[An essay that appeared online in the old Vocabula Review in February, 2014. Few changes. Thanks to Tim Shonk and to Robert Fiske for help with it. —JK]
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o languages exist? You can make a case — a hard-headed, nominalist, existentialist sort of case — that they do not, except in a vague descriptive sense. Partly in a spirit of devil’s advocacy, here goes.
Ferdinand Saussure, the great Swiss linguist, elaborated a key distinction between langue (language itself, in a timeless snapshot) and parole (speech, unfolding in time). Clear enough; but which of these do we intend when we speak of “the English language”? Do we mean the sum of English speaking, or a very small body of abstract relationships distilled from all that evanescent performance? Language in action, or in the intervals when it seems to vanish into a realm of pure ideas? Apparently we mean both, but it is an odd sort of something that can exist in such different ways. Dodging in and out of time, appearing and vanishing, language seems to behave like one of those incomprehensible particles the physicists are always chasing.
Then there is the problem that English (in both senses, or whatever sense) changes continually, as do all other languages. Old words die, new ones are born; pronunciation drifts; inflections and cases dwindle; like changes into a strange new function word that experts struggle to categorize. Some of the changes seem to be back-and-forth episodes that leave little permanent result (no one has said “bitchin’” or “rad” for a while); but others are fateful and irreversible (no one says “thee” or “ye” either). Of course there is continuity as well as change, so that, for example, much of Chaucer’s vocabulary and grammar remains transparent to us today. But much does not, and there is even a sense in which every utterance, every bit of parole, slightly alters langue, the overall system.
Linguists and other free spirits sometimes argue that linguistic change invalidates any kind of prescription: the rules are only temporary, so we might as well break them now as later. But in Language and Human Nature, Mark Halpern makes a compelling case for exactly the opposite conclusion: we need vigorous prescription precisely because language is so malleable, so much a matter of frail and fleeting conventions. In any case, the temporal shiftiness of language would seem to become, at some point, a problem of identity. Is what I call “the English language” the same entity you named with that phrase two years ago? Two decades? Two centuries?
Spatial or geographic variation, likewise, raises thorny questions. We like to associate languages with the regions for which they are named: English to England, Spanish to Spain, American Southern Rural Vernacular to the American South, and so on. But merely stating such correspondences stirs up a blizzard of complications. English, of course, is now a world language, spoken in a dizzying number of places and varieties. When I call the number on my credit card and, after several menus, speak with an actual human, he and I can more or less understand each other, but he is in Manila and I am here in Illinois.
So call that a historical accident if you like, and define English as the language that originates in the British Isles — but right away, you are in exactly the same kind of difficulty. Old English is really a German dialect imported from the Continent, which soon after arrival mixes with Celtic and Latin, and a little later with Norse. After the Norman invasion in 1066, a flood of French all but swamps the “native” dialect, and for several centuries, French and Latin are the only languages written in England; Chaucer’s Middle English is a low-rent vernacular, skulking on the fringes at first. A refugee from the court of Henry V, in the early 1400s, would probably have an easier time conversing with the natives in France than those in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland. The situation today is not so different. Drive west from London for three or four hours, and the road signs (in Wales) start looking like this:
The point is not that languages tend to overflow their initial boundaries, but that such boundaries hardly exist in the first place. John McWhorter entitled his recent history of English Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, but the same phrase might fit almost any language. In an eye-opening article, “European Chancelleries and the Rise of Standard Written Languages,” John H. Fisher, the renowned Medievalist, describes the welter of localization and divergence that seems to be the default setting for spoken language:
. . . both in 950 and today, spoken dialects in Europe represent a continuum in which, from north to south and east to west, each village can understand its neighbor, although at the extremes the speech is mutually unintelligible.
So if you hike east through Alsace-Lorraine, the “German” in the conversation increases at each new inn, while the proportion of “French” decreases, and vice versa if you go west. From our modern viewpoint, everyone seems to be speaking a dialect, not a “real” language; but in 950 AD, the truth is that no supervening lingua franca, understood all through the continuum, even exists as yet. French and German are nothing but loose confederations of related dialects and (at most) the idea of a transcendent unity that is beginning to emerge from them.
What eventually brings standard languages on the scene, Fisher tells us, is no grass-roots development in the oral culture, but a technocratic and scholarly revolution from above: clerks and secretaries, needing a stable idiom in which to conduct business, create one, which then slowly imposes itself on the oral culture as the true or proper language.
A comparative study reveals that standard languages all emerged as written forms, not oral; that these written standards were created by government secretariats, not by literary figures; and that when spoken standards began to emerge in the 17th and 18th centuries, their grammar and pronunciation were based on the written standard and not vice versa.
In a famous 1952 manifesto, the National Council of Teachers of English, ardent to reinvent the discipline as a sub-field of linguistics, declared that “the spoken language is the language.” But if Fisher is right, the spoken language, insofar as it is more than a local dialect, is really a product of the written language, always already corrupted when the linguist arrives to take his samples. What gives French and English and the rest heft and stability, turning them into widely intelligible trans-local tongues with great cultural cachet, is not the dynamic inventiveness of the oral culture, but the labors of ink-stained drudges scowling in the candlelight, compiling their business inventories and spelling lists and usage diatribes. Fashioned from the raw material of local usage, the standard languages are not ersatz creations like Esperanto or Klingon, but they are not simple, mighty facts of nature either. Every bit of them is subject to unceasing and partly conscious negotiation, and they are always, to an unsettling degree, fictions that become real because we choose to believe them.
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aussure, too, notes the difficulty of disentangling dialects and languages. In his Course in General Linguistics, in 1916, Saussure entitles consecutive chapters “Dialects Have No Natural Boundaries” and “Languages Have No Natural Boundaries.”
It is impossible . . . to set up boundaries between dialects. The same applies to related languages. The size of the territory makes no difference. We would be unable to say where High German begins and Low German ends, and would find it just as impossible to draw the dividing line between German and Dutch, or between French and Italian . . . (204)
Moreover, the distinction between dialects and languages is tenuous and relative:
Precisely how a language differs from a dialect is hard to specify. Often a dialect is called a language because it has produced a literature. (203)
Compare the saying, possibly by Antoine Meillet, that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
Indeed, the concept of dialect, though indispensable, can seem terminally hazy. I have more than one neighbor who might say, “Them fools never should of went there” where I would say “Those fools never should have gone there.” Earnest people try to wish away such divergences by positing that we are speaking “different dialects,” each perfectly respectable in the “discourse community” to which we belong, so that we can count ourselves equally correct. For linguists and other scholars, the maneuver also helps straighten up otherwise perplexing data tables, preserving the central postulate of language as inherently law-abiding.
No doubt such mediation can be helpful. But the problems are many. This is my neighbor, so how convincing is it to assign us to different “discourse communities”? Or to any communities at all, since, like all people, we move from one group to the next, often varying our speech habits as we go? When this neighbor or another one meets me halfway with one small change — of went to have gone — but leaves nonstandard Them in place, do I now posit yet a third dialect, a third phantom community? Or a fourth dialect and a fourth community when I use ain’t for jocular emphasis, as even the most hoity-toity Americans do on occasion? Where all this can lead is wittily suggested by the late David Foster Wallace in a wonderfully entertaining essay on usage:
the United States obviously has a huge number of such Discourse Communities, many of them regional and/or cultural dialects of English: Black English, Latino English, Rural Southern, Urban Southern, Standard Upper-Midwest, Maine Yankee, East-Texas Bayou, Boston BlueCollar, on and on. . . . Plus, of course, there are innumerable sub- and subsubdialects based on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with locale or ethnicity — Medical-School English, Peorians-Who-Follow-Pro-Wrestling-Closely English, Twelve-Year-Old-Males-Whose-Worldview-Is-Deeply-Informed-By-South-Park English — and that are nearly incomprehensible to anyone who isn't inside their very tight and specific Discourse Community . . .
Wallace hawks the terms “dialect” and “discourse community” like a late-night TV pitchman, but the joke is that both are multiplying like Goonies; useful enough descriptively, the terms fail the test of Occam when we try to use them systematically. It simply makes no sense to posit a whole new dialect, a whole new community, every time we encounter a bit of “variant usage” (as we do constantly). The other side of the story, at least, is that we are all speaking the same language, in the same community, but that we bring different preferences and resources to the table. “People differ quite a bit in their speech habits” pretty well sums up the whole discussion.
But once we subject “dialect” to such fierce deconstruction, how safe is the big brother concept, language? If Saussure is right and languages are just scaled-up and slightly more persistent dialects (with or without armies and navies), do we conclude that English, French, German, Latin, and the rest are also unnecessary hypotheses, iffy contrivances that we ought not to take quite so seriously? That would be hard news for language teachers everywhere. It would affront the deep tribal passions that people invest in what they take to be their national (or otherwise transcendent) languages. Every patriot feels that German or Pilipino or Klingon is simply there somehow; to question it seems like an insult.
Even so, that is where our contrarian, skeptical, Occam’s-Razor-wielding argument seems to take us. There is a coherent standpoint, not entirely trivial, from which the world is filled not with separate languages, but only with language itself: a single vast conversation that circles the globe and goes endlessly back in time, with nodes and moments you can call Provençal or Mandarin Chinese or Beat Slang if you like, but nothing really fixed or constant aside from the act of speaking itself. Call it the Sea of Language Theory.
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r maybe we have gone wrong somewhere. Maybe the difficulty of delimiting languages in time or space or social class is beside the point, and what really counts, what makes a language what it is and differentiates it from all others, is structure. Isn’t any language sufficiently defined by its lexicon and its grammar? Aren’t those what make it unique and integral?
Saussure would seem to be a strong advocate for this view, notwithstanding his denial of “natural borders” for languages or dialects. Saussure’s great innovation is to shift the emphasis in language study away from reference and “imitation” (as art critics called it) and toward the intrinsic structure of the linguistic system. In this new way of thinking, what makes tree (let’s say) mean what it does is not any settled relationship to reality, but its contrast to such related terms as shrub, bush, plant, stick, twig, branch, vine, trunk, and so on, together with other grammatical and phonological relationships that define the term’s place in the language as a whole. You may use the word to denote the healthy maple in front, the dead oak out back, the little chart you are using to track family relationships, the device in the closet that stretches your Wing Tips, or what your dog occasionally does to possums, but reference is now something of an afterthought; what counts is the elegance and ingenuity of langue, the structure that underlies and authorizes reference. For Saussure, as James Milroy puts it, “a language is a self-contained structured entity of totally interdependent parts” (36).
It would be mad to deny that such ideas (however mangled in my quick summary) have been profoundly transformative and valuable. What matters here, though, is that Saussure’s model is strikingly Platonic, hypostatic, top-down; it seems divorced from the intimate daily experience of language, from creative performance. It seems to require that the grand totality of langue be immanent in the individual speech act, and that it be universal and unchanging: “ . . . a language, as a collective phenomenon, takes the form of a totality of imprints in everyone’s brain, rather like a dictionary of which each individual has an identical copy” (qtd. in Davis, 77). Such formulations have their uses; but the obvious riposte is that no two individuals ever have the same mental dictionaries. My vocabulary is never exactly the same as yours, and for every word we have in common, our pronunciations will differ a bit, and so will our overall sense of the word, the connotations and mental pictures we attach, the range of uses we find for it. (Sometimes we will disagree completely; if you use “fulsome” to mean “extensive,” as the talking heads have been doing lately, expect me to scowl.)
Likewise, Saussure’s idea that a language is fundamentally a system — rational, efficient, integrated, self-consistent — can seem jaw-droppingly at odds with ground-level experience. At most, languages offer a mixture of partial and conflicting systems, lightly seasoned with pure randomness. That is why they take so long to learn. They are not optimal and efficient, but endlessly particular, chock-a-block with the debris left by accidental histories. Every paradigm is partial, every rule harried by exceptions.
I had a grandmother who used to say, for emphasis, “I can’t for the life of me” and “believe you me.” Both expressions are impeccable English, and both were perfectly intelligible to us kids, but try parsing either and you get nowhere. In the Northeastern U.S., “Not to worry,” said in a certain tone, counts as a complete sentence, but the pattern cannot be used with any other verb that I know of. All through the English-speaking world, writers write and painters paint, but tailors do not tail; they tailor. Nor is a geezer “one who geezes.” A falling plate can be “dashed to pieces,” and you can say “dashed his hopes,” but try dashing almost anything else and you are out of luck. You can argue to no avail, but not to a little avail or a lot of avail. Distress, it turns out, is not the opposite of stress, but more like the same thing. You can be ungrateful, but not an ungrate; you have to be an ingrate instead. My wife says dived and thrived, but I (with a minority of die-hards) say dove and even (hesitantly) throve. System? Structure? English looks more like a huge grab-bag, completely innocent of comprehensive organization.
Again, the idea of langue as an integrated system seems to accord very poorly with what anyone can observe about language acquisition. Your average five year-old is a highly proficient chatterbox, using her limited vocabulary to express her thoughts with rapid-fire virtuosity. If language really were a system, a machine that can function only when all its parts are in place, shouldn’t she, instead, be hopelessly tongue-tied, pending arrival of the rest of the lexicon?
I do not mean that such lofty estrangement from facts-on-the-ground is a particular flaw of Saussure and structural linguistics. The problem seems to haunt all our attempts to reify language as an object of inquiry and study. Perhaps it is not really even a problem, just the natural cost of having a model for something as huge and complex as language. In any case, the same disparity between model and data, essence and existence, certainly shows up in language classes — both the kind offered to foreigners and the kind inflicted, madly perhaps, on native speakers in the hope of improving their performance. In both cases, what we call “the language” — the thing we are trying to instill, the ideal we hope to achieve — is an intense simplification of the infinite, fleeting facts of actual usage. A million gallons of parole have been boiled down to make just a few teaspoons of langue, which we then dutifully administer, but with uncertain results.
In both kinds of class, direct instruction notoriously fails to produce the kind of proficiency that is really wanted: the students’ execution is always stiff, slow, uncertain. Some resort to memorization and drill and theory is nonetheless indispensable in any kind of second language class; and in the first-language class it can be the thing that makes it possible to conceptualize language at all – to get out of it sufficiently to look at it. In that roundabout sense, grammar instruction can improve performance after all. But there remains, always, a gulf between “the language” — that ghostly blueprint, that rolling weighted average of everything that has been said anywhere by anyone — and the particular speech act.
Structure, at any rate, proves to be a weak basis for defining and differentiating languages. For one thing, no language ever has clear title to its lexicon or grammar; innumerable features of both are shared with what we count as “other languages,” especially those that have been geographical neighbors. But the bigger problem is that the structure isn’t really there in the first place.
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inguists and language teachers alike, then, have a natural bias toward the ideal over the actual. We are always more interested in langue, the somewhat permanent, intermittently systematic, acceptable-until-further-notice shape of the language, than in momentary, eccentric, merely-practical parole. But we need to remind ourselves, every so often, how things look on the existential plane, the plane of actual usage. In that spirit, let me offer two particular texts.
The first is something my granddaughter said two years ago, when she was seven. Regarding her older brother thoughtfully, she remarked, “That was a make-yourself burp.” It was, indeed, but how had she found the words to say so? Certainly not by reflecting on the entire “field of signifiers” and selecting these two or three as ineluctable. It was possible that she had heard the phrase from someone else, but when I asked her she said no, with a puzzled look. Far more likely, the phrase was newborn, an epiphenomenon, authorized by existing langue only in the most distant way. “Make” and “yourself” were in her personal dictionary, of course, but to use the little verb phrase as a modifier was her own inspiration. Perhaps something in her linguistic experience had given her a general precedent, a sense that verb phrases (not that she would have the term) were a kind of thing, and that modification was a thing you could do with things; or maybe a phrase like “do-nothing Congress” or “all you can eat buffet” was lurking in her memory as a direct model. Still, that particular combination was her own, delivered on deadline, without noticeable strain. Impressive!
But it’s fair to add that even another child might object to the phrase as ill-made or childish. Typically a new phrase or word, if it is especially striking, will undergo a kind of vogue-cum-probation wherein other speakers pick it up, repeat it, fool with it, laugh at it, and then most often quietly discard it; only rarely does it instead pass on into the canon of more permanent, less self-consciously repeated language. The cycle can be observed at the level of public discourse, or in neighborhoods, families, play groups, bowling leagues. Norah’s phrase was good enough to do the job of the moment, but not good enough to join and alter the ideal order of langue, at any of these levels. It would have to be repeated a few thousand times and rigorously riffed upon (“make-yourself fall,” “make-yourself laugh”) before anyone was tempted to put it into a dictionary, even a slang dictionary. Before things got nearly so far, however, the existence of more satisfactory alternatives — “deliberate,” “intentional,” “fake” — would cause the nonce-phrase to die an unnoticed death.
But children’s speech is full of such witty makeshifts; no adult can eavesdrop for long without being charmed by them. Such improvisation solves quite easily, I think, the seeming paradox of children being able to communicate long before they “know the language.” Pretty clearly, children are just imitating, and very freely recombining and riffing upon, whatever bits of language they happen to have picked up. From their ground-level vantage, language is no huge body of precedent waiting to be consulted; it is just a long chain of conversations, and the constant, agreeable opportunity to build again with whatever they have retained. Rather than worrying about words they lack, they stretch and adapt those that they have, swimming the Sea of Language with the perfect ease of true natives.
Adults do not have to be as inventive as children, because their mental dictionaries and grammars are much larger; they can plagiarize instead, using what they call the “right words” for things. Even so, their speech remains in various ways adventurous and improvisational, as it must be in order to meet the surprises of experience. We all jury-rig odd new phrases and invent new words on occasion, and often the line between invention and recall is completely fuzzy. The other day I had a brief conversation about the “annoyingness” of something or other, not realizing till later, when I checked a dictionary, that it is a “real word.” (I still find it, well, annoying, and mean to avoid it.) But since langue is a kit for invention, licensing creations that may turn out to be unique, it becomes very hard to determine the outer boundary of “real English.” Is everything that can be done with English, English? Probably not, because if I said “annoyitude,” everyone would understand, but everyone would make a face. Still, the conceptual terrain here is boggy.
This brings me to my second text, an example of parole that happens to be fictional. Umberto Eco, in his great novel The Name of the Rose, presents a character, the ominous and pitiful Salvatore (John Perlman, later of Sons of Anarchy, plays him in the movie), a mad monk whose speech is an unclassifiable blend of dialects:
“Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri jesu christi! Et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors...Cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! bonum monsasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?” (47)
Adso, the narrator, comments that "Salvatore spoke all languages, and no language." That is an overstatement, but his gabble shows elements of Latin, French, Italian, Provençal, and of course English. In several cases lexical stems from one language are inflected with the endings of another. Apparently Salvatore has spent his formative years roaming through the regions and city states of northern Italy and southern France, absorbing bits of language everywhere. That experience and the resulting idiolect confound tidy concepts like “native speaker,” “dialect,” and “discourse community.” A native of no place, Salvatore speaks no nameable dialect and has no community that can make much sense of him. But he furnishes a splendid example of what we have already been noticing: that since no one receives a copy of langue ready-made from the heavens, we do not so much “learn the language” as rediscover and reinvent it, despite “poverty of input” (in Chomsky’s phrase), through inference, metaphor, guesswork, paradigm-jiggering, error, and wild extrapolations. Salvatore is a freak from one angle, but you could argue from another that he is typical, or rather archetypal: we are all gabbling creoles on some level, mixing precedents as we struggle to express unique meanings.
Of course, this is fiction, and ultimately Salvatore is as impossible as a unicorn. More on that in a moment. First, though, I want to notice that his background is really not so unusual. History has a nasty way of skewing and tangling and truncating people’s linguistic educations. It may be that steady immersion in just one language, of the kind our theories vaguely posit, is really the historical rarity. My stepmother was born in Java and grew up speaking Dutch and Indonesian. When the war came her family was interned by the Japanese, so over the next three years she absorbed a few bits of their language. In 1946, barely out of the camp, the family had to flee from postwar chaos to Holland, where for five or six years she functioned mainly in Dutch, withstanding much criticism for her colonial take on it. Then the good luck of a job with Shell Oil took her to Curaçao, in the Caribbean, where she learned the local creole, Papiamentu, and spoke it for many daily tasks, though the office and evenings required Dutch again, and sometimes a bit of French, Spanish, or English. In 1963 she visited relatives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, met my father, and married him, and since then she has functioned mainly in English, though she can still shift back instantly into Dutch or Indonesian. Her unclassifiable accent has never entirely disappeared, nor certain trademark grammatical eccentricities, but so what? She always gets her point across, often more clearly than mere native speakers.
Such examples of people operating between and among languages, patching together highly individualized idiolects, raise again the question of language borders and identities. In what sense is English even there if it blends so readily and often with other tongues? You don’t have to be Salvatore to say something like “Go get your pizza, chica, chop chop!” A hundred native speakers of English must understand au revoir or Bitte for one who understands botryoidal or hennin, though the latter two are English, the former two French and German. From one angle it looks as if we are not following any coherent set of protocols sponsored by a “discourse community,” at all, but just slapping together parole with whatever is mentally handy.
It can still be useful to conceive of languages Platonically, as separate, stable, optimal systems, spoken by beings who walk around with whole dictionaries in their heads, consulting them like judicious philisophes. But only to a point. Eventually such models need to be confronted with anti-models proposing that our idiolects are all radically eccentric, that we build somewhat blindly on things we happen to have heard, that even successful communication is strangely hit-or-miss, that “the language” is a shifting accretion of nonce-works and ad hoc conventions.
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f course, the anti-models have their own glaring weakness. If we are partly making up the language as we go along, building on personal experience, how do we ever communicate? Why don’t we all wander around the asylum speaking purely private, unintelligible, Humpty-Dumpty languages?
The short answer: we cooperate, we keep at it, and we always have a context. You and I may start with quite different mental pictures of “tree,” but within a few seconds, usually, I see that you mean this green thing I would have called a bush, and that’s that. We have a shared definition that lasts as long as the conversation itself does, and afterwards I even add this experience to the portfolio that defines my own mental picture. Of course, this amiable process works only when there is substantial overlap — well short of full identity — between our two idiolects at the start. (The condition of little or no overlap is called “speaking different languages” and requires a translator.)
But almost any conversation, even a written one, is redundant and offers various different ways for a listener or reader to home in on the thing meant. The words individually are vague, but massed together, deployed as a team, they all grow clearer and get the job done. Even in the extreme case, according to Adso, “one way or another, I did understand what Salvatore meant, and so did the others” (Eco 48), though he seems to mean only that they grasped the gist. In fact we do not want words to be fixed and exact, like so many scalpels. It is the partial indeterminacy of words, their vagueness in the langue phase, waiting in the dictionary, that lets us reshape them endlessly to perform new expressive chores.
The slightly longer answer is that most people’s speech behavior is closer to my stepmother’s than to Salvatore’s. What is really freakish about the latter, making Salvatore more an allegorical icon than a realistic character, is not the uninhibited way he riffs and builds with his personal hoard of words and paradigms: everyone does that. It is his complete lack of audience awareness. He never looks around and tries to gauge how well he is coming across, never seems to notice that no one is speaking back to him the same jabber he speaks to them. He can catch the gist of others’ meanings, as they catch his, but he seems to have stopped learning language. He lacks an inner censor and needs a good editor or dyspeptic teacher, to whip him into shape.
But the rest of us, who are not fictional characters, always take pains to match our speech to other people’s. We echo and imitate our friends directly, and when we reach back into our personal word-hoards, we choose the phrase that seems most likely to succeed in present company. When we get confused we say so, at least sometimes, and request clarification. We go on learning, though never as fast as when we were children, and pick up new tricks and habits that help us keep in step. Native speakers never acquire much of their vocabulary from the dictionary, or from any kind of direct explanation, but pick up nearly all of it on the fly. Nonetheless we work hard, almost from birth, at building up our inner dictionaries, remembering words, tabulating their roles in various conversations, never quite pinning them down or exhausting them, but clarifying our sense of their possibilities. Inward lexicography is a universal sport. Even children will ask “What’s that mean?” and “What’s that called?”, building for the future, working to synchronize their idiolects with a postulated larger consensus. Langue is not a given but a kind of instinctive hypothesis, an ideal we hope to realize by assuming it. We never really have a system, but we are forever trying to build one.
Some such process must be one reason that languages get to be such strange mixtures of method and madness. The grammar and the lexicon never unfold according to a master plan, but grow up gradually from countless different origins, and keep growing and decaying without stop. Up to a point, especially as children, we are all laws to ourselves, working by creative analogy from things we happen to have heard; but natural imitativeness and the desire to communicate press back in the other direction, toward convergence rather than divergence. Over time, particular paradigms coalesce into somewhat more general patterns that can be identified as the implicit grammatical awareness of the native speaker. Speakers’ creativity is pruned back by various forces, and there is a natural, dialectical progress toward a communal standard — rather like the macrocosmic progress of nations toward standard languages, cobbled together out of local dialects.
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n the end, of course, languages do edit themselves into something like existence, as even a contrarian must admit. If I wake up tomorrow somehow transported to rural China, the reality and stark separateness of English and Chinese will be an incontrovertible truth of my perspective. Both languages are palpable, immediate, undeniable. Nothing could be less relevant to me than the theoretical possibility of passing from one lingo to the other by insensible stages, on a very long hike across Asia and Europe, with a boat ride across the Channel at the end. Nor do I know or care that “Chinese” actually exists in multiple dialects, some of them sharply divergent and mutually unintelligible; nor that it contains hundreds of loan words from around the globe; nor that it features thousands of one-of-a-kind idioms that pay no attention to what is supposed to be the ruling grammar of the language. It is all Chinese to me, and what matters is only that I can understand none of it. Finding a translator is an urgent priority both for me and for this freaked-out family in whose house I have materialized.
So the call goes out through the neighborhood for someone who is local but “knows English,” or perhaps “American” or “Yanqui.” No one has any problem understanding what this means, and soon the call is answered. The translator arrives, listens to me, listens to them, explains, laughs, sympathizes, and rather quickly manages to straighten out all misunderstandings, apologizing to the family on my behalf.
Out of sheer gratitude, I invite the translator to lunch in the best restaurant in the village. We go there and have a fine meal, eating dishes whose names I can’t pronounce, drinking the local beer, which is amazingly good. It is only afterwards, as we are sitting back with a last cup, that I begin to think my problems of the morning were really, after all, just matters of degree and perspective. Glad of the chance to practice her English, my translator has been chattering on, in her animated way, while I mostly listen. Her accent is so strong and strange that I fail to recognize many of her words, and she seems to be attributing nonstandard meanings to many that I can catch. She has a couple of favorite expressions — “On my money,” “So we likewise” — that she seems to believe are English idioms, but which so far as I know are not, at least not anywhere in the universe but this particular table. In fact I hardly know what she is going on about; it is like having lunch with Salvatore. My translator and I need a translator.
Works Cited
Davis, Hayley. “Typography, Lexicography and the Development of the Idea of ‘Standard English.’” In Standard English: The Widening Debate. Eds. Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. New York: Warner Books, 1980.
Fisher, John Hurt. “European Chancelleries and the Rise of Standard Written English.” Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Assoiciation 3 (1986): 1-33. Found at http://www.illinoismedieval.org/ems/VOL3/fisher.html, December, 2013.
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