The truth about language
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - july 06 ]
She speaks eighteen languages. She can't say no in any of them. - Dorothy Parker
One night, driving cross-country near Niagara Falls where a new bridge to Ontario was building, I stopped at an all-night diner to warm up our babies' milk. Waiting at the counter, I sat drinking coffee with a man in a hard hat who turned to me after a minute and asked, "You like bridge work?"
Perhaps some people do not like bridge work, or maybe taking a break in the middle of the night gives a man time to count his blessings.
Our greatest strength and our common fault is that we naturally share our stories with others. We make the assumption that they think the same as we do. We take it for granted that they see what we see, feel what we feel, and know what we know. We are wrong, but if we did not stick our noses into other people's realities we would have neither sympathy nor revulsion for them. We would not know what others do not know, so we would have no stories to tell and there would be no fun, no jokes, and no myths. Without stories we would have nothing to talk about, we would have no friends, no plays, no movies, no commercial television, and no religion.
We carry life through our mothers, then we become like others. As we learn how we are not like others we become ourselves. We are mostly the same as everybody else, except for the precious differences where the stories are. Each story we tell makes us unique.
From conception to death we learn to be parts of a culture defined by a language in all its varieties. We learn by becoming like others. We are all like a lot of people, like parents, mentors, bosses, teachers, and friends. The wheel goes round and round, the cycle unending. Like ants and bees we are expendable, except for the queen.
We are cut outs, we are identical paper dolls right down to our colour, each of us one of a type. For example, because I am a white male of a certain age, I have been mistaken for television actors on two occasions. Once in Malaysia at a Chinese department store, I was mobbed by high school girls who saw me as Napoleon Solo, Robert Vaughn's character in the television series The Man from UNCLE. I signed "Napoleon" in their notebooks.
When the movie Sweetheart's Dance was filming in Vermont, I stopped by to watch the film crew at work in front of the Grange Hall in Hyde Park. Don Johnson, star of Miami Vice, was playing the leading part. I was standing there talking to a policeman when a school bus passed by, its windows rolled down and the kids leaning out. A girl spied me and shouted "There's Don Johnson!" The other kids all called " Hi, Don Johnson!" I waved back like the pope.
We are like foreigners the way apples are like oranges. It is not true that down deep all people are alike. Our ways are not compatible and harmonious, no matter what we do to make them be like us. If you go to another country and live with the people, then you will see how well you can get onto their way of thinking and being. Those people cannot see how you are different from every other one of your people. To apples you are just another orange. For example, my wife is married to an American, so I am first of all a generic American to her Canadian family and friends, who are mostly Quebeckers. It is better to be an American in Quebec than it is to be a Canadian. Quebeckers do not like Canadians much, while they admire Americans because of the American Revolution and television. They are full of jealous admiration for those who broke away from the British Crown. When I am drinking with my Quebec friends, I always toast the Queen, "À la Reine!" and they groan.
Like most Americans today, they are, as part of the television generation, not stupid but uninformed. They do not know many of our stories. They simply cannot play Jeopardy. They prefer the most popular television program in Quebec, The Price Is Right, which is about consumer goods.
A conversational case in point: my friend Richard Via, a stage manager, lived with Mary Martin of musical theatre fame - Peter Pan, Maria (Sound of Music), Nellie Forbush (South Pacific) and so on. When her name comes up, I must explain to my Québecois friends that she is the mother of JR of TV's Dallas, Larry Hagman. Then they know who she is.
My wife softens my outlandishness by telling people that I am of French extraction. She believes that my ancestors came from France because one of my great-grandmothers tried to prove her origin was French in order to inherit some money. I believed it too, until I learned better.
Those people who have never been foreigners are not truly aware of what it means to be members of their own tribes. Do the Mormons send their young people overseas for two years to live among the heathen so that they get their bearings lined up and know who and where they are in this world, and so that they can say that they have been there and done that, and there is no place like home? They want their young people to know that there is no better way of life than their own. And the truth is that there is no better way of life than one's own. Ways of life may be prettier, cleaner, or longer, but no better, including our own. Ask the French.
Anybody who speaks a language can teach it, can't they? No. In truth, language teaching is a waste of time and money. It doesn't work. It's like teaching someone to play the harp, or Ingmar Berman's old joke about how to play the cello: "First, spread your legs." With the help of a tutor you can learn to make a rough translation from a language similar to your own, like French and German. But you can also do it by yourself. Learning a language requires living in the language, not fooling around with it.
There was a time when school learning beyond the elementary level - the ABCs and how many bushels a wagon holds - was Latin and mathematics, as if Latin, a dead language thought to be the perfect expression of a Golden Age, and mathematics, the science of numbers, would sharpen the mind. The effect was to foist prescriptive grammar based on Latin onto the users of a Germanic language, English, and to make its speakers feel guilty, and to make generations of people wonder what the square of the hypotenuse was good for.
People think that being able to speak another language is like being a foreigner, but speaking or reading a language is not a state of being or a stage of development. It is an activity, like walking and running. Some people have to use crutches. Others march with the crowd. Speaking a second language is merely getting along with the people who speak it to their satisfaction. Like Richard Burton in disguise you go on the Hajj to Mecca, and no one suspects you are an infidel, then you can be said to speak Arabic, in a sense. If like Burton you pretend to be a Pashto-speaking Afghani, it's all right. Your halting Arabic is good enough. As Theodore Bickel used to say, "It's close enough for folk music," a little out of tune, maybe. Who cares?
Who cares is one who cannot accept your being different, like an immigrant's child.
Children learn their native languages from other children, not from adults and teachers. No one sets them down and teaches them. A second language is ideally learned naturally in the same way. In bilingual, double-language communities, as Southern Britain once was with many people speaking both English and French, one language is preferred to the other, causing the languages to overlap in ways that cause them to change.
A standard language is an artifice, a made-up compromise. Many countries have academies that lay down the rules of usage of the "standard." For example, L'Académie Française is trying to stop the word email by telling folks to use the word le courriel, so now French has two words for email. In Québec automobile parts have two or three names, one in each official language, and one in the Québec dialect. For example, a fan-belt is une courroie, a starter is un démarreur or un starteur.
Nobody speaks a standard language, and if we did not have standards of correctness and proper usage decided by the finest most-cultivated arbiters, nothing would happen differently.
An individual's language is more like the speech of the larger community that speaks that language. My "perfectly bilingual" son says things like, "It's a long time since I haven't seen him." He speaks French and English, or English and French, sometimes at the same time.
He learned that since is somehow negative, as is its equivalent in French. I haven't seen him since high school: Since high school I haven't seen him. It's a long time since I haven't seen him. [!]
Such use of negatives is like our saying "I don't think he's here," when we mean, "I think he's not here." Foreigners get tripped up when our language is illogical. For example, we say to a guest, "Won't you sit down?"
The guest says, "Yes, I won't," meaning, "No, I won't. "Will you not sit down? - Yes." Negative questions in English do not have simply negative meanings.
What are the meanings of the negative question "Aren't you funny?"
It means sarcastically that you are perhaps not funny in my opinion and perhaps I disapprove of what you say and/or of what you have been doing - all that in three words.
Yes, we have no bananas.
Consider the confusion we have over the verb mind, which has the negative built in. We ignore the negative if we don't mind:
- Do you mind if I smoke? [meaning May I smoke?]
- Sure, yes, go ahead.
- No, I don't mind.
-Yes, I do mind. Here yes means no.
Languages are so complex that they have to be learned by practice, by examples in situations. No amount of thinking about language can help you say the right thing. You don't think about riding a bicycle. If you do, you'll fall off. If you think about speaking, you'll make mistakes. If you do not think about speaking, you'll make mistakes. So it goes.
Children learn real spoken language by playing and working with other kids. They learn proper language in school. Proper language is polite language that does not shock anyone since it is not vulgar or common. It is middle class. It is based on the written form of the language and prescriptive grammar. Prescriptive grammar is like Robert's Rules of Order and Emily Post's etiquette, made up and imposed, both unnatural and socially important. If one is fortunate, one writes well enough and speaks in an unremarkable way. If one is unfortunate, he speaks like a pompous ass or a rude bully, like John Kerry or George W Bush.
Written language is mostly polite language put on paper so that it is sufficiently complete for others to understand. Anything you put on paper that interferes with the readers getting the message, like misspelling, bad punctuation, skewed grammar, and stupid rhetoric is a fault most of us are familiar with.
Spoken language is often impolite and familiar. In addition, it is incomplete because when you speak you adjust your language to your listeners. You don't have to explain to your family what you have to explain to a lawyer. Your talk can be allusive and private such that outsiders cannot understand it. With your friends the same is true to a lesser degree. You do not have to spell out what you mean about what you share with your friends, for example, an entire conversation:
"How 'bout them Yankees?"
With strangers you can take very little for granted. You must not think that they know what you know. With doctors and lawyers you speak in full sentences and leave nothing out. It is dangerous and unlucky to leave anything out or to make up stories when you are speaking to a doctor or to a lawyer. That's why they have special legal privileges, so that they can hide the truth, or lie on your behalf.
People who grow up in one culture speaking one language are like loaves of bread too long in the oven. Just as their languages are thick crusts on their minds, their values are shrunken crumbs. The crust is too thick and the crumb is hard and bitter. New immigrants to the United States soon learn to emulate our backward, dumb insularity, or they must at least put on an American false face. In any event, their children will by necessity become real Americans like most of the rest of us, able only to shout in English incomprehensible commands and obscenities at Iraqi peasants.
I learned about foreigners from Grandma's neighbors in Indiana, Belgian miners brought over to America to dig the soft coal and die of lung cancer, like Grandpa, so that the big dynamo in Petersburg could light the hills. Grandma tried to speak French with the wives and children. She was curious about them perhaps because her mother thought she was descended from the rich Du Ponts of Delaware, a popular hoax of the time. In the newspapers grifters promised inherited money if you could prove you were an heir. Grandma was sure we were descended from French Huguenots and the Du Ponts, but the immigrants' children refused to speak French with her, while the women were happy to use a few words, just to be polite.
When I was with my parents we lived in a part of town called Dutch Flats because of the many German immigrants there. We laughed at all the German-inspired phrases in English, calling them Dutchy. "Throw mother from the train a kiss," for example, or like Churchill's famous parody of prescribed English "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put." Like Yiddish, a kind of immigrant German in the big cities, the immigrant Volksprache was unpopular in Indiana.
For few weeks in the summer of 1944, when I was nine years old, I ran errands for German prisoners of war who were dismantling an old ice factory in Dutch Flats. They had to stay within the barbed wire, and the guards allowed them to talk with us kids and give us money to buy cigarettes and candy for them at Schmidt's Grocery. "Wie heißt du? Wieviel kostet es? Das kostet fünf pfennige." Cigarettes cost zvanzig pfennige a pack in those days.
My father, a native speaker of South Midland American, had an encrusted mind, and so he could never pronounce my French-speaking wife's name. It is Danielle, with equal stress on both syllables: DAN YELL. In Father's pronunciation, the name had to be Dan ELL. He could change the stress (relative loudness) to the second syllable from the first, but his mind did not allow the correct syllable division. He could not hear the subtleties of another language, and so he could not learn one, and he never tried.
When my mother visited us in Montréal, she was very uncomfortable around French speakers. She never before had had to be a foreigner. She said she felt "people were always talking behind my back." Danielle was not welcome in her home. When I visited my mother solo in Florida, she always matched me up with an attractive, available white-trash woman, hoping I would fall out of love.
Perhaps most American feel that people are always talking behind their backs. In my experience this is true, and lately what they have been saying is not good.
Despite the drawbacks of parochialism, insularity, incuriosity, smugness, philistinism, impoverishment, and fear, some of us Americans are no so blighted.
How many languages do you speak? People ask me this question when they learn that I have lived in several countries where the language is not English. I tell them that I speak only English, and that poorly. Pressed to go on, I tell them that I can get along in French, Spanish, Italian, and Thai, and get into trouble in Japanese, Arabic, Somali, and German. When Thai acquaintances ask my Thai friends whether I can speak Thai, they answer "Poot passat Thai gnu-gnu pla-pla. (He) speaks Thai snake-snake fish-fish..." a little, often enough. That's a compliment, I think.
When they ask me about Chinese, I know that they do not know what they are asking about. I tell them that Thai is a kind of Chinese, and part of a continuum of "languages" that includes Lao, Yunnanese in Southern China, and Cantonese in Hong Kong. I tell them about how Chinese people from different parts of China converse, making signs on their palms with their fingers indicating the ideograph for the idea or thing they mean because they cannot understand each other when they talk. In the cities you see people scratching away on their hands to show each other their intentions and questions. The standard, imposed language of China today, Gwo-yu, or Mandarin, shares a graphic writing system, which is not an alphabet, with other spoken "languages" of China. That is how people of different ways of speaking can communicate in face to face conversation, by making signs with their fingers as if drawing on their palms.
So here is a basic distinction, one necessary to understanding. An alphabet is a set of letters that in combination stand for vocal sounds and also for ideas. Natural languages are, first of all, spoken, made of sounds produced by people. The alphabet was an invention after the fact of spoken language. Speaking came first, then people used signs to give information and make records, and then someone invented the alphabet. With the alphabet we indicate both meaning and sound. There are many alphabets, all related historically to the original.
Before the alphabet we had only numerals and signs: 1, 2, I, II, ¢, $, &, @, #, £, †, and so on. Some numerals were cumbersome, Roman numerals, for example. Arabic numerals replaced Roman numerals because they are more abstract and simpler. The decimal system, a generative system of only ten signs, replaced an additive system of many signs. Luckily, the Romans did not want to count very high.
Our ten numerals are a kind of writing system like the Chinese ideographic system. The numerals do not stand for sounds, but for concepts. The numeral 1 stands for an idea, not a word. We express it as a word however we please. In English we say WUN. In Thai we say NUNG, in French UNG, in Spanish UNO, in German AYN. The word is arbitrary. It could be anything we say, but we agree to say it one way so people can understand us. The idea, however, is universal, just like the numeral 1. Some signs and symbols, not letters as such, that we use sometimes in writing: {} [ ] = - , . / ; ' \ ☼ »? © ÷ ≈ ° . IMHO, we learn these PDQ. [In my humble...]
The ideographic system of Chinese is similar to the signs and symbols of mathematics, the opposite of the phonetic alphabet, which uses one sign to stand for one speech sound. The phonetic letter [p] stands for the sound made when the lips part and close before or after a puff of air, and so on. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a scientific tool for use in recording speech sounds for the purpose of describing languages and making up alphabets for writing them. The ordinary alphabet stands for speech sounds and in combinations it also stands for meanings, for example, to, too, two, tutu, toucan, tew, and teuton, so when we read we do not read letters alone like Morse Code. We read letters, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs – all at the same time. Without the context, that is, the whole book, chapter, article, essay, letter, conversation, and situation, you cannot interpret the meaning correctly. Even given the context we make misinterpretations and get the wrong idea.
It takes a heap o' livin' to call a language your own. Passing language courses has almost nothing to do with language in use. You can go to school to learn a language, and when you get through you will know a lot about the language but you will not know the language.
Taking a foreign language in school is like going to Sunday school. Just as we send children to Sunday school and catechism classes to learn the rudiments of our religions, and we send them to Hebrew or Chinese school to learn about the family language and heritage, foreign language classes are like nail polish on fingers that cannot grasp.
Many foreign language teachers in the United States do not know, in this sense, what they are teaching. They cannot read newspapers or hold intelligent conversations in the languages they teach. Besides, languages cannot be taught in classrooms. There should be no foreign languages taught in schools. It is a waste of time and money. It does not work. Instead, all schools should teach how people of the whole world speak their languages, that is, students should learn the phonetic alphabet [IPA], general linguistics, and the history of English. Then they might be ready to use a foreign language when the time comes for them to do so.
All dictionaries of one or several languages have pronunciation guides in the world-standard phonetic alphabet, except in the United States where each dictionary uses its own incomprehensible system. American students do not learn to read the phonetic alphabet, so they never know how to pronounce correctly. For instance, they make nothing of the difference between the two pronunciations of Al-Qaida. In Arabic it is alk Aïda, not alk Ada, but the British transcribed the name using the letter /E/ instead of /I/: Al-Qaeda, because Brits are as ignorant as Americans. So people started saying alk Ada. Compare Eye rack and Ear rock.
Americans are all a boy named Sue. They are all in Folsom Prison. They dig sixteen tons of number nine coal, and the straw boss says, "Bless my soul," and they do not believe the rest of the world exists.
Individuals have varying degrees of sophistication and understanding of other ways of life. At one end you might find a hopelessly confused multi-culturalist like me. For example, a kindly Anglican priest once asked me my faith. I replied that I was a Christian-Buddhist-Unitarian-Muslim-Daoist. I lived for years in Africa, Egypt and the Far East. In my old age, I find truth and comfort in the Christianity I learned as a child, for all that other talk about faith and religion is merely talk, or put more properly, metaphysical observation, that is, mutterings about nothing. At the other end of a scale of worldly sophistication from me you might find a fellow coming out of the jungles of Brazil who knows nothing of the modern world, or an old servant in Siam whose life has been bounded by the family estate, and whose last wish is for his ashes to be buried beneath the stone lintel of the main gate. What's the difference between my sophistication and the simplicity of others? It is so great that it amounts to nothing.
The metaphysician Noam Chomsky supposes that each person is born with a language acquisition device [LAD] that accounts for the fact that most have the potential to use an infinitely complex language too unpredictable to be learned piece by piece, of course. That LAD is called intelligence for want of a better term. Normal people can put two and two together if and when it suits their purposes. Mathematics and propositional logic can give theoretical descriptions of human behavior, but they cannot be used to explain it.
If Chomsky's Cartesian speculation is true, then each individual must also have a hatred acquisition device [HAD] that accounts for the endless antagonism among men. To say that men speak and men hate is to say nothing new. What they speak and what they hate is what they have learnt.
My adventures have taught me a lot and given me strong feelings. In addition to my reverence for dead white men and great composers and performers, I have been there and done that when you talk about Somalia, Egypt, Marxism, Siam, marriage, France, academic freedom, Italy, Singapore, sexuality, Japan, children, Republicans, Palestine, Mexico, gun control, Islam, Freemasonry, and so on, all set topics for me, and here's the point: all that I know about them is tainted and shaped by my petty experience. I know that I am usually not a trustworthy source of information about anything. I know more than most people about some matters, but not much else – language, for example, and history, which is a pack of lies. I taught English to foreigners most of my life, living overseas. I know that teaching is like history.
History is merely talk-story, a version of events seen from a point of view, the actual events and their importance forever colored by the background and intentions of the teller. We never in any event get to the point where we know what it is to be another kind of person, much less to know what Napoleon's retreat from Moscow was like. Being a foreigner is not like being anyone else. It is impossible to measure and compare those qualities that make a German a German with the qualities that make a Pole a Pole, or a Bushman a Bushman.
So, in order to sell your widgets in China, you had better know widgetry and government regulations and business practices, or you had better be able to hire someone who does know these things and is willing to manage them for you. Similarly, to be a surgeon or general practitioner of medicine, you do not need a course in inorganic chemistry. You need to spend a lot of time with good doctors in order to see how doctoring is done and where to get the right kind of help.
In order to learn a language, go and live all day every day with people who speak nothing other than the language you want to learn. Do not say anything in any language to anyone. Do not say a word in the language you want to learn for months or until you absolutely must speak. By the time you understand all that is said around you, you will know enough of the language to get by. The longer you wait before speaking, the better will be your competence and performance in the language. For example, the child who speaks late speaks well. Language learning is simple: live with its speakers until you understand them.All other ways of acquiring a language are deficient in some respects. If all you need is polite Japanese in order to attend meetings in Japan, go to a commercial language school like Berlitz, or hire a tutor. But if you truly want to learn Japanese, move to Japan and live with Japanese people, not with Americans or English, or Koreans. Foreign languages are best learned in bed.
