About forcing a language on someone

Plourde Eric plourer at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA
Tue Mar 14 05:14:47 UTC 2000


[ Moderator's note:
  The following message addresses a number of issues brought up in a recent
  post by S. M. Stirling (JoatSimeon at aol.com); nothing further on those issues
  will be posted to the list.  However, a comment in the final paragraph takes
  us beyond those issues, and back to Indo-European issues, and I will welcome
  further discussion *of that paragraph only*.
  --rma ]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> edsel at glo.be writes:

>> That's a complete misunderstanding. There is huge difference between
>> learning another language for practical reasons (or in more modern times:
>> out of interest in other cultures, religion or what have you) and being
>> forced to abandon one's own language (and inevitably:culture).

> -- "abandon" is a value-judgement; it would be equally (or more) accurate to
> speak of "acquiring" a new culture.

> Eg., I have a friend who's Japanese-Canadian, second generation.  She knows
> maybe 6 words of Japanese (fewer than I do) and is married to someone whose
> parents came from Lancashire.  Has she 'abandoned' a language and culture
> which is somehow uniquely 'hers'?  Of course not; she has a perfectly good
> language -- English -- and a perfectly good culture -- "Overseas European",
> samesame as the rest of us.

Your "Japanes-Canadian" friend is then not Japanese, just Canadian. Depending
on how old she is, yes, she did not abandon her culture, but maybe her parents
or grandparents, if they lived in Canada during 1940's as Canadian citizens of
Japanese origin were sent to concentration camps for "reeducation" due to their
"treason". They did not have the right to vote from 1895 (like Chinese and
Natives of British Columbia, thelatterrecovering it in 1949 and on federal
level in 1960 only, 20 years after "white" women.) So she probably either did
not have a chance to learn Japanese from her parents, orshe was beaten for
speaking it, much like the Natives. And it is interesting to use "perfectly
good" to qualify English and Overseas European (whatever that means) because
these are value judgments based on your prejudices.

> Language and culture are not like skin color.  They're more like your
> clothes.  One can change, mix and match to suit the circumstances.  Many of
> my ancestors were Gaelic-speaking and wore the Great Kilt.  I'm
> English-speaking and wear trousers, and firmly of the conviction that Butcher
> Cumberland did Scotland a favor.

See, it is exactly the opposite. Humans use languages and they shape the way
you think, so language is not like clothing. It is true that most British,
USAns and Australians use skin color to segregate their societies (like South
Africa) but religion is a pretty stronger divider of society (REAL examples
would be the Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian languages that maintain dialectal
intelligibility, the differences being based on religion (Catholics, Orthodox
Christianity and Islam, respectively) and the alphabet used. Or, Hindi and
Urdu, that areshaped by Hinduism and Islam respectively, and use devenagari and
arabic script, respcetively.)

Another pretty strong prejudice is "doing Scotland a favor", by what?  Killing
the people? Like Jonhatan Swift "Why are Irish complaining they have nothing to
eat, they have a plentiful natural resource, they should eat their children." I
don't know what kind of favor that is.

>> It [language] is something that defines them.

> -- until they get a new definition.  Linguistic and ethnic identity are fluid
> and changeable, subjective in nature.

The only affirmation making sense until now.

> Eg., to take just one example, there's a community of over 1,000,000 people
> of South Asian (Indian) origin in South Africa, descended mainly from
> indentured workers brought in to cut sugar cane.  A large majority of them
> now use English as their native language.  How are they any worse off than if
> they were speaking Gujarati or Tamil?  A small language is a prison, under
> modern conditions.

Gujarati or Tamil are not "small languages". Also, they have a very deep
literary tradition that rivals English in many ways. The "South Asian"
community was defined along the lines of Apartheid (a Brown, maybe...) and they
were colonized by the British who viewed their languages as primitive and
useless...  This process was even more reinforced in South Africa, where the
white man was the epitome of "perfectly good" culture and language.

>> The fact is that ordinary people resent very much being treated as
>> somebody who can't speak properly.

> -- and then in most cases, shrug and get on with the job.  Eg., my father
> worked very hard as a young man to shed his Newfoundland accent. (A dialect
> which can get extremely impenetrable to Standard English speakers).  Standard
> English was more useful, so he learned it; just as my more remote ancestors
> shed Gaelic and Lallans -- or most of the ancestors of the inhabitants of
> Vienna shed various Slavic languages for German.

Your father used a variety of English developed on a Gaelic and Irish English
(what an oxymoron) substrate that was frowned upon and seen as "impure" and
"dissonant", and instead of others making the effort to understand him and the
other people that spoke it (I gather some still speak it) he was forced to
change his ways as Newfoundland was forced in the Canadian Federation.

>> That's what happens when the original language loses its critical mass and
>> becomes the language of a minority: it is then beyond salvation in most
>> cases.

> -- a "minority" where?  Minority/majority status is a product of the size of
> the sphere of interaction, which in turn these days is a product of
> technological development.

If you are one of those people blinded by M. McLuhan's empty digression about
"medium is the message" and "dans ce cas les primitifs sont cuits". You mustnot
forget that, why is there a predominance of English on computers and Internetis
that the software creators were too stupid to invent a way to display other
fonts or characters right away.

> A small language could get along quite well when most people were illiterate
> peasants who rarely left their villages.  The local patois was as useful --
> more useful -- than a larger national language.

That is in the same state of mind as Marshall McLuhan's implicit belief
that languages "evolve" with technology, but so is not the case. Most of the
"illiterate" peasants (and what of the hunters-gatherers) that dot India's
countryside can use at least two languages, and normal  people in central Asia
until the 20th century could use an average three or even four.

> In the age of 'globalization', even French or German are "small" languages,
> of declining usefulness.  A fifth of the entire human race can speak English,
> and the percentage increases rapidly.  Meanwhile half the languages spoken in
> 1900 AD are extinct, and half the languages spoken in 2000 AD are moribund
> (no longer learned by children).  This is all to the good.

I was laughing at the entire letter until I read the last paragraph. This kind
of thought is quite typical of someone who either has a serious inferiority
complex because he cannot use more than one language (like 80% of the planet)
or he is flaunting a kind of linguistic "Manifest destiny" where English will
become the only language on Earth and then it,s going to be Heaven on earth.
Yeah, right.

I guess either you really wanted to provoke, or you just really do nothave a
clear picture of the global stateof languages. Sure, English is gaining ground,
but what kind of English will it be? Some people are already complaining about
the "weird English" used by foreigners or the immigrant children whose first
words are swearing words...

PIE was probably never a unified, unique language, sure, there is nothing
provocative about that hypothesis. But the people who used the IE langages were
probably very violent and bloodthirsty people who imposed their culture (and
languages) on the others. How else would they havespread so quickly? How
Scythians and the Germanic tribes were depicted? In the war between Sparta and
Athens, who won? The city of belligerance and cruelty orthe city of democracy
and tolerance? You know the answers.



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