The New Republic

The futility of examining a contention like this is matched only by the futility of resolving it. Language is both a utility and a measure of all we hold dear intellectually, emotionally and psychologically. In it we ground, among other things, our philosophy, culture, gender, race; our social, political and economic values; our hopes and dreams; our very sense of reality itself. The language of commerse will...in the end...be the language that is passed down to the final descendents. Right now it appears to be English. And if in time English does indeed become the universal language of commerse we can't help but speculate how much else it will drag along with it. You know, with respect to what language can tell us about the "human condition". And, of course, not tell us. And maybe the world will go along with it if we finally agree to join the rest of it in embracing the metric system. george

- iambiguous

November 3, 2009 at 3:36am

As usual, loony tunes post a comment not because he knows anything about linguistic, but because he is lonely and has no one to talk to. His comments add nothing to the discussion. George thinks that because he uses the word philosophy a number of times he has said something meaningful. The guy is deluded.

- jacksondyer

November 3, 2009 at 6:22am

“However, in these cases what seems to be happening is more that the languages are living as what I have called elsewhere “taught languages,” spoken by almost no one from the cradle, mainly used as second languages by a dedicated set but hardly an entire country of people. Even this is great. Yet in 2009 the simple fact is that there is a single example of a language brought alive from the page and now used as a native language by a massive population of users: Hebrew, and that was a very unusual story driven by a unique confluence of religious commitment, a sudden mixture of people speaking many different languages, and arrangements such as children early in the experiment that became modern Israel being removed from their parents and raised on kibbutzes (sic) where only Hebrew was spoken. This kind of thing can’t ever happen in, say, Ireland.” Let me begin with a correction the plural of Kibbutz is Kibbutzim (and not kibbutzes.) In a sense Hebrew never died out being preserved in texts both religious and non religious throughout the millennias of exile. Jews in exile going back to antiquity always spoke a local “Jewish language” which was the local tongue with Hebrew words mixed in. This was true of the Jews living in the ancient Greek world, in the Iberian Peninsula and in Eastern Europe were they kept their German Jewish language (called Yiddish). Yiddish means Jewish in German; just as the Spanish Jews after the expulsion kept their Judezmo (Ladino) (Spanish-Jewish). The Arabic spoken by Jews over the centuries also had a high percentage of Hebrew words mixed in. These Jewish dialects had mixed vocabularies but about 20% of the words were variants of Hebrew terms. Now, since most males in the Jewish community had studied the Torah in Hebrew most were acquainted with the Hebrew language. This accounts for both the desire as well as the ability to adopt themselves to a revived Hebrew language in Israel. American Jews are different in as much as their Torah education was not as extensive and hence their knowledge of Hebrew was deficient. Even here though there is a renewed interest in the Hebrew language. One other point, you said: “arrangements such as children early in the experiment that became modern Israel being removed from their parents and raised on kibbutzes (sic) where only Hebrew was spoken….” I am familiar with Kibbutz life and I don’t know what you mean. Children on Kibbutzim were raised in common by parents who already spike Hebrew. They “were not removed” in order to teach them Hebrew. In any case, the by the early 30’s Jews in mandate Palestine were already speaking Hebrew and new arrivals were eager to learn and live in that language. This is what Zionism was all about. I have another point to make about the possibility of a single world language but I’ll post these comments separately.

- jacksondyer

November 3, 2009 at 10:19am

"The language of commerse" Commerse George, really? On a piece about language try to make it a point to at least spell basic and common words correctly. In my area of rural Oaxaca Zapoteco is spoken more and more only by the uneducated poor, virtually none of my University students understand it, and fewer speak it. Some of the campus maintenance workers have tried to teach me a little but beyond a few common phrases I don't have the inclination to learn it since I know I shall not retain it when I leave. What makes the retention of these native languages so hard to maintain is that the dominant language, Spanish, was imposed from the outside and is radically different. In China local languages flourish, my Children's first language was Wu, the language of Shanghai. Due to the unique nature of Chinese it could be said to have no written form, since the written form is meant to express Mandarin (except in Hong Kong, where it is Cantonese). And all the dictionaries that use pinyin have Mandarin, so learning Wu for me was far more difficult, and I never did learn it. Needless to say, living in a city where the majority of people spoke Wu made Mandarin more difficult, like going to Brazil to learn Spanish (provided that everyone also spoke Spanish as their second language). Wu is so prevalent that Chinese from other provinces who live and work for multinationals there are happier at work when English is spoken more and feel left out at social events. Of course, learning Wu for a Chinese person is far easier than learning English since Wu and Mandarin are closely related, but the problem is that it would require someone to teach it. Language schools are abundant in Shanghai, Mandarin for expats, and foreign languages for Chinese, but no Wu. The thing this article doesn't lay out is that many, many languages blend in with others, that the death of some languages doesn't represent a true death since a sister who looks and sounds very alike is still alive. Some variants of Wu die out, yet Wu thrives. More people speak Wu than speak Polish. If a language like Walloon dies, it would require little scholarship to understand it and even recreate it. The danger is when an outside completely different language is imposed, like Spanish on Mexico. When Huave goes, and Mixe and Mixteca, and Zapoteco, etc. it will be gone forever.

- blackton

November 3, 2009 at 11:01am

Yet in 2009 the simple fact is that there is a single example of a language brought alive from the page and now used as a native language by a massive population of users: Hebrew I have one little quibble, I wouldn't call Hebrew massive. There are what, about 6,000,000 or so people in the world that speak Hebrew? In order to qualify as massive, lets try to stick to the over 100 million mark. I like Yiddish, on NY radio they used to have Yiddish language broadcasts, and since my German was a lot better then I used to try to pick out what I could understand. So many great words have been brought into American language from it. The great thing about living in Jersey was when any Italian friend of mine, who have heavy Jersey accents, used yiddish words in their common speech. I had a friend of mine who always used to say (incorrectly): "what are you, meshug?" or how he wanted to "shtup that broad"

- blackton

November 3, 2009 at 11:18am

oh, yeah, about Yiddish, ZZ Top has a kick ass rock song called "tush." (which is yiddish from tuchus). Only in America.

- blackton

November 3, 2009 at 11:23am

"In China local languages flourish, my Children's first language was Wu, the language of Shanghai." Blackton, this is interesting. I know little about the many languages spoked in China. I just read the Chinese novel “Brothers,” by Yu Hua and was surprised of the different languages spoken in the novel. Are you familiar with the novel?

- jacksondyer

November 3, 2009 at 1:15pm

The only one of his books I have read is Huozhe (To live). How is the book? Since I have come to Mexico I haven't really been reading anything in Chinese (or English translation of Chinese books). What is most interesting about China is not just the languages, but the sheer number of dialects, even on both sides of the Huangpu river in Shanghai they will have variations in vocabulary. The Chuansha word for grandfather is Da Da, so I had to adjust hearing my sons call my father in law Da Da instead of me. Ma Ma is pretty universal (it isn't, but moreso). The thing I like about Chinese most is the written language, whenever Koreans use the classic script, or the Japanese, I can understand their meaning. For instance Hyundai uses the characters 现代, which means modern. In mandarin it is xian dai.

- blackton

November 3, 2009 at 2:18pm

"Meanwhile, there are efforts of revive languages that are no longer spoken or are in danger of being no longer spoken, such as Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Maori..." This assessment is inaccurate in relation to Welsh, for one. While some people are surprised to learn it, Welsh is very much alive and spoken by more than 20% of the population in Wales - and it's not just the old folk - the figures for young people under 18 speaking Welsh rises to 40%. Even taking some rubberiness in the stats into account, the trends are towards healthiness and strength, not against it. The more the Welsh language becomes tied to Welsh identity, culture (especially youth culture) and work opportunities, the more robust it becomes. Not to mention the 15-20% of families for whom Welsh is their first and most natural language to use in the home. Welsh is the strongest of the Celtic languages, partly because it kept a stronger base population of speakers, and partly because it has historically been at the centre of Welsh nationalist movements. Unlike Ireland, where Irish was less central than the fact of Republicanism, or in Scotland, where the base of speakers was only ever too small for language to factor largely in pan-Scottish nationalism. In short, Welsh isn't going away, and in every indicator it is gaining strength.

- Mormon Socialist

November 3, 2009 at 3:29pm

blackton, Still reduced to a pale immitation of JD, eh? Why don't you actually take on my arguments for a change. As I noted for Jacko, they revolve around identity, value judgments, political economy, the limitations of language and existential philosophy. In other other words, how these factors play a crucial role in evaluating "the news". Or rather, for folks like you, how they should. If nothing else, you can provide a template for all the others who cluck, cluck, cluck and wiggle, wiggle, wiggle when confronted with them. Or [sigh] do you still prefer the snug [and woefuly smug] familiarity of the traditional coccoon frequented by your colleagues in the mainstream media? Be bolder, my friend. ; o ) george

- iambiguous

November 3, 2009 at 5:26pm

Blackton, the novel was uneven in tone but a lot of fun to read.

- jacksondyer

November 3, 2009 at 5:38pm

Looks like the creepy George woke up. Like Dracula he sleeps by day and posts by night his smug and silly comments.

- jacksondyer

November 3, 2009 at 5:40pm

“…I hope the piece does not give any sense that I think of English as somehow “better” than other languages. I do write that if it ends up being the last one, we could do worse than one that is relatively easy to learn the basics of--no gender, few conjugational endings, etc. John McWhorter argument begs the question about whether it is possible to have single language in the world. My answer is no. Let’s take English as an example. There are many types of English being spoken in the world today. American English is quite different from British English which any film goer trying to decipher the spoken language of say the Scottish or Welsh countryside without subtitles would soon find out. The problems is compounded when we are dealing with the English of the Asian subcontinent which has incorporated many local expressions. For there to be a single universal tongue be it English or Spanish all other tongues would have to die out first. This is impossible and as English becomes adopted in different parts of the world it inevitably adopts the local vocabulary and sometimes syntax which makes it unintelligible to English speakers elsewhere. It is hard for an Argentinian speaker to understand a Central American one even thought they both speak Espanol. From what Blackton said the same may true of Chinese speakers. The same will happen if English or any other language were to become the last, or only language in the world. Multiplicity and not unicity is our fate, thank goodness.

- jacksondyer

November 3, 2009 at 5:52pm

Mormon Socialist, I am intrigued. What is a Mormon Socialist?

- jacksondyer

November 3, 2009 at 5:54pm

Mormon, that it is interesting about Welsh, but from what I have heard it is a son of a bitch of a language. Some great languages are in the south pacific, my sister speaks Ponapean from her time in the peace corps, she learned it pretty quickly. jackson, study pidgin English sometime, this was the language spoken quite commonly among ports around the world. It was very common in Shanghai in the early 1900's and you can still find pamphlets and what not with that language available.

- blackton

November 3, 2009 at 6:08pm

Blackton, You're right about Welsh being really hard to learn. My father (a linguist) said he had heard it jokingly described as a language designed by two separate committees working in two different rooms. One decided pronunciation while the other worked out spellings.

- kerFuFFler

November 4, 2009 at 12:20pm

kerFuFFler "You're right about Welsh being really hard to learn. My father (a linguist) said he had heard it jokingly described as a language designed by two separate committees working in two different rooms. One decided pronunciation while the other worked out spellings." Interesting but the same thing happened with most languages since the spelling system came long after the phonetic structure was already in place. I read that the spelling for Russian was designed in Byzantium by someone (a Greek speaking scholar) who didn't even know the language that well. The alphabet he came up with is said to be almost perfect. This account has been challenged but not the fact that it was designed by non native Russians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabet Perhaps a Russian speaker could help out, here.

- jacksondyer

November 4, 2009 at 3:56pm

MormSoc, you just made the point -- more or less -- that I wanted to make. But while I'd agree that in Ireland the language issue was less important than the political issue of national independence, that doesn't quite explain the different outcomes, especially considering the resources spent on Irish Gaelic over the last 80 years. If you are drawing a direct comparison of Ireland with Wales, then the problem with that parallel is that there has been no real national independence movement in the latter (much less than in Scotland). I think it's more revealing and also curious, therefore, that the country with the least degree of national sovereignty (Wales) has retained its original language to a much higher degree than the country with the highest degree of national sovereignty (Ireland). Go figure!

- ironyroad

November 4, 2009 at 6:35pm

@jacksondyer: A Mormon Socialist, c'est moi! Well, the whole Mormon project began with a desire to rediscover and restore the original or "primitive" form of Christianity. Along with that came a wish to remake society in the image of the early saints, who had "all things in common". Many have compared the communitarian experiments of early Mormons to a kind of pre-communism, even though the average Utah Mormon would rather talk about polygamy than admit that they had anything to do with "communist" ideas! I'm no communist, but I do have a hankering for the way Mormons used to try to live in an integrated social, religious and economic community. And the name really fires up conservative Mormons, too - added bonus. @kerFuFFler & ironyroad: the Welsh language has an unfairly bad reputation. It's not that difficult at all. It's lost many of its inflected endings, like English, and mainly scares people off because they think it's unpronounceable! When you realise that "w" is actually a vowel (as in "who" or "you") and get past the "LL" sound, there's nothing to fear. There are many reasons why Welsh has prospered better than (say) Irish. One is simply the numbers. In 1900, around 50% of Welshmen and women still spoke Welsh, while the equavalent numbers for Irish-speakers was more like 10-15%. Both have declined, of course, but one clearly came into the 20th century with a better head start. Another reason is the historical and cultural place of the language, and indeed, its prestige. The Welsh language got a huge shot in the arm when, in the late 16th century, some canny Welsh nobles convinced Queen Elizabeth to allow an Authorised version of the Bible in Welsh in order to secure their loyalty to the Church of England. Thus was produced the first Authorised translation of the Bible, predating the King James version by around 15 years, but in Welsh! It was a massive hit, producing a whole new generation who were now literate and (relatively) educated because they could now read and speak the text of the Bible in their own tongue. By the 19th century, religion and language (and national identity) were so tightly wound together that the average Welsh miner, who might hear the orders of the bosses in English, would sit in church on Sunday and hear the Word of God thundering from the non-conformist pulpit in Welsh. This was then, truly, "Iaith Neb", the Language of Heaven. "If Welsh is good enough for God, then who am I to put it aside for Saesneg (English)?" In contrast, the Irish-language Bible didn't get published until around the late 18th-early 19th century, and was received by an illiterate and down-trodden Irish populace, many of whom had lost the language anyway, and a Catholic Church that didn't really have its heart in spreading a vernacular Bible. Thus Irish was denied a chance at respectability and status that it might have otherwise gained. And one last point - it's tempting to think that a nation has only so much nationalist energy to spend, and that with such a struggle for Irish independence and republicanism, there wasn't much left to worry about language. So while the Republic of Ireland has put effort into the status of the Irish language for the past 80 years, it hasn't been enough to reverse the stagnation of the preceding few centuries. In Wales, the language has been the vehicle for the expression of Welsh nationalism, largely because of the lack of any realistic alternative. Political aspirations had to be sublimated into only available movement of any size and cohesiveness - the language movement. And one last plug for Welsh: it was the favourite language of J.R.R. Tolkien, and he used it as the template for his own invention of Elvish!

- Mormon Socialist

November 4, 2009 at 9:55pm

“@jacksondyer: A Mormon Socialist, c'est moi! Well, the whole Mormon project began with a desire to rediscover and restore the original or "primitive" form of Christianity. Along with that came a wish to remake society in the image of the early saints, who had "all things in common". Many have compared the communitarian experiments of early Mormons to a kind of pre-communism, even though the average Utah Mormon would rather talk about polygamy than admit that they had anything to do with "communist" ideas! I'm no communist, but I do have a hankering for the way Mormons used to try to live in an integrated social, religious and economic community. And the name really fires up conservative Mormons, too - added bonus.” Thanks for the reply. I had to smile when I read your response, Mormon Socialist. I recently had to re-read Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” about his adventures n Utah and Nevada during the early 1860’s and he some pretty interesting and amusing things to say about early Mormons there. He met Brigham Young, and considered him the unofficial King of the Utah Territory. The society he described wasn’t exactly socialist, unless you consider the equality of wives subservient to one man a form of socialism, but you need to read the book itself to get a taste of Twain’s wit. Ironically the only communism he found was that of the mostly silver miners living in common in huts and even sharing beds while they were hunting for precious ores. This is how I see communism, it occurs happenstance when diverse individuals are thrown together in a common and temporary project. It doesn’t last long since as soon as their common aims are achieved they tend to revert to their erstwhile individuality.

- jacksondyer

November 5, 2009 at 11:10am

JD: Written Russian does indeed codify remarkably well the pronunciation of spoken Russian (or vice versa), and in that sense the Cyrillic alphabet is a good match for Russian.

- sdemuth

November 6, 2009 at 8:17am