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?

book review: The Origin of Language

(that’s the best photo I could find. )

the title of this book is a bit misleading, as it’s not about “the origin” or “the mother tongue” — in fact, there is little discussion of what that original language may have been like or the evolutionary development of the capacity for language and all those other speculative fields (though he does offer a handful of what he believes are global cognates, and he does briefly try to sketch out the spread and branching of the world’s language families from Africa).  of course, those are terribly difficult subjects, and it’s understandable why there is little coverage in this book, but then why the misleading titles?

oh well, what the book is about is the use of comparative linguistics — classification and taxonomy — to identify not only the major families of languages worldwide, but also the larger families to which even these language families belong.  with little regard for the general consensus among linguists throughout the world (esp. historical linguists) — and with the credentials and data to back it up — Ruhlen makes his case in an interesting way: he introduces the reader to the basics of language classification — the basic tools used initially to identify Indo-European, setting historical linguistics as a field of study in motion — supplementing those basics with a few key points here and there (e.g., common sound changes among the world’s languages), and then allows the reader to work through tables of vocabulary to identify families of languages.  this allows the reader to discover some of the key features involved in classifying known language families, as well as then finding commonalities with larger super-families of languages.

a fair concern here is that he could be picking and choosing words that conveniently support his thesis, and the reader would never be the wiser.  in fact, that is a criticism that has been aimed at anyone trying to do this type of large-scale comparative linguistic work.  however, he does provide general statistics about the chance occurrences of certain similarities — and his vocabulary are not entirely random words, but more common words that are known to be more stable over time.  further, he answers those criticisms (though there may be more, for all I know) directly and in a satisfying manner.  for instance, someone may object to a large-scale grouping of the Amerind languages based on, among other things, consistent pronominal patterns by saying that pronouns look like everywhere, or that those sounds mimic infant sucking sounds and so are widespread.  unfortunately for the critic, the first claim simply isn’t true, and the second claim is not satisfactory because it fails to account for why those same sounds are not attested elsewhere, if not worldwide (assuming, of course, that we were all once infants).

one of Ruhlen’s beefs with most historical linguists is that they have forgotten the first order of business: classification and taxonomy.  since Indo-European and other families were initially discovered, most linguists have taken these families for granted and have set about reconstructing the proto-languages of those families, or trying to chart the various sound and grammar changes over time.  as a result, they have come to believe that only in the presence of such extensive work reconstructing proto-forms and documenting sound changes (such as what exists for Indo-European, which alone has been studied more than the rest of the world’s language families combined) can you believe you have a genuine family group — ignoring the fact that they were already operating within the assumption that IE was a language group, one that was identified on not nearly so many (a few handfuls, in fact) cognates.

in any case, this book has informed me about a lot, though I feel I have more questions now than I had before, but that’s usually a good thing (unless, of course, a book simply fails to provide you with any answers whatsoever).  it should also be said that he makes use of the best available genetic information that has independently tried to track human migration over time (using various means), most of which corroborates what linguists have uncovered over the years.  and his argument is that the evidence also confirms those who wish to group the world’s language families into ever more closely related family groups.

what’s boggling my mind right now is the rate at which languages change, as well as the innumerable twigs and branches of human language families.  for instance, look at this figure from his book, which represents human genetic populations organized loosely along language boundaries.  it’s not even as complicated as his final genealogical figure, but I couldn’t find that one online.

now look at where you see “Indo-European” and then look at the language family chart for Indo-European (from Wikipedia):

(click on the image for a bigger view).  and the truth is, this complex reconstruction of IE is unique among the world’s languages, as it’s been studied far more and has a lot more material (esp. written) to analyze.  so just imagine what the true history of it all may be!  what a ridiculously complicated story and subject.

we shall be reading

so it looks like I’m off to a good start this year bookwise: here’s a snapshot of some of the books I’ve received (or purchased with gift money) over the past few weeks (not including two new awesome vegan cookbooks we have).

the list of books on my “to read” list just keeps growing. I’m currently re-reading the LOTR books, including The Hobbit, this time paying more attention to the languages and lore created by Tolkien.  it’s impressive stuff.  I also have lots of language stuff in store this year: my brother Ryan gave me intro-level Chinese books and workbooks; I received Marquez’s Memoria de mis putas tristes in Spanish (obviously) from my sister Megan; Tim lent me a book I bought him a few years ago on the Romance languages; I haven’t read any of the French books I bought in Montreal; and I picked up a linguistics book on Old English and its closest “relatives” (I also have to finish my current reader and move on to the dual-language Beowulf I found a few weeks ago).

I always imagined one day I might catch up and then be able to immediately buy and/or read whatever I felt like on a whim, as opposed to always having books beckoning from the shelves (for instance, Emily gave me Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, but I also have his How the Mind Works to read…).  oh well.  I’m always happy to provide a safe and loving home for new or used books when the opportunity arises, confident that I will one day give them their due (or at the very least lend them to someone else who will).

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.

where my language goed?

I have conflicting feelings about language standards and change.  on the one hand, I can’t help but wince when I hear unconventional or “incorrect” use of a language, particularly my own.  that’s not to say that I don’t make mistakes, or that I don’t even always know what’s correct (though I’m trying), but some speakers just do physical violence to your ears.  for instance, I am not much of a fan of any dialects that collapse our not-that-complex verbal inflection, whether not distinguishing between singular or plural (I go, he go, we go) or doing away with any auxiliary verbs (what you say? for what did you say?), not to mention swapping verbal forms and creating entirely new auxiliaries (we done went to the store). (though this last one is actually quite charming.)

on the other hand, I don’t pretend for one minute that a language is anything but fluid and constantly changing. (I particularly love that patently Germanic feature of English that allows for the growth of new words through initial hyphenation and eventual integration of words, e.g., inasmuchas).  languages are living things, and though they often change in predictable patterns based on the physical limitations of speech and hearing — and they usually head in the direction of being simpler, more regular — you never quite know where a language will go.  anyone who pretends that contemporary language changes are corrupting a hitherto unchanging way of speaking or doing grammar cannot have any real clue about the history of that language, not to mention the ways in which languages change in general.  all of them.  plus, those “ungrammatical” quirks are usually quite regular, which makes them, in linguistic terms at least, grammatical.

so should I be so upset about failures to inflect in English today?  after all, Old English inflected for gender, as did the Norman French that so dramatically transformed the mother tongue, but we don’t sit around bemoaning this fact, do we?  and as for a failure to differentiate a singular or plural verb, some languages today have already lost this distinction and are doing just fine (by me, anyway).  Swedish, for instance, no longer inflects for number, though its predecessor, Old Norse, did.  does it really matter that we still distinguish the third person singular, saying I go but he goes?  why not officially do away with it, then?

chances are that irregular features of the language will continue to drop off over time.  in fact, the relative stability of the spoken language over the past half a millennium is somewhat astounding, and must owe its success to the roles that printing and literacy have held in the last few centuries.  whereas literary languages, especially when in the tight control of an elite group, such as scribes or priests, are more than capable of remaining fixed over longer periods of time, spoken languages go through dramatic changes unless the speakers are relatively isolated, or their communities insulated.  Icelandic is a great example, which has maintained an impressive stability over the centuries (due also in part to a “purism” movement in the 18th century designed at bolstering the language and removing too many foreign words).  in fact, if you want to learn Old Norse, some linguists suggest that you just learn modern Icelandic and then go from there.

in any age you can find a number of stuffy old farts bah, humbug!ing the decline and corruption of the language.  but then you realize that were it not for this ongoing flexibility and creativity of the language (and its speakers), we would never have arrived at some of the literary giants of this past century, whose inventiveness and linguistic borrowings are what excite me so much about language!  (think here of James Joyce, or more contemporary writers like Salman Rushdie or Junot Diaz).

nevertheless, I can’t help but feel somewhat anxious about the idea of too much change coming too fast.  fortunately, with so many people speaking English today — especially those estimated 1.4 billion people learning it as a second language — there isn’t much tolerance for every single regional or cultural dialect and peculiar feature.  no one has the patience to learn anything but the most normative, widespread version.  the cumulative result is that it takes a significant influence to introduce non-kosher changes throughout the entire web of speakers.

however, this same large body of native speakers and non-native learners will also likely contribute to the “flattening” of the language in terms of making it more regular.  when children are learning a language, they have a fantastic innate ability to create the grammar of the language they are learning based on what they hear, and their tendency is to establish regular, predictable patterns.  this is why they will always add “-ed” to make a verb past tense unless taught otherwise.  and linguists have shown that we have to create entirely new entries in our “mental dictionary” for irregular forms of a verb, such as “went” instead of “goed.”  would we really be so much worse off if the latter were adopted as the normative form?  though I have to wonder what the chances of this happening naturally are given the fact that even in Old English there were already three different verbs making up the paradigm for expressing the idea of “to be.”  so this irregularity has proved rather regular over the past millennium or so.

in the end, I have to stay open minded and flexible about language variants and change — especially when it comes to written grammatical norms (e.g., punctuation standards), which seem to be changing faster than anything else — and enjoy the quirks and convoluted history of this language, at least at a safe distance in literature and poetry.  and though I don’t count on seeing any major changes happening in my lifetime, I fully expect our language to continue to interact with other major world languages as we (hopefully) increase our cultural, political, and economic ties with other nations.  and I fully expect — and welcome! — the inevitable overlappings and sharings between English and the Spanish of Latin America as we reimagine a shared “American” (North, Central, and South) identity.

shh! the career

so far I’ve put off writing about my impending career direction, library school, for a number of reasons.  the most immediate was waiting to hear about financial aid information, to be sure that I would be able to attend before committing fully.  although I did send them the deposit before finding out, and I suppose I had decided that I would try to at least take one class if I didn’t have any aid … but oh well.  I finally received the information sometime last week and I’ll have the usual loan options available to me, which isn’t thrilling, but at least it means it will be possible for me to attend full time if I want.  there is still another grant option out there, but I don’t think I’ll know anything about that until just before the start of the semester.

I guess the other reason I put it off is that it just doesn’t seem all that real to me yet.  back to school … hopefully for the last time (in the immediate future, that is).  it feels odd committing to it fully because it makes my decision to abandon my previous career plan — even more school for the professor route — more concrete.  it means I’m committing to this revision of the plan for my life — for our life, now, as this decision is part of co-reimagining the future with Emily.  if I’m to take on any more debt, it has to be a full commitment, not something I’ll dabble in and change my mind about again.  we can’t really afford any more debt than that about which we have no real choice (see previous posts on this matter…).

occasionally — such as yesterday, reading about historical linguistics and toying with the idea of studying Old English again — I realize again how much I really really want to do a PhD someday.  but no sooner do I start questioning my decision to take the library science route than I remember that I want to do a PhD for me, not so much for a career plan.  what I really want to accomplish with a PhD is the full commitment to one of these topics I’m interested in in order to get a real hold on a topic and to produce something substantial in that field of knowledge.  make some sort of contribution, maybe, however small.  do I then really care about being able to teach that for the rest of my career?  not really.  add to that the reality that I’d probably be teaching more general subjects and not just my area of expertise, and the prospect isn’t any more enticing than my potential future career as a librarian of whatever sort.  would I be happier teaching than working in a library?  not at all necessarily.  what’ll matter are the details about my job and my specialization and location and salary etc.

but whatever I end up doing — whether working in libraries for a decade or so before going back to school and maybe changing directions (and having a career to fall back on just in case!) or staying in libraries for the rest of my career and maybe one day down the road, as I’m scaling down the hours and approaching retirement, pursuing a PhD in some area that interests me most (most likely linguistics of some sort?) — I think that the decision to go to library school now is the best option.  for the short term and the long term.  whether I go full steam and finish quickly, or whether I start with the basic classes and then try to get my foot in the door at a library somewhere and take it slower as I work — that we’ll have to wait and see.

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.