lazit', English, standards, and still no opera

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Alina Israeli wrote:

> ... This statement confuses "norm" and "standard". Any dialect has a 
> norm, i.e. something is either correct or incorrect in a given 
> dialect. Standard language, whatever dialect or variety is accepted 
> as NATIONAL norm, while having a norm, also has the authorities who 
> say what is and what isn't a norm.

The term "norm" as used in English refers to what is commonly (normally) 
done, with little or no judgment as to its correctness -- it's primarily 
a descriptive term. In contrast, "standard" does impose a judgment. So 
if I say that the duplicate "is" in sentences like "What I mean is, is 
that you are mistaken" is the norm, I am certainly not endorsing it, but 
simply saying it is commonplace.

Norms and standards often coincide, but things get very interesting to 
linguists when they do not. In the case cited above, we have defenders 
of "standard" English holding their noses and objecting while the 
general public violates the standard and adheres to the norm. If the 
difference is noticed by the public, those individuals who wish to 
advance will make their best efforts to adhere to the prestigious 
standard, letting their guard down in casual contexts. If the norm wins 
out, the standard will collapse and be discarded, thereby acquiring the 
status of an obsolete or archaic form, and listeners will begin to 
evaluate speakers who stick to it as "stuffy" or "behind the times." And 
of course then we have to remember that there is feedback in both 
directions, so the speech patterns of a group perceived as stuffy tend 
to acquire that taint, and the patterns of a group perceived as trendy 
come to be regarded as trendy even if they are historically throwbacks.

> Even they agree that language, and consequently norms change.

Yes.

>> but if we take this reasoning to its logical limits, we might soon 
>> arrive to a standstill described in Alice Through the Looking-Glass
>> where Humpty-Dumpty explains to Alice that words mean only what he
>> wants them to mean.
> 
> No, if we take "this reasoning" (i.e. "there's a need for any norm or
> standard especially when it comes to stress or phonetics") to its 
> logical limits, we may come to languages like Polish and French that 
> have no movable stress, Polish stress is fixed on a penultimate 
> syllable, a French at the end (of a syntagm).

There are various "needs" for standards, and most of them are not 
linguistic. Besides the basic need for mutual understanding, members of 
a society want to be able to identify speakers in terms of social and 
demographic characteristics, so they link various speech patterns to 
membership in groups, and they evaluate speakers' prestige by how well 
they adhere to the listener's own idealized version of the language. 
Accordingly, a member of one subculture may rate me highly because I 
approximate his ideal, while a member of another despises me because my 
speech is far from his ideal. It's a very complicated situation, and we 
don't have one standard language here. Rather, we have many similar and 
overlapping standards with subtle differences that speakers and 
listeners use subconsciously for identification and rating.

Certainly a speaker can violate the standards of so many subcultures 
within a society that he is perceived as a nonnative, and that carries 
its own set of consequences. But I'm frequently amazed at the diversity 
to be found within the set of native speakers of "my" language. When I 
went to Ohio for the first time and encountered the "something needs 
done" construction, it was so alien to me that I took it for a speech 
error. Turns out it's the norm in an area from western Pennsylvania 
through central Indiana, and I had to learn not to regard people who 
used it as incompetent or illiterate or nonnative (which had been my 
initial reaction coming from a different dialect area). I even have some 
fun with a friend from back east by purposely saying things like "the 
dishes need washed and the floor needs swept" and watching her squirm -- 
she knows I'm intelligent and literate, and she also "knows" the 
construction marks me as a country bumpkin, and it's hard to reconcile 
the two.

So it was very interesting to hear that saying "sozvónimsya" instead of 
"sozvonímsya" is giving me away as illiterate to the Russian literati. 
I'm frequently told by native speakers that I have "no accent at all" 
(which of course I take for a polite lie), and in short conversations 
they mistake me for a native. But I'm very aware of my limitations and I 
know that they detect me as a nonnative within a few minutes.

On the other side of the fence, I have to make a special effort when 
speaking English to butcher foreign names like Khrushchev, lest I be 
thought pretentious, or worse yet, misunderstood. When I talk to hockey 
fans about Mario Lemieux, I have to remember to say "Lemioux," and when 
I talk politics I have to say "al Kayda." Only with the linguistic upper 
crust can I pronouce these names correctly -- and then it's a positive 
because it marks me as a member of the group, the "in crowd."

> This is an interesting situation, known in linguistics as 
> code-switching. Evidently, Humpty-Dumpty knew both languages or 
> dialects, his own and the one Alice would understand. While 
> code-switching has been studied in many immigrant groups, Hispanics 
> in America, Nisei (Japanese-Americans) and others, anecdotally it's 
> found in fiction like "To Kill a Mockingbird" where the black 
> housekeeper speaks "standard American English" with the family of 
> Atticus Finch and switches to Black English in her church (to the 
> great surprise of the narrator-protagonist Scout).

Yes.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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