language as property

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Alan H. Hartley wrote:

> > native language as property
>
> That's an unpleasant thought. Maybe those responsible for drafting such
> "ordinances" should be asked if they're licensed to use the English
> terminology in which they drafted the proposals.

Are any of us, in the US or Canada?  (I apologize if I seem to overlook
the various subscribers who are not US or Canadian citizens.)  Many of my
ancestors appear to have been German speaking (the - the "evidently"
evidential) and neither country is part of Great Britain, which presumably
controls anything actually called 'English'.  Still, in some sense I
clearly have a better case for using English than Spanish or Omaha-Ponca.
As far as I know all living Omaha and Ponca people are bilingual in
Omaha-Ponca and English and have as much title to English as I do.

On the other hand, I believe copyright law is designed to protect
particular fixed sequences of words and images, not the use of particular
languages or isolated words in them.  I don't think, for example, that
Okrand's Klingon or Tolkien's various invented languages are copyright,
only the publications about them.  I've never heard of any language,
including natural languages, invented languages, computer programming
languages (high level or low level; open, proprietary or otherwise) being
copyright.  In fact, I'm not sure that it is even accepted practice to
copyright encoding systems like ASCII or XML.  Languages are the original
"non-proprietary software," though hardly "open source."

I have the impression that Native American (or other) ethnic groups have
not even been able to enforce anything like trademark rights to their own
names.

It might be possible for states or Congress to create and invest statutory
rights to languages.  That would be a great way to ensure that the
controlled languages disappeared without further discussion or attention,
one suspects.  I'm not clear on whether such a law could regulate existing
published materials without being an ex post facto law, something the US
Constitution precludes.

Linguists working on Native American languages have (in recent years,
anyway) tended to respect the wishes of the relevant groups as to what
languages were published on, what materials in them were published, and,
up to a point, as to what the languages are called (though not always). I
believe this has been primarily motivated by a polite wish (moral
obligation? ethical inclination?) to respect the sense of privacy of a few
particular groups with respect to social matters in general, and of all
groups with respect to personal or socially restricted information.

However, I think that most linguists in the US would not sympathize with
general attempts to control all publication in and on all languages.
Frankly, I fall into that category.  Clearly almost everyone in the US
would respect a Federally-enforced rights of control within the US.
Copyright control might just possibly be enforcible under treaty
obligations elsewhere, if it proved valid, but copyright law is fairly
international and involves a fair amount of voluntary cooperation.  I'm
not sure an extension of the bounds of copyright in the US would be
observed abroad.  Statutory rights probably wouldn't be enforcible
elsewhere, especially if of state origin.  Depending on details of the
situation, a lot of publication might simply move to another state or
abroad.

In a situation where the rights were merely asserted without any
recognized legal enforcibility, I can't say what particular individuals
might do out of a sense of personal debt, personal necessity, etc.  It
would certainly be a very uncomforable situation, especially since one
suspects that most cases many of the members of the native communities in
question would also be out of sympathy with the asserted rights.

It might be appropriate for Native Amercan groups to provide statements
regarding the respect with which they would wish their languages to be
considered, to regulate internal use of the language in public contexts
where that was feasible, and to the extent that this might be consistent
with Federal and state laws, and so on.  One could probably regulate, for
example, the orthographies to be used in purchase of published materials
or preparation of tribally funded materials, and, up to a point, the
content of the materials.  It would probably be wise to be very retrained
in doing this, to avoid creating situations in which no satisfactory
materials were ever available for acquisition.


JEK