Book notice: An ad hoc approach to world domination

[Harold Schiffman]

  An ad hoc approach to world domination
November 24, 2007

The coastlines and borders that run between languages are blurry at best.
And English is gloriously famous, or infamous, for being a borrower. Of
course, "borrow" is a misnomer here, as there's no intention of returning
the words. But before crying "Stop Thief!", remember borrowing is copy and
paste, not cut and paste. Hindi kept its champo (shampoo) when English
started washing with it, just as Tamil kept its catamaran. English took
kiosk from French (kiosque) who took it from Turkish (koshk) who took it
from Persian (kushk) but all those Mediterranean coastlines, and beyond,
remain kiosk-dotted to this day. Arabic continued reclining in its suffah
long after Turkish took it (sofa) and gave it, unchanged, to English. And
Japanese would have happily dispensed with its tsunami but even as it swept
across the world, the home-grown one remains.

English doesn't only borrow; it also gives back. Philosophically, the
lending is some kind of compensation for the borrowing over centuries of
shoulder-rubbing and border-crossing with other languages. Trouble is, when
English borrows, it's often called theft, and when it lends, it's sometimes
called imperialism. One thing's for sure. None of it's neatly quid pro quo.
Go no further than the adventures of English when it arrived in Australia.
Here English borrowed Aboriginal words or extended English words to apply to
the local context; and Aboriginal languages took in English words; and
nowhere did the borrowings sit still and inert. Consider the career of
koala, an early adoption of a local word gula, which then moved through
coola, koala, bear, native sloth, and finally, after some 120 years, almost
at extinction, came to settle on koala.

Where languages make contact, no linguistic accounting takes place. There's
no international Language Court, no global linguistic bookkeeper. Best
approximate is the French Academy (though regulatory zeal is shared by
others, eg, Tamil) - well-known for its gate-keeping of corrupting (read,
English) words. In my imagination, I see a be-desked, neatly moustachioed
Parisian bureaucrat, with Excel lists of would-be new arrivals, ready to
alarm-raise at any hint of trespass. Had French been less fixated on lexical
purity, it might today be the Globish. It's all to do with self-identity and
that's where the ego permeability (EP) metaphor is apt. The concept is
usually applied to individuals learning a foreign language. A person with a
low self-conviction is said to have low EP (LEP). A person with high
self-conviction is said to have high EP (HEP). LEP suggests high
defensiveness and low receptivity to outside influences. Conversely, HEP
suggests low defensiveness and high receptivity to outside influences.
Learners deemed "natural" are tell-tale HEPs. They're wont to warm to (and
ape) the accent, seek out natives, feel comfortable in the culture, not
worry about looking or feeling stupid. Near enough is plenty good enough;
imprecision and ambiguity are happily tolerated. All helpful qualities in a
multilingual world with increasingly frequent path-crossing.

Perhaps EP may be extended to a whole lingual group - Anglophones or
Francophones, for instance. I'm going out on a limb here but might this not
partly account for why English's adventures abroad involved both borrowings
and lendings, while French's involved much lending but little borrowing?
Does English as a language have a higher EP than French? If that's all
romantic codswallop, the same can't be said for the forensic evidence Melvyn
Bragg discusses in his *The Adventure of English*. He cites the "great
grammar shift" that occurred as English came in contact with the Danish of
Viking invaders. As it was in the interests of English that its speakers
communicate (for trade purposes, if nothing else) with the Danish-speaking
invaders and settlers, it re-invented itself, becoming more amenable and
flexible. From an inflected language, such as Latin, with meaning largely
carried by word endings, English began to lose its complicated inflections.
The locus of meaning shifted to its syntax (word order), which became
relatively fixed; and prepositions were imported to replace word endings,
for showing the relationships between words. The hard-wiring of meaning into
fixed syntax made English easier to learn, you could get all the words wrong
but still make sense. Just what you need on a visit to Barcelona.

With the next set of trials, tribulations, raping and pillaging under the
Normans in the 11th century, English again might've gone under but for its
adaptive resilience. Bragg writes that it continued "to change, to endure,
both resisting and absorbing the invader's language, selecting, nursing
itself like an exiled and wounded animal, hoping for the opportunity to
re-emerge". It's not English's aesthetic qualities that account for its
spread. Rather, the spread is linchpinned in power (read, armies and
navies): conquest plants the flag, trade follows the flag and trade needs
language. The fact that Britannia ruled the waves for centuries, bringing
back exotic spices and much besides from far-flung places, no doubt
instilled a great sense of self (some might say, an over-inflated one). Then
when the Empire faded, the next superpower was also English-speaking,
dominating the world in everything from military machinery to popular
culture and fast food. The French had their empire, too, but somehow
colonial confidence didn't strengthen their EP to the point where French
might develop a less fearful attitude to borrowing. Perhaps, it all goes
back to Waterloo.

In any case, language contact hardly leads to neat borrowings, interchanges,
renewals or neat anything else. Nor are returns like the after-hours chute
of a library. It's much messier than that. More bottom-up and organic.
Whether it's sleeping with the natives or stealthy night-time border
crossings, the unofficial rule is rampant, random cross-pollination.
Borrowed terms tend not to stand still. They grow legs and walk about in
their new habitat. It's less a surgical skin-graft than a slow process of
bottom-up assimilation, allowing the adopted word to acclimatise to a new
location. It's a kind of "indigenising", or making local what started from
beyond.

The compound double entendre was borrowed from 17th-century French, to mean,
in English, a phrase with two meanings, the second of which was usually
risque. The borrowing happened because English needed a term for a sexually
indelicate ambiguity, a la Mae West's "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are
you just happy to see me?" In English, the term developed its own
connotations, part of a larger pattern of expediently borrowing French words
where more prudish English ones were hot potatoes. (Think negligee,
lingerie, the brothel's Madame, and even risque). Times change and with
them, words. Contemporary French no longer uses double entendre; and nor,
much, does English. With the taboo on lewd all but lifted, English no longer
needs its oblique French dalliances.

Borrowing and indigenising also happened to the Latin ad hoc. Adopted in the
17th century, ad hoc literally means "to this", understood as "for this
matter or purpose". In English, it started out adjectivally: "an ad hoc
committee" being a committee formed for a specific and limited purpose,
temporarily co-existing with the regular committee. Later, a broader meaning
developed: "in haste", "impromptu" or "without adequate planning". You see a
lot of policy-making made ad hoc around election time. Thus far the
indigenising shifts are both semantic and functional. More recently, the
form has anglicised further by becoming a noun, merging ad hoc, adding a "k"
(more English), and an English suffix ("-ery"). And behold, we have
"adhockery", for a single instance of poor planning, and "adhockeries" for
multiple instances (again, handy around elections). By the time we're
adlibbing over adhockeries, we've forgotten that Latin was ever part of the
mix.

This is not to suggest that a new word is necessarily welcomed into the
language in streets lined with a home crowd of cheering, flag-wavers. Early
arrivals are often scorned by those who define the language by what they
themselves learned. The indigenisation process can be a track of hurdles,
where only time decides the winner. Meanwhile, new arrivals may be caught
vice-like between, on the one hand, scholarly opposition from those most
vested in maintaining the alleged purity and status quo and, on the other,
indigenising pressures that are coaxing the borrowing to, well, come in,
take your coat off, make yourself at home. Those today who dismiss new
arrivals as gimmicky interlopers have forgotten that many of the words they
learned, Gospel-style, were once also sites of contestation.

Anyone who ever learned French at school knows about faux amis (false
friends), indisputable evidence that borrowing leads to idiosyncratic
trajectories. Take "propaganda", which hails from modern Latin and
originally meant a committee of cardinals who managed foreign missions.
Clear links here to original Latin propagare (breed, multiply), as to the
spirit of evangelical Christianity. The modern pejorative sense of
"propaganda" did not itself enter until World War I (you'll never guess
why). The Spanish propaganda, used politically, is a true friend to the
modern English; but in everyday Spanish, propaganda means advertising. I
still remember the shock of discovering that all that junk mail in my letter
box was propaganda.

Indigenising inevitably leaves its own stamp. When English borrowed husbonde
from Swedish, it moved away from the farm-owning sense of the original.
Modern Hebrew has its own milder version of The Academy, but tends to warm
to English, adapting it for local use: pancher (for puncture), backax (for
back axle), pendel (for penalty kick). Recently, Israelis have started
saying "bye" (in place of "shalom") when they hang up the phone. Indian
English has largely stopped hiding in the shadows of the Raj, asserting its
own pride: backside (rear entrance), marketing (for vegetable shopping),
cousin-brother (male-cousin).

Anu Garg, the wordsmith behind *A-Word-A-Day*, writes treasure troves of
semantic developments. He cites pundit, the Sanskrit word that came to
English via Hindi. In India, a pundit is esteemed for his wisdom, usually in
a religious context. In English, it's slightly pejorative, political pundits
ever ready with opinions. Similarly, guru, from the Sanskrit word for
weighty, means a religious teacher who gives instruction to disciples. In
the secular West, guru has broadened its applications. We have cricketing
gurus, weight-loss gurus, money-making gurus. Not only is the context
unspiritual but the claimed knowledge base also may be open to conjecture. I
for one feel like blanket-apologising to Indian pundits and gurus, for what
we've done with their words.

Variety crosses history, geography, socio-economic class, ethnic groupings,
genders and sub-cultures. It is also across generations and within families.
A correspondent from Armidale, NSW, informed me about the varied nuances of
"crib" within his family. "To my kids it's a bed for baby Jesus. To my wife
and I (in our 40s), it means to cheat before an exam. But for my Irish mum,
'crib' means to complain (the way we'd say 'whinge'). 'Stop your cribbing,'
she'd say when we were whining about a long car trip. My brother says that
on a recent trip to India, he found Mum's use of 'crib' being used by young
Indian executives, who themselves were cribbing about the factory workers'
cribbing about their pay and conditions." When travellers return from other
landscapes, something has changed. They bring back souvenirs, sometimes they
pronounce a foreign word differently - the ciao is never the same after a
trip to Italy. Sometimes the shift is in the sensibilities. So too is it
when languages travel. How could it be otherwise?

*Ruth Wajnryb's Cheerio Tom, Dick and Harry: Despatches From The Hospice of
Fading Words (Allen & Unwin, $24.95), is out now.*

http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/an-ad-hoc-approach-to-world-domination/2007/11/23/1195753287435.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its
members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or
sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree
with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20071124/54e2d454/attachment.htm>