LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.02.06 (08) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 06 February 2006 * Volume 08
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.02.06 (07) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language varieties
>
> But, Gabriele, who was talking about spying?  Is *this* how you look 
> at language research and recording: as spying?  If so, this may 
> somehow explain our different views and approaches, for I have never 
> entertained the thought of language being a private, secrete 
> commodity, although I can see some of Sandy's points about ownership.
>
> I have never in my life thought of linguistic, ethnic, cultural or 
> "racial" communities as closed societies, though I know some people 
> do.  In other words, I do not perceive my or other people's languages 
> and cultures as having fences around them, as being inaccessible to 
> non-members.  Much rather, I view all of them as being parts of 
> humanity's common treasure trove.  Whilst individual pieces may have 
> been created by and belong to certain groups, others may at least 
> admire them, may even be permitted to touch them.

I agree entirely with this paragraph. Indeed, while at our local Deaf 
Club hearing people aren't allowed whether they know BSL or not, I'm 
running a stealth campaign to get hearing people in! (to which I must 
add that most Deaf Clubs aren't like this, and I'm not the only one in 
the club who is against the policy).

However, what I don't agree with is the idea of experts knowing better 
than people who have been brought up in the culture. In Deaf culture you 
could lay aside Aristotle's ignorant assertions about Deaf people (and 
women, for that matter) having no souls, and consider more conscientious 
individuals such as Alexander Graham Bell's efforts to solve the 
"problem" of deafness.

Bell (whose wife was deaf) studied the family trees of people in 
Martha's Vineyard, but in the end we see him writing in his notes that 
he can't make any sense of it. We now know that the reason for this is 
that he didn't have the results of Mendeleevian genetics at his 
disposal. Yet he seems to have thought that his expertise overrode his 
ignorance and went right ahead and tried to ban marriage between deaf 
people. This is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious of people who 
think they know how to do some aspect of cultural engineering from 
outside of the culture: it's not enough to be an expert, you have to 
secure the gaps in your understanding.

How does the problem of deafness look from within the culture? Simple - 
it's not a problem. Bell thinks it is but that's because it only becomes 
a problem when someone like him comes along! He completely fails to see 
that the only problem is himself and he can't solve that by interfering 
in other people's cultures.

This brings us to the phenomenon of someone from outside a culture not 
really believing something, no matter how true a person within the 
culture knows it is. For example, in my dialect of Scots we pronounce 
the word cognate with English "spoon" as /spIn/. There are many English 
speakers -in my actual experience - who refuse to accept that this is 
possible, because how do you distinguish it from the English word 
"spin"? I explain that we say "birl" for "spin" but they find this just 
as hard to believe. While we're not talking of experts in a case like 
this (though I believe it could happen with experts), we do see similar 
errors committed by people who you'd think would know better.

For example, Hannah Aiken, editor of the "Forgotten Heritage" collection 
of fairy stories in Scots, speaks in her introduction to the book as if 
Scots was a form of difficult English. She says that although R L 
Stevenson wrote a long short story, a book of poetry and much dialogue 
in Scots, he must have found it difficult to speak, and could never have 
written a novel in Scots. Now to know that this is rubbish you don't 
have to be an expert: you just have to be brought up speaking Scots. You 
read RLS's Scots and realise that in spite of borrowing vocabulary from 
other dialects, he's a natural speaker. Yet many experts in the language 
never grasp what's known by the natives, they just don't come to 
recognise what's genuine in the culture no matter how much they work 
with it, and never really understand that if you're brought up with it, 
Scots is actually easier to speak than English.

This is why I say it's not enough to have a lot of expertise in English 
and in writing systems in general to be able to safely say that the 
orthography can be overhauled. No matter how much nonsense people rooted 
in the culture may seem to talk about it, you just can't know that it 
isn't you that's the problem, and moreover you may never be capable of 
seeing that.

Of course you may argue that the orthography isn't part of the language, 
because that's true. It's perhaps the most superficial layer, used only 
in writing and not in speech, and perhaps therefore the layer that 
experts can most easily justify tampering with. But is it possible that 
even though it's not part of the language, it's still part of the culture?

I would say that those outside the culture should certainly research and 
study all they want to. But in the end I think it should be up to those 
within the culture to say what, if anything, should be done within the 
culture as a result of this body of knowledge that everyone has built up.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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