Some common linguistic fallacies

Text 6

(from “ An Introduction to Language”)

The widespread belief that languages somehow have souls and that they in some way reflect the racial, national, and even spiritual characteristics of those who speak them cannot be supported by any available evidence. It is obvious that the technological, economic, and cultural development of a people is reflected in the word stock of its language; one would not expect to find words meaning 'nail' in languages spoken by those who live in thatched lean-tos or igloos, or a word meaning 'God' (in contrast to 'god') among those who are polytheistic, or for that matter words designating any of the material and spiritual phenomena peculiar to Western European cul­ture among those who have no concern whatever with this particular culture. But the presence or absence of specific vocabulary items is no real test of linguistic soul—whatever that may mean—nor of the efficacy of a language for those who speak it.

When the great Danish Anglicist Otto Jespersen declared that "as the language is, so also is the nation," it is doubtful that he had vocabulary items in mind.

Nevertheless, he was to some extent considering matters that really have nothing to do with language per se, but rather with matters of style. English is, he said, "methodical, energetic, business-like and sober," not much given to "finery and elegance," and opposed to pedantic restrictions of any sort—thus evincing the very characteristics that he saw, or fancied he saw, and admired in the English nation.⁴ It is highly doubtful that the linguistic characteristics that he so admired in English reflect in any way the collective soul—if we can conceive of such a thing—of the English-speaking peoples of the world, or even those who have chosen to stay at home in England.

It is unlikely, however, that when he was writing in 1905 Jespersen had in mind anything quite so specific as Edmund Wilson's belief that, just as the will of the ancient Jewish people "finds expression in the dynamic verb forms [of classical Hebrew], so the perdurability of the people is manifested in what may be called the physical aspects of the language."⁵ Nor would Jespersen, it is needless to say, have been astonished, as was V. S. Pritchett, that in Germany "agreeable, straightforward people speak German, a lan­guage bursting with grammatical complexities, and not a nonchalant, gram-marless tongue like our own."⁶ We can forgo here any detailed comment on Pritchett's identification of grammar with a particular system employing a comparatively high degree of inflection—the modification of the form of words, usually by means of endings, to indicate grammatical relationships. To suppose, however, that English is grammarless because it has considerably fewer such inflectional modifications than German is to be unaware of the manifold other grammatical devices by which we communicate with one another—quite aside from the fact that any language must have grammar, which is to say a system.

T. R. Fyvel, writing in the Spectator (London), shows an even more extreme disapproval of the German language, believing it to be partly respon­sible for the rise of Nazism: "to explain how the scum of the earth came to seize control in Germany must lead one far beyond the unemployment days and Versailles, deep into the nature of the German romantic movement and the structure of the German language...."⁷ Somewhat more vehement toward yet another language is Miriam Chapin in How People Talk (p. 86):

Quite a case could be made out for the assertion that if the Japanese had not spoken such a thoroughly cussed language, they would never have let their rulers embark on such a career of conquest.... If the ordinary Japanese had spoken Chinese, had known his sensible, rather godless neighbor, he could hardly have accepted so readily the doctrine that China must be bombed and bayoneted into the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The connection that these authors so clearly see between language and politi­cal philosophy, of course, exists only in the realm of linguistic folklore; never­theless, for the linguist to doubt the existence of such a connection is to bring down coals of fire upon his head, so deeply rooted are such notions. An amateur linguistic judgment that is at least partly accurate is the bromide attributed to Queen Victoria, to the effect that although German is a very difficult language, German children seem to have no trouble speaking it. This leads us into another tenet dear to the hearts of those who are fond of speculating about language—that some languages are intrinsically more difficult than others. While it is perfectly true that an English-speaking adult would have more difficulty learning a totally unrelated tongue (say Turkish or Chinese) than a closely related one (say German or Dutch) or even a more remotely related one (say Russian or Greek), it does not follow that Turkish and Chinese are intrinsically more difficult languages than those belonging to the great Indo-European family of languages, to which English also be­longs.

The fact is that Turkish and Chinese children have acquired a certain mastery of the grammatical structure of their languages at about the same stage of life as American and English children—at five years or a little earlier. And this is true of all children all over the world. It must be stressed that we are here referring to grammar—the system by which we communicate orally—not to vocabulary items, which we go on acquiring all our lives. At the age of five we were all able to say all we wanted to say, without knowing such elegant items as charisma, mystique, and viable; and if at that tender age we used forms like you was, swang (for swung), and don't never, we were not using un-English forms at all, as the history of our language shows, but merely currently unfashionable ones.

Esthetic judgments of a language or a dialect are completely subjective and hence can have no real validity; they merely indicate what one likes to hear. Such judgments are therefore eschewed by the linguist. It is, however, widely believed that certain languages are more "beautiful" or more "musi­cal" than others—for instance, that Italian is somehow more beautiful, more musical than other languages. When a well-known professor of Italian descent was asked in a television interview (no more ill-informed than most such interviews that deal with language) what was the most beautiful language, he attempted, quite correctly, to evade the question; when the interviewer came forth, as was practically inevitable, with the question "Isn't Italian the most musical language?" the good professor, realizing that this was no occasion for disputatiousness, would say no more than,

Well, he supposed that most operas were written to be sung in that language. This subterfuge was good in a way, for as a rule linguists do not contribute to the popular­ity of their craft when they refuse to corroborate popular misconceptions.

John Temple Graves, for many years a distinguished writer and publicist in the American Deep South, stated that in his opinion French was the most beautiful of languages, though it is unlikely that all would agree with his dictum that a particular type of southern American English—that used by educated speakers—was the second most beautiful. His statement, obviously ex cathedra, is so characteristic of the certainty of the cultivated layman about such matters that it is worth quoting: "The true—which is to say the edu­cated—Southern accent is, next to French, the most beautiful in the world," going on to point out that "it pronounces its T gently rather than as if opening wide for the throat doctor"; furthermore, "it drops its final 'g' [he is certainly not referring to the final g in bag and the like, though he seems here to be saying so, but rather seems to have present participles in mind] but not without a trace—just as the French drop the final 'n.'" Then, not having quite sufficiently displayed his phonological acumen regarding degrees of g-dropping, he explains that "the 'g' isn't quite heard, but it is there."⁸

One wonders how Dr. Graves—he received at least one honorary doctorate in the course of his long and genuinely distinguished journalistic career— could declare without hesitation that the "true Southern accent" is that used by educated speakers, leaving out of the question his certainty that it is the second most beautiful in the world. If by true he means something like 'preserving older, traditional regional characteristics'—and it is difficult to see what else he could mean—then the beauty prize should go to the speech of the folk, comparatively uncontaminated as it is by the schoolma'am's artificial notions of correctness and elegance.

What is most notable, however, is that here is none of the irritating timor-ousness or hesitation that is frequently characteristic of the dicta of the professionally trained student, who would probably be so tiresome as to suggest that the notion that one language or type of language is more beauti­ful than another usually depends upon such nonlinguistic factors as who is doing the speaking (a cockney costermonger or Sir John Gielgud?), to some extent upon the agreeableness of the subject, and to a large extent upon who is doing the listening.

Not all speakers of English find Graves's "true Southern accent" pleasant to listen to, as we have noted above; we have seen that in certain regions of our country there is a well-defined, if unreasoning, prejudice against southern speech, and there are even regions where, by and large, any type of speech other than that used locally is disliked and where those who use it are objects of suspicion or discrimination. To use an example suggested by the quotation from Graves's article, it would be very difficult, not to say impossible, to demonstrate that the dental nasal(as in walking) is more beautiful than the velar nasal (often written ng, as in walking). The articu­lation of the partially velarized nasal—the strange, almost-but-not-quite-dropped final g cited by Graves⁹—must be left to the imagination.

A commentator who found all varieties of American English displeasing to his ears was the American critic Van Wyck Brooks, who described our national speech as "the mud-turtle language... spoken as if one had mud in the mouth," going on to say that "in this mere viscous noise every syllable is blurred or burred; there is no precision or clarity; no vowel has its value."¹⁰ He quoted with approval the rhetorical question of William Dean Howells, who obviously also considered himself something of an authority on American speech: "Who can defend the American accent, which is not so much an accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang?" Such commentary by distinguished literary men throws no light on the English language spoken in America; it does, however, clearly reflect tastes and attitudes, which the linguist is likely to consider less important to the study of language than information pains­takingly and unemotionally acquired.

But so great is the temptation to make subjective judgments about linguistic phenomena or to draw subjective nonlinguistic conclusions that even the revered Jespersen succumbed to it when he referred to the native Polynesian language of Hawaii as being "full of music and harmony," ⁿ and hence, one would suppose, beautiful. Jespersen attributed this music and harmony to the facts that Polynesian lacks consonant sequences and that all its words end in vowels, for example, aloha oe and Liliuokalani. Now, all this is purely subjective—a matter of what one happens to consider musical and beautiful. But not every lay observer finds all vowels musical and beautiful. Harry Irvine, an English actorTong a resident in the United States, considered the vowel used by all speakers of Standard English in hat and hand "excruciat­ingly ugly,"¹² while Windsor P. Daggett, a teacher of speech, considered the stressed vowel of father "the most sonorous sound in English";¹³ he was so enamored of this lovely vowel that he recommended its use in words in which it has never occurred in modern times in either British or American English. As for consonant sounds, every lay commentator on language knows that those of German are "harsh" and "guttural." These terms presumably refer to the velar fricative written ch in ach —a sound that we who speak English lost long ago but continue writing as gh, as in through and though; in rough, tough, and enough it has been replaced by quite another sound. The fact that a highly similar fricative sound occurs also in Spanish—written j, g, and in a few old-fashioned names x —is ignored in such esthetic appraisals, for as every lay commentator knows perfectly well, Spanish is one of the "musical" languages. The very presence of the sound is not usually suspected, since in American school Spanish the sound written h at the head of English syllables replaces it: Jaime falls together with Hymie, Gilda with Hilda, and Don Quixote becomes simply "donkey hoty." The popular judgment of German is older than Nazism, of course, but quite in line with the Holly­wood and television version of the Nazi as a goose-stepping, heel-clicking, hand-kissing beast whose German vocabulary consisted chiefly of Achtung! articulated in a particularly offensive, presumably "guttural" manner.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27