.
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Che cos’è la letteratura? (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1976), p. 66; original title: Qu’est-ce-que la littérature? (Paris: 1947).
9. Lucien Polastron, Libri al rogo (Milan: Edizioni Sylvestre Bonnard, 2006), p. 16-17 (original title: Livres en feu, Paris: Editions Denoel, 2004).
10. J.-P. Sartre, Che cos’è la letteratura? …, p. 86.
11. Quoted in Polastron, Libri al rogo, 2006, p. 89.
12. Francis Bacon, Essays (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972), p. 150 (L).
13. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), p. 71. This bilingual text also contains the original Latin.
14. Any attempt to break out of the solitude imposed by learning must be informed by the realisation that even in the most liberal state, there is always a cost – particularly in relation to politics, religion and ethics. In conformist eras such as the current one, the cost is bound to be higher, and this explains why modern journalism has become so toothless.
15. Quoted in Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, Out of the Flames (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), p. 85.
16. Calmeta slightly misquotes Horace’s advice not to publish until the ninth year. The advice in full was: “But you will say nothing and do nothing against Minerva’s will; such is your judgement, such your good sense. Yet if you ever do write something, let it enter the ears of some critical Maecius, and your father’s, and my own; then put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year. What you have not published you can destroy; the word once sent forth can never come back,” Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 385-90, trans. by H. Rushton Farclough (London: Leob Classical Library, 1955). It is interesting to note the primacy of the spoken language at the time: the advice is not to let some expert critic read it, but to let him hear it.
17. Prose e poesie edite e inedite, ed. C. Grayson (Bologna: 1959), pp. 3-4.
18. Anton Francesco Doni, La seconda libraria (Venice: Marcolini, 1551), p. 6.
19. Doni, I marmi (Venice: Marcolini, 1553), II, p. 67.
20. Doni, La seconda libraria, … p. 151. Grillo, the Italian word for “cricket”, is also the word for “whim” or “fantastic notions”.
21. “Later in the 18th century the literati of the Scottish Enlightenment still spoke Scots but for writing they had developed an effective, but Latinate and sometimes ponderous, English prose.” For this and the interesting quote from the English officer, see Paul Henderson Scott, Andrew Fletcher and the Treaty of Union (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1992), p. 69.
Chapter Five. Big is not beautiful, but merely more profitable
1. Donald MacDonald, Tales and Traditions of the Lews (Edinburgh: Birlinn, n.d.), p. 221.
2. Michael Kraus’s figure is quoted in David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge: C.U.P., 2000), p. 18. On pages 4-18, Crystal discusses the various estimates for the number of languages in the world before coming up with his “off-the-cuff” figure of 6,000. The two figures imply that only 600 languages will survive.
3. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 34.
4. It took the British from 1803 to 1835 to destroy almost all the Tasmanian population, and the last Tasmanian died in 1876. Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers provides an excellent satire of the administrative, religious and racial prejudices that contributed to this tragic destruction.
5. See David Stevenson, Highland Warrior. Alasdair MacColla and the Civil Wars (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1994), p. 237.
6. Bernard Lazare, Il letame di Giobbe (Milan: Medusa, 2004) p. 59 (Original title: Le fumier de Job, Paris: 1928).
7. Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848 (London: Penguin: 1973), p. 221.
8. Some Breton nationalists sided with the Nazis, and this betrayal by a minority of the minority was used against the language in the post-war period – to great effect. Breton still has many speakers, but its age demography is dramatic. The language is destined to die within decades unless very radical action is taken.
9. Report on Attitudes to the Gaelic Culture (Edinburgh: System Three Scotland, 13 March 1996). This report was prepared for Canan Limited in Skye.
10. Alan Sproull and Douglas Chalmers, The Demand for Gaelic Artistic and Cultural Products and Services: Patterns and Impacts (Glasgow: Caledonian University, March 1998).
11. Keynote Speech to the Celtic Media Festival held in Portree on Friday 30 March 2007. See the CMF website and webcast of speech at: http://strea mingportal.multistream.co.uk/celticmediafestival/pres14/wm_pres14.htm.
12. Joshua Fishman, Reversing Language Shift (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1991), p. 65.
13. “Money alone can’t pump life into a dying language”, Scotland on Sunday, 17 September 2000, p. 19. McIlvanney, like many others, believes that there is a natural world for languages, and that “worthy intentions”, “creative agendas”, lobbies, committees and legislation do not save languages. But they do. Only military events have a more dramatic effect.
14. Elizabeth Buie, “They are the best of the bunch”, The Times Educational Supplement Scotland, Friday March 23, 2007.
15. Richard Johnstone, Addressing the “Age Factor”: Some Implications of Languages Policy (Council of Europe: Strasbourg, 2002), p. 19.
16. Johnstone, p. 19.
17. British Academy submission
to the Dearing Review, “Summary”, Para. 2.
18. Will Woodward, “Translation can discourage integration, says Kelly”, The Guardian, 11/06/07.
19. He appears to have said, “El juez Gonzales es uno de nosotros, el representa todos nuestros suenos y esperanzas para nuestros hijos.” Pretty banal stuff and surely understandable to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of the Americas’ other great lingua franca.
20. Joshua Fishman, “Maintaining Languages: What Works and What Doesn’t Work”, in Gina Cantoni, Stabilizing Indigenous Languages (Flagstaff: Northen Arizona University, 1996).
21. Marx, who I greatly respect as a thinker and writer, has been proved right on some important points. That a writer like him should be so contemptuous of such peoples, amongst whom he included fairly large groups like the Czechs, says a great deal about the power of the great-nation superiority complex of the nineteenth century, which is not entirely a thing of the past. For an excellent appraisal of Marx, see Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
Chapter Six. Register
1. Charles de Rochefort’s Histoire naturelle et morale des Îles Antilles (2nd edition, Rotterdam, 1665) tells the story of such societies in the Antilles. Grammar did not change, but about one in ten of the words he recorded changed between the sexes. This is not another language, but another register. See Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, …, pp. 237-8. The language difference clearly reflected the degree of social division between the sexes, as Rochefort tells us that “the women do not eat till their husbands have finished their meal” (Histoire …, p. 497).
2. In Tuscan, the “c” is not really elided (although Italians perceive it as such); it is actually transformed into a spirant (like our “h”) when it is a single consonant between two vowels.