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 Instinct (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.
Chapter Seven. The need for a lingua franca and its inherent dangers
1. This story is almost entirely based on elements taken from a television programme broadcast during the fiftieth anniversary of the Suez Crisis, including of course that of the young boy who was slapped. Interestingly, the British soldiers admitted that all prisoners were summarily executed and expressed degrees of regret, while their officers denied it angrily.
2. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 31; David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), p. 438; and Richard Morrison, The Times, T2, Wednesday May 29, 2002, pp. 2-3.
3. Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804-1999. Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 70.
Chapter Eight. Conclusion
1. This poem will also appear in my collection of poetry, Presbyopia.
2. Of course, this attitude in an even cruder form is alive and well, and inhabiting sections of the Scottish middle classes (one journalist appears to have made a career of insulting Gaels and a distinguished intellectual living in Glasgow claimed he would not have wanted one of his daughters to marry an “island boy”). In the network of prejudices and racisms that sadly affect Scotland as they do every other country, the Gaels are not the most unfortunate, but because prejudices against them don’t break the rules of “politically-correct”, they can be uttered in “polite society” which is generally so good at keeping its prejudices hidden. My translator acquaintance was not quite so disagreeable, but for that reason his views were also more disturbing. There is certainly no intended “anti-Englishness” in my example.
3. Unfortunately this is exactly what is happening, but it is still at a fairly tentative stage. Consider that there was a time when even a great intellectual and man of the left like Shaw could write such lines as “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive” and “if we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture, we must exterminate the kind of people who do not fit into it.” These quotes appear in John Carey’s excellent work on the subject: The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 62-3.
4. Jeremy Harding, “It Migrates to Them”, London Review of Books, vol. 29, no. 5, 8 March 2007, pp. 25.
5. Dominic Hilton, “Wrong Headed”, The New Humanist, Sept. 2005, p. 38.