English, R.I.P.

over at The Washington Post, Gene Weingarten wrote a sad obituary for the English language.  citing instances of poor grammar and even worse spelling from recent newspapers (not just online versions), he reports that the English language, “already severely weakened…died of shame.”

in several ways, this article reads as yet another screed (albeit a more melancholic one) about poor grammar and lexicographical errors.  he rails, of course, on the use of “alot,” the classic spelling error and friendly monster.

the truth is, however, that such errors have made their way into English before, and they’ll do so again.  in fact, “alot” is exactly the kind of thing that just might find a home.  no one (or even “noone” for some) really uses the two words in any usual sense, as in referring to an actual “lot” of something as a unit of measurement.  in fact, we rarely use “lot” by itself, reserving it for phrases like “a vacant lot” or “empty lot.”  and “a lot” doesn’t just refer to some large number of something — we already use the words as an adverb, surely a digression from the way in which it was originally used.

so if we’re not referring to “one lot” of something, and are using the two words essentially as one adverb…well, this is the kind of thing that gradually becomes fused as a new word in a language.  it’s all quite normal.  in fact, it’s only because of widespread literacy and cheap printing that changes like this haven’t been happening more regularly across the language.

Weingarten’s real concern — and rightly so — seems to be not so much the demise of the language itself, but the demise of printing and journalism standards.  this matters for him because, in his estimation, newspapers have been “the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured.”  the problem, of course, is budget cuts and the decline of thorough copy-editing, compounded by “decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication.”

while he is shorely (haha, I kick you while you’re down, English) right about the decline of print standards in an era of blogs and diminishing funds for newspapers and magazines, I’m not sure he’s correct about a decreased public attention to grammar and the rest.  compared to when?  if anything, literacy rates have only continued to climb over the decades of the past century.  does he imagine that the average industrial worker at the turn of the previous century had a much greater command for syntax and lexicography?  surely a historical comparison of even newspapers — this “authoritative forum” — over the past two centuries would reveal natural changes in the both syntax and lexicography, all of which is natural and taken for granted even by a careful, pure-English-loving journalist like him.

where he may be on to something, however, has to do with the concern about what these declining standards might mean for future readers, who may become less familiar with the correct forms of those tricky words and phrases.  but then again, maybe not.  after all, we live and operate in a world in which those answers are only a few clicks and keyboard strokes away — and, more importantly, we still live in a world where fastidious writers like him are the ones with columns in reputable newspapers.  when misspellings and atrocious grammar become the norm, or even approach it, then we can pronounce the language dead, or at least dying.

more likely, however, the language — and not some “ignominiously diminished form of itself” — will continue to adapt, especially as Englishes around the globe take on lives of their own.  it’s officially the second language of Europe now, and we will undoubtedly see more and more changes as time goes on.  and anyone with even an inkling of the history of English (which Mr. Weingarten pretends to have) should dismiss such cantankerous postmortems and look forward to the richness that global Englishes are sure to bring about.

Engrish evolved

Wired ran an article in 2008 that hypothesized an inevitable evolution of the English language, particularly in Asia and more particularly due to the ongoing hybridization of English and Chinese grammatical features.  the author, Michael Erard, claims that by 2020, only 15% of the world’s English speakers will be native speakers, and so more and more grammatical or syntactical “quirks” will make their way from other languages into spoken English.

he quotes examples from Chinese signs:

“If you are stolen, call the police at once.”

“Please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can.”

“Deformed man lavatory.”

he questions whether these sorts of humorous examples of “Chinglish” — the stuff of t-shirts and websites — are really bad English, or whether “they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us.”

the sorts of changes he thinks might take place are not just the sprinkling of English with foreign words, but also changes in pronunciation and the borrowing of grammatical features.  for instance, in Singaporean English (Singlish), speakers use “words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you.”  English may also begin to be influenced by the tonal nature of East Asian languages as well.  or so he imagines.  the future?

Given the number of people involved, Chinglish is destined to take on a life of its own. Advertisers will play with it, as they already do in Taiwan. It will be celebrated as a form of cultural identity, as the Hong Kong Museum of Art did in a Chinglish exhibition last year. It will be used widely online and in movies, music, games, and books, as it is in Singapore. Someday, it may even be taught in schools. Ultimately, it’s not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with “proper” language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. Nor will Chinglish replace native languages, as creoles sometimes do. It’s that Chinglish will be just as proper as any other English on the planet.

this is fascinating stuff, especially for those trying to imagine what global languages (or even a global language) might look like if we make it long enough to see it happen.  and what’s particularly good about this article (it’s too short to really be great) is that the author doesn’t see this as some tragic thing to gnash his teeth over.  and rightly so.  anyone who has even an inkling about the history of English — or any other language with much of a written record — will understand that these processes are quite normal, and that it’s nothing less than silly for anyone, in any given age, to look at the form of the language they learned and pretend that it is unchanged and unchanging — or at least it would be, if it weren’t for those darn’d foreigners and ignants mucking everything up!

it will especially be interesting to see what new creative literary forms emerge from these sorts of hybridizations.  stay tuned!

the universality of English

last fall, the linguist and sometimes cultural critic John McWhorter wrote a World Affairs article dealing with the impending demise of most of the world’s languages and the future of a universal English.  he sets the scene:

Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.

many people, including McWhorter, are incredibly saddened by this loss.  and at seems that too often we read about how the last speaker of a particular language has died off, such as what happened this past February with Bo in India.  unlike some others, however, he feels that we will be unable to stem the tide.  a chief reason for this is globalization and cosmopolitanism.  here, he provides a summary of “language death” as it affects immigrants, especially immigrants to larger cities:

As people speaking indigenous languages migrate to cities, inevitably they learn globally dominant languages like English and use them in their interactions with one another. The immigrants’ children may use their parents’ indigenous languages at home. But they never know those languages as part of their public life, and will therefore be more comfortable with the official language of the world they grow up in. For the most part, they will speak this language to their own children. These children will not know the indigenous languages of their grandparents, and thus pretty soon they will not be spoken. This is language death.

McWhorter directly challenges the idea, popular among many, that if a language dies, a culture necessarily dies with it.  as he sees it, language only has to do with geographical separation, and nothing to do with culture.  the emergence of the innumerable languages over human history — most lost, many of which we’ll never know, by the way — is due to “chance linguistic driftings.”  by way of comparison, when we speak of protecting or saving whales, we don’t speak of each family of whales, each with its unique song, but rather of whales generally.

he also denies any genuine (or at least substantial) link between a specific language and the specific culture that produces it.

For the better part of a century, all attempts to conjure any meaningful indication of thought patterns or cultural outlook from the vocabularies and grammars of languages has fallen apart in that sort of way, with researchers picking up only a few isolated shards of evidence. For example, because “table” has feminine gender in Spanish (la mesa), a Spanish speaker is more likely—if pressed—to imagine a cartoon table having a high voice. But this isn’t exactly what most of us would think of as meaningfully “cultural,” nor as having to do with “thought.” And in fact, Spanish speakers do not go about routinely imagining tables as cooing in feminine tones.

in short, claiming that when language dies, culture dies with it amounts to putting the cart before the horse:

The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.

aside from this aesthetic factor, however, he returns to his initial question: is there some urgent benefit to humanity that some people speak one language while others speak another?  is it essential to humanity that (beyond the genuine aesthetic loss) that we employ the full range of our phonetic capabilities — which no individual language does, of course — or that some languages preserve case systems?  he thinks not.  (it is a shame, I should add, when languages move from precision of speech to more imprecision and confusion — a linguistic dulling, if you will.)

McWhorter imagines a future where everyone speaks primarily English — the de facto universal language, as he sees it — along with about 600 additional languages (the overall count, not the number spoken by each individual, of course!) worldwide.  he insists that the unfortunate — but unalterable — history of colonialism associated with English should not prevent us from acknowledging this fact.

To change this situation would require a great many centuries, certainly too long a span to figure meaningfully in our assessment of the place of English in world communications in our present moment.

in addition to the present position of English worldwide, he argues that a few of its features will guarantee its success, contrasting English’s “user-friendliness” with, say, the 2,000 Chinese characters you need to learn even to read a newspaper, or some of the more rare phonetic features of certain languages

For all of its association with Pepsi and the CIA, English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go. English verb conjugation is spare compared to, say, that of Italian—just the third-person singular s in the present, for example. There are no pesky genders to memorize (and no feminine-gendered tables that talk like Penelope Cruz). There are no sounds under whose dispensation you almost have to be born as a prerequisite for rendering them anywhere near properly, like the notorious trilly rˇ sound in Czech.

in the long run, he does not think it’s realistic that English will eventually swallow up all the others as well, especially in countries where a sole (non-English) language dominates and is tied up with the entire culture (e.g., Japanese); however, unforeseen events such as rapid and dramatic climate change might require more global migration, necessitating the use of English as a common language among immigrants.

he sums up:

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation…The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.

overall, he’s probably right about the continued loss of languages worldwide, although there are a number of reasons why English might not be the go-to second language for everyone on the planet in the future.  but what’s missing most from this article is consideration of the extent to which hybrid languages and creoles will emerge around the world as minor languages blend into the larger ones, or even as larger ones merge with one another.  so, for instance, Hinglish and Spanglish may be forces to be reckoned with.  how might this sort of interaction affect English globally?  is it possible that we may have various Englishes emerging in different locations?  could we eventually see even more integration between those 500-600 languages that survive the massacre?  what might a global language (or a handful of global languages) look and sound like?

a pair of britches fit for a spider

reading in B. Cottle’s The Plight of English, I came across a fun fact.  our word “britches” is an alternative to the spelling “breeches.”  no news there.  “breeches,” however, which has been with us at least since the days of Middle English, is presumably plural for “breech,” though  nobody uses the singular.  the Old English word brec, however, the root to which “-es” was added in later English to make it plural, was already the plural (nom. and acc.) form of the word broc, which I suppose was an acceptable word in the singular, meaning “leg covering” or something.

so let’s do the math: broc (one leg)  x 2 = brec (two legs) x 2 = “breeches” (four legs).  throw in “a pair” and you’ve got eight legs.

a nice example of the redundancy that sometimes accompanies language as we feel the need to keep adding emphasis and exaggeration, though maybe this time it was unconscious.  I guess our brains just can’t cope with the idea that pants don’t come in anything but a pair…

Engrish: dulled and effaced

writing of how languages, especially their vocabulary, change over time, how words take on any number new, often distorted meanings, Basil Cottle, in The Plight of English, wonders, “Is our vocabulary nobly rich, or is it bloated?”  recognizing “that semantic change is not a killer disease for a language, and that twentieth-century modifications of words are all part of a process,” he remains clear that “it does not by any means condone all our abuse of the vocabulary.”  comparing the nature of the language between the Middle Ages and today, along with rates of illiteracy, he continues:

We, on the other hand, have universal education conveyed in our own language, cultured speech available by button even if there be none in our families, books in plenty, cheap dictionaries.  Our opportunities for holding on to our supple and expressive language are far stronger than they were in the fourteenth century, when the language was redeemed from its servitude, and it seems to me unpardonable that we have so maltreated words not slight or slurred but shapely, clear, and meaningful.

and after a few examples (of awful, terrible, fabulous, and the like):

Such handling of any language will make it prone to bloat.  Its riches will be thrown away as mere excess; its lucid and distinctive words will be used with exaggeration, their outlines dulled and their picturesqueness effaced. I am not condemning inventiveness, though it might well be felt that we have plenty of words to be getting on with … but brilliance is needed for such inventiveness … Let us, rather, tend what we have: it is an abundance.

book review: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

This is a wonderful book, to be sure, providing some excellent overviews and a strong sense of just how blurry some language boundaries really are and how they can change.  that being said, it would have been nice if he’d provided a review of historical linguistics and the mechanisms by which languages can change, perhaps even a review of some of the general features of language change.  hell, maybe even the teensiest tiniest consideration of language acquisition.  but enough of that.

another potential shortcoming would be the fact that you put the book down feeling much informed in general but still uninformed about characteristics of certain world languages.  aspects of ancient languages seem to be treated in more detail as far as their makeup and features.  you feel somewhat cheated not having learned hardly anything about the various Germanic languages (apart from English, of course) or, say, Japanese. (scwhat?  a different form for men and women?)  often there is more of the ‘history’ and less of the ‘languages’, especially towards the end.  and the pace of the historical overviews seems shallow enough for people who are already familiar, but too dense for anyone approaching a subject for the first time…

but considering Ostler’s intent, and his knowledge of so many of the languages through which he is sweeping, it’s still an impressive book.  and a treat of sorts for anyone who loves languages.