Few Concerns of the Course
Language
is BIOLOGICAL We can talk to each other because our bodies and brains develop
in ways that make language possible. Language comes from both the neural
organization of the brain and the mechanical organization of the vocal cords
and vocal tract.
Language
is CULTURAL To a great extent language is culture and vice versa.
Language
is ARBITRARY There is no relation between words and the things they represent.
This claim is easily demonstrated by looking at very common words: English
"dog" is Spanish "perro" is French "chien";
English "bed" is Spanish "cama" is French "lit" .
. . there is no way a human can look at a dog or a bed and know what "the
word" for the object is. Still less then, are there necessary signs for
abstract and highly variable concepts like "liberty" or
"love." Yet within language itself, many words make sense because
they fit into a system of other words. The word "broom" is arbitrary.
Yet in Ireland, a broom is called a "sweeping brush"--a combination
of two arbitrary words that is in itself not arbitrary, because one can deduce
the meaning of the phrase from the meanings of its components. Meaning in
language is always a product of arbitrary and systematic factors.
Language
is GENERATIVE We understand new sentences that we hear; and we constantly
produce new sentences.
Language
is UNIVERSAL All cognitively normal children acquire a language, early and
without training.
Language
tends to CHANGE This is a paradox: if communication is important, isn't
consistency an absolute value?
Language
is HISTORICAL We speak the way we speak today because of series of historical
accidents and contingencies.
Language
is VARIABLE at any given moment. Each of us speaks a different variety of a
language (or languages). Each community speaks a different dialect, and people
speak many different dialects depending on the social situation.
Languages
LIVE and DIE--not exactly like organisms, but in an analogous way. Their
extinction is like that of biological species:
The
world is experiencing "language extinction on a massive scale,"
writes David Crystal, a professor of linguistics at the University of Wales at
Bangor. Mr. Crystal reviews the statistics on the disappearance of languages,
noting that most experts expect about half of the 6,000 languages in use today
to die out within the next century. Many people view this trend as a natural
consequence of modernization, but Mr. Crystal argues that they fail to
understand what the world risks losing. "We should care about dying
languages for the same reason that we care when a species of animal or plant
dies. It reduces the diversity of our planet," he writes. "In the
case of language, we are talking about intellectual and cultural diversity, not
biological, but the issues are the same." The diversity of languages --
with their practical, intellectual, and literary offerings -- helps humans
survive, Mr. Crystal writes, by providing ideas and approaches that various
cultures and societies have developed. He urges a greater effort to support the
work of linguists, teachers, and native speakers who are trying to sustain
threatened languages, but he notes the fragility of their work. Writes Mr.
Crystal: "With every language that dies, another precious source of data
about the nature of human language faculty is lost."
Languages
are inexact and idiomatic media. Translation is not a simple decoding and
re-encoding but an art that is sensitive both to general concepts and to
particular expressions of those concepts in different languages. There are two
principles at work here, and they are sometimes at odds.
One
is the "principle of affability," which means that anything you can
express in one language you can express in another. You might have to borrow
some vocabulary and provide some context, but you can say anything in any world
language.
Another
is sometimes called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after its joint originators
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. This hypothesis posits that there are great
differences in the way people think, depending on what language they acquire.
Severe forms of this hypothesis would actually contradict the principle of affability,
because there might be some concepts in some language that you really couldn't
get across in another.
Even
the simplest translation exercises point to the tension between these two
linguistic ideas. Most languages have a simple phrase you say to someone when
you will see them again soon. "Good bye," we say, which is a
contraction of "God be with you," though most of us say instead
"See you," "so long," "later." In French? "A
bientot" literally means "To well soon." "Au revoir"
is "To seeing-again." In Spanish, "hasta luego" or just
"luego"--"till then," "till later." Nothing
terribly remarkable here; it's all quite effable; but try saying "to
seeing again" or even (think about it) "till later" to someone
in English. It just sounds funny. "To well soon" or even "till
soon" sound crazy. Are we all really saying "good-bye"?
And
what about Italian, where "ciao" means "hello" or
"good-bye" (and etymologically means "slave," though that's
another story altogether).
Or
try saying "his wife" and "her husband" in a gendered
language like French. The usual phrases are, respectively, "sa femme"
and "son mari". Where did the "his" and "her" go?
A Frenchwoman calls her husband "mon mari" and her car "ma
voiture." She uses two different words for "my," and she
actually cannot say "his" or "her." Does the French
language have a concept for "his or "her"? Are the ideas
expressed in those two words "effable" in French? Or--more subtle--does
French have the same idea for "my" as English has?
Reflect
for a moment on the simplicity of those phrases we've just gone over, and
you'll see how hard this issue becomes.
Spoken
language is different from writing. Speech and writing involve different parts
of the brain.
For
most of linguistic history, we know only the history of written language.
Spoken language predates written language historically. In fact, writing
systems developed--probably--only three times spontaneously (in China, Sumeria,
and in Mayan culture). Spoken language predates written language in individual
development--no developmentally normal child fails to acquire language, but
people must be taught to read and write.
Written
language is much more stable than spoken, especially in societies that have
technologies of printing but have not yet developed technologies of mass aural
media. So our written language became standardized quickly after the
introduction of printing into Britain after 1470. To a great extent, our standard
spellings today reflect pronunciations that were still in use in before 1470,
like the initial consonants of knee, knight, knave . . .
And
in spellings like:
--night,
ought, fought, caught
where
the gh digraph represents a once-spoken sound.
Written
language can be heavily standardized. Huge industries of linguistic
prescription grow up around the written language. People can attempt to
prescribe a standard in spoken language as well, but it is very hard to do so.
Speakers who have many different accents may all be able to write a single
standard language, a fact that has great importance for education and for
politics.
Etymology
Etymology
is a powerful tool; it's often used as a rhetorical tool to help win arguments.
We feel we have power over words if we know how they used to be used--though in
practice one rarely has access to a lot of etymological information, and there
are "dead" meanings buried in every word. "Assassin" and
"hashish" have the same root. "Manure" means to work with
one's hands. "Toilet," a hundred years ago, meant a woman's dress.
"Person" means mask. "Glamour" and "grammar" are
in origin the same word.
"Dilemma"
means not merely a problem but an impossible choice between two alternatives.
"Disinterested" means impartial in judgment. . . . or at least, in
each case, they used to mean those things, sometimes in languages that predate
English.
Etymology
can help us see past cultures frozen in present words. One of the best-known
examples is Walter Scott (coiner of "glamour")'s comment, in Ivanhoe,
that we can tell what Normans and Saxons ate, and how that reflected power in
Norman England, by looking at words for food:
Food:
Mutton
Beef
Pork
Venison
Poultry
French:
Mouton
Boeuf
Porc
Venysoun
Poulet
English:
Sheep
Cow
Pig
Deer
Birds
You
can see here Scott's basic point: that the English natives of Norman England
cared for animals, but rarely got to eat them. When a large animal was turned
into food, it was turned into French, because a Norman person was going to eat
it.
Grammaticalization
Words
and phrases that once had a certain kind of dictionary meaning can, over time,
acquire a function that has little to do with their original meaning; in
effect, they trade in meaning for function. Take the word "very." The
first English dictionary meaning for "very" is "really and
truly," from the French "verrai" (Modern French vrai,
"true"). In Middle English, the word meant "really and
truly." When Chaucer says of one of his pilgrims
He
was a very perfect gentle knight
He
does not mean that the knight was really really perfect, or even that he was
perfectly gentle. He is using a string of three adjectives of about equal force
to describe the knightliness of the knight--he was a very knight, a real knight
of a knight.
But
the use of "very," over and over and over, in strings of adjectives
where it came first, turned it into a special class of adverb called a
"degree word" (like "so," "much,"
"many," &c.) The word was grammaticalized.
One
more example, from French. Standard modern French for "I don't know"
is je ne sais pas. That pas is the same word as in the phrase pas de deux,
which means a dance step; it's the English word "pace." Literally,
French people say "I don't know step." And probably at one point they
really meant it. It's just that they kept saying it so often that it became a
grammaticalized "negative particle." So that "I don't know"
may be more common today in the less-standard form "sais pas, moi" .
. . where did the negative "ne" go? For that matter, where did it
come from to begin with?
So
what is the future in English of "totally," "incredibly,"
"squat," "alot," and "moreso"?
History
Both
cultural and linguistic history help us to specify how the language changed in
the past and in what context. We'll study some cultural history as background
to study of linguistic issues--and remember from above, that language and
culture are often synonymous. You will need to draw from coursework in British
history, or absorb some British history as you go. English people have had constant
contact with speakers of other languages for the past 1,500 years; they have
been colonized and they have been colonizers; their language has spread around
the world. We'll learn something of the history of "English-speaking
peoples" along the way of learning the history of English.
IMPORTANT:
You
must keep the following generalized chart in mind and know it well by the end
of the semester--if nothing else stays with you from this course for the rest
of your life, a knowledge of the basic historical periods of the English
language must stay. :-)
Old English (600-1100) is
a purely Germanic, highly inflected language with several literary standards:
West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish.
Early Middle English (1100-1300)
is a radically simplified English, losing most of its inflectional endings, but
as yet keeping a mostly Germanic vocabulary. It retains many different
dialectal forms and has little standardization in spelling and other
orthography.
Later Middle English (1300-1450) is
heavily influenced by French vocabulary and has two major literary dialects:
Midlands/Northern and London. Particularly in the London dialect, we begin to
see standardization, under the influence of the Chancery clerks.
Early Modern English (1450-1650)
moves sharply toward standardization, with the invention of printing being the
major factor here; London standard tends to become a national standard, with
consciousness that other dialect regions are sub-standard or non-literary. The
impact of the English translation of the Bible is very strong in this
standardizing of the written language.
Modern English (since 1650)
is characterized by relatively rigid standardization (compared to other English
periods, though not to Modern French) and by the increasing role of travel and
electronic media in establishing a spoken as well as a literary standard. At
the same time, the worldwide spread of English has resulted in new dialect
areas well beyond Britain. In particular, American English becomes a competing
standard with British "received" or "BBC" English.
In
broad theoretical terms, what we see in the development of the English language
is the intersection of "organic" or "natural" language
processes (which however one should always see as political, not unconscious or
biological) with technological forces.
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