We Live in a World of Doubt (further comments from my Linguistics course) (English)

Or: "Forgive the young, the tides have not washed enough of their days away..."
Of course, no one can predict the future, and I wouldn't attempt to, but I would caution anyone who puts his or her eggs all in one basket.

When I was in High School, we believed the Soviet Union would start a war that would destroy us all. In fact, being a mere 10 miles from a second strike target in Pennsylvania, we were even taught what areas of the county would be vaporized, what zones in the firestorm, what zones would have doors and windows blown out, and what zones would merely suffer radiation poisoning. I remember my biology teacher saying that when he heard the Soviets were bombing, he planned to take his wife and daughters to the army depot and wait there to be vaporized.

Yet, most of you who are younger than I did not know that world, or are too young to have understood it. The world was a different place a mere 20 years ago.
A century? None of us will recognize the world then really, not if we could see it from our seats behind our computers.

My aunt Arwilda was born in 1908. When she was a girl, Latin and French were the languages to learn, and the farmers in the countryside all spoke Deits (Pennsylvania German). There was no electricity in her town, nor were the streets paved. They had telephones, but no radio. She read the Sears Catalogue by gaslight. She could remember her mother renting a horse and buggy at the livery stable down the block to ride to a rather distant village (15 miles away) on a family emergency. She was in such a hurry, the buggy went up on one wheel as she rounded the corner on her way out of the livery. My aunt lived until 1994. She saw a gaslit, horse and buggy world evolve into a world with computers, color television and the very real threat of hot, atomic death.

I think you have all posited very fine thoughts, but many of you make leaps of faith and commit dreadful logical fallacies. The future is as mutable (changeable) as the past was varied, indeed, moreso. Perhaps English will still be important in 100 years. Certainly it will still be spoken.
But while it shall still be spoken, it won't necessarily be the first language in schools and in business meetings. One thing is relatively certain, the United States will not be the world's only power. This is new, and it won't last, no country holds power for long, and as I have pointed out in several places, there are many tell-tale signs of our decline. I suspect it is likely that we will still be an important player in the global arena, but we will be sharing top-billing with other nations, just as we have in the past.

Things will not always be as they are now.

Watch out, tomorrow will be exciting, thrilling, hair-raising, and nothing like any of us imagines ;)

Further Comments from my Linguistics Course (English)

So far, I think you've all added some really good contributions to this discussion, but I'm a little disappointed that not more of you caught on to the very different ways those who speak Mohawk and those who speak English view their world.

There are two concepts which I often share with my language students: Crossing the Bridge & Parallel but Incongruous Linguistic Universes.

Crossing the Bridge: this is a term I learned during my early years of learning Welsh and being, albeit marginally, involved in Welsh and Welsh language politics. Back in the 80's there was a movement in Wales called "Croesi'r Bont," or Crossing the Bridge. This idea was used to demonstrate how non-Welsh speakers could cross the bridge to the Welsh speaking world with time and practice. I remember Welsh Tutor John Albert Evans describing people in our class in relationship to the bridge (much to the glee of my own ego, I was described as having already crossed it!) Other students were described as setting foot on the bridge, or halfway across, etc. I tell my own students about this bridge and explain to them that when they finally do it, when they finally master their chosen language well enough to function comfortably in their new language, that they have now crossed a bridge to somewhere new...

...to a Parallel but Incongruous Linguistic Universe. No matter how close two languages may be, say French and English, the perception of everything shifts when you move from one to the other. You really do "see" the universe differently while wearing French colored glasses as opposed to English colored ones, and vice-versa. The same is true for any language. There are whole ideas, concepts, from the mundane to the profound that differ wildly from one language to the other.

It is indeed true what Noam Chomsky claims about language, that all human languages are equal, at least theoretically. In practice they do not exchange relevant concepts that are unique and different between them to make each complete. It is not just the concepts (semantics) however, but also the syntax, morphology and pragmatics that give each language a different perspective, each totally unique. As hard as it is to imagine, but when I'm in Wales, speaking Welsh all day, everyday, my universe is Welsh. China has a Welsh accent (there are Welsh speakers there having Welsh thoughts about it!). Quantum Physics flows like poetry through ancient concepts of the natural world, even if the math behind it is no easier in Welsh than in English (but in Welsh I get to talk about my numbers in base ten or base twenty, or for fun mix the two systems up!). World politics are colored by millenia old Celtic concepts of federation, tribal allegiance, freedom and fair play. It is not the world that I occupy in English, and because none of you speaks Welsh, you will never really understand what I mean unelss one day you do. However, some of you have crossed bridges into English or other languages, and perhaps, if you're proficient enough, and you're sensitive enough, you will perceive these linguistic differences in perception. French, Japanese, English, Mandarin, Wolof, Mohawk, Latin, Russian, Arabic, and all the other languages of the Earth occupy the same space and time, but do not share the same reality.

If you get a chance, go back and read the chapter on Mohawk again, and see if you can begin to appreciate what this means in relation to how Mohawk perceives reality.

Response to a Student Post on the Future of English (English)

Well, obviously you feel very strongly about the future of the English language, but some of the other students have already painted parallel pictures that show how the demise of English will come about. It is not, at the end of the day a question of if English will die, but when. If you asked a Roman citizen if he thought there would come a day when Latin would not be the language of the Empire, he would have laughed at you. And while Latin continued to be used as a language of many cultural endeavours after the fall of the Empire, the language that was being used in universities and in scholarly works would have been incomprehensible to the citizens of the Empire at its height. They could have read it, but would not have understood spoken Medieval Latin, since it had long ceased to be a community language.

That's one of the possible death's of English frankly, because it is so analogous to Latin. Global English will take on a sort of moribund life of its own, static and essentially unchanging (it could not change much if it were to remain an international language), while the local variations of English would continue to evolve into new languages. That process would be very slow and it would be generations, perhaps centuries before the speakers of the regional Englishes would begin to see themselves as distinct from Global English.

However that's assuming a lot of variables will not change. English has only been the international language for about 40 years (generously speaking). Really, it did not fully supplant French until the mid to late 1970's, and while many Americans are confused or bemused the persistence of French in the wake of the English language's rise to power, the rest of the world still uses French as a first or second international language (including the English!). What appears to be a meteoric rise to global domination is really the result of coincidences that no one is in control of. Currently, the world's largest economy is the European Union, followed by the United States and then by Japan, Germany, and China (using nominal GDP, the arrangement is a little different with PPP GDP, but you can poke about the data yourself to see what that really means). A number of other European Union countries fairly well fill in the other top ten slots, and only one of them speaks English. French and German are the mostly widely spoken languages in the Union and are the languages of its wealthiest and most developed (refering to HDI components as well as GDP) members. The playing field is still very crowded when it comes to economic domination. Yes, English is the big man on campus today, tomorrow may be another story.

The knives are out, of course, with a number of global languages [linguae francae] (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic) and some regional ones (Chinese, Hindi [actually relatively few people in India can speak English], German, Russian) struggling in the world marketplace not so far out of reach of English. These are all languages with more than 100 million speakers, all mega languages, and all serious contenders for the next world language. Will any of the supress English? Maybe, maybe not, but the economic and political variables are quite profound. Take HDI (Human Development Index). While the United States has the second largest GDP (the largest of any one country), it now ranks only 8 in HDI (better than China's 81 of course). This lower score in HDI while other countries increase in HDI and have high GDP's demonstrate a certain degree of volitility in the world in which all countries are playing.

Languages like French often remain on the periphery of the Anglo psyche because we really don't see Africa. More than 20 countries in Africa use French as an official, co-official or administrative language, and with the world's 6 largest GDP and an HDI of 16, France's influence in Africa is far, far greater than England's or the United States. Canada, our neighbor to the north, is effectively 1/3 French speaking (between first language speakers and speakers of languages other than English who also speak French and French and English bilinguals. Canada has the world's 8th largest economy and an HDI of 5.

Portuguese is the forgotten mega-language par excellence of English speakers. With 220 million speakers, and spoken by people in Europe, Africa and South America, the largest single country that speaks Portuguese is Brazil, the world's 11th largest economy (HDI 69). What will happen in 15 or 20 years? Will Brazil come to eclipse China and the US? It's not unimaginable. Brazil has already weaned itself from the titt of foreign oil by convirting to ethanol for fuel. Will China still be viable? Its growth rate is already slowing (among the other fastest growing economies currently in the world are abysmally poor countries like the Sudan [Arabic] and Chad [French and Arabic]; they are small potatoes today, but Chad and Sudan have lots of black gold...). What about the "Southern Cone" of South America? Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have always performed well (at one time Argentina had the world's second largest gold reserves). If they come to dominance, Spanish may well be the world's new language of the day.

What is good ot bear in mind is something my mother always says: "It's hard to imagine things ever being different than they are now."

So true, and yet, if we look back in our lives, we can plainly see things have not always been as they are, and so we know they will change.

Will there always be an English? Not likely. It will evolve and/or die off, some day. No, certainly not in our lifetimes, nor anytime soon. This is certainly a golden age for the language and the English speaking cultures, and we should enjoy the benefits of that place without hubris because one thing that history always teaches is that the mighty always fall! Whether we fall slowly and gracefully, or are clipped at the pass by a more earnest, upstart rival is yet to be seen.

How I Came to My Languages

Thank you for your interest. To be wholly honest, I wish I could say that my relationship with foreign language had been born of some profound, adolescent interest in the world beyond my rather limited and rustic childhood. However, the truth is, it was born from pure, unadulterated spite. When I was in the 5th grade, I had a well-meaning, but utterly absent minded teacher, who, instead of keeping her class on track with their reading levels, got us off on an interesting, but entirely off-sequence civil engineering project, designing a small town (I think this did leave an indelible impression nonetheless, as I now am a fan of SimCity, but I digress...).

In those days, in Pennsylvania, we had a strict tracking system, and by the end of 5th grade, you had to be done with a certain "reading level." Sadly, due to her indulgence, none of us was able to get adequately far enough along our "track" and all of us were dropped multiple levels upon reaching the 6th grade. This was especially consternating for me since I was already reading Tolkien in the 5th grade! Imagine my chagrin when I was placed in remedial reading! Worse still, my 6th grade teacher was a thoroughly unpleasant person, who took no interest in any of us who were in "Catch the Wind," the remedial reading group. I had to suffer along an entire year in that group, being forced to read extremely simplified texts from out primer, all of which were printed with extra large typeface. Apparently, in those days, it was considered natural that people who needed remedial reading instruction, also were unable to distinguish small letters...

Near the end of 6th grade, all students in our school had the opportunity to take an exam to test out of further reading classes and hence be allowed to study a foreign language in the fall of our 7th grade. In order to take this exam, we had to get permission from our parents. My mother signed the permission slip, and I presented it to my 6th grade teacher, she smirked, and said, "I don't know why you're bothering to take this test. You're in 'Catch the Wind.' You'll never pass."
Spite, I said, was my motivation.

Of course, I was reading real novels by that time, so I passed the exam with flying colors; I got a 94. I was very pleased to see the look of dismay and shock.

That is when I began studying French, and in the same year, having discovered that, not only did I enjoy studying French, but was able to do quite well in the class, I began studying Welsh on my own. Two years later I also signed up for Spanish, and in my senior year I took Russian. Later on in college, to appease my growing interest in the Pennsylvania German side of my family, I began working with that language as well as High German. Since then I have studied many languages to widely varying degrees, including Latin, Cornish, Irish and Breton.

In her own, malevolent way, my 6th grade teacher opened up my world to foreign languages.
And yes, once you acquire a new language, and you master it, you do see the world in a different way. The language I'm closest to emotionally, and with which I most enjoying viewing the world, is Welsh, but I also enjoy my views of the world from Spanish, French, German, etc., and the small changes in my own personality that come with them, as I have learned to reinterpret my own orginal English speaking personality within the cultural contexts of my other languages!

Comments on a Student's Submission about Meaning and Deconstruction (English)

I really enjoyed this contribution, and what I like most about it is that it demonstrates how interdisciplinary approaches can be meaningful in more than one academic direction.

I think you hit on something with your Derridian comments about the non- compositional meaning in language. One thing that more science-oriented linguists struggle with is the very nature of meaning. The problem they arrive at is that it's incredibly difficult, within the subdiscipline of Semantics, to establish what meaning is.

Of course, the irony is that inspite of his apparent railing against "traditional" literary criticism, Derrida created a whole new nomenclature which is now repeated like Biblical rote throughout the circles of literary criticism among my colleagues who are a little bit older than I, and at times even among my generation and the younger generations of literature students. For some reason however, Derrida's work is rarely deconstructed with any seriousness (rarely is not to say never...), which I think he would see as a pity. "Derrida," professor David Wills of SUNYA said," only had one idea, but it was a big one." I would at least in part concur with Wills. Wills is, by the way, a Derridist, and was a personal acquaintance (perhaps indeed an actual friend) of Derrida before he died. To me, Derrida did have one idea, although it wasn't very big really.

Deconstruction has been inflated well beyond its origins, but is nonetheless an amazingly powerful tool for literary analysis. Due to is flexibility, it's also a great tool for other kinds of social analysis as well. Without a doubt, Deconstruction, in its essence, belongs in the realm of the cognitive sciences, as one of the many tools in the arsenal to coming to terms with the understanding of how the human mind works and what it is capable of grasping and creating.

To be honest though, I would have to side with the "anti-Derridians," by large an far in the same way that, while I more often than not agree with Dawkins and the other New Atheists, that reason and science are most likely to solve our problems and lead more humans to some kind of rational enlightenment, I feel that we would be foolish to throw out the spiritual baby with the religious bath water. Derridians and their ilk have a tendency to scoff at older forms of literary analysis, and at times even scoff at literature itself! Their adherence to their absolute ideals is no better or different than Structuralists or other traditionalists, in the same way that how the New Atheists approach their Work is no different from the zealots of any religious movement.

You will notice that I link my comments back to literary criticism when I reference Derrida because that is where I believe his work is best equiped to make meaningful (hehe) contributions. While Deconstruction can be (and should be) applied to many disciplines, the vast majority of Derrida's work beyond his one big idea is founded on very faulty knowledge. He often made forays into sociology, anthropology, theology and philosophy while having no real background in those areas, despite his self-proclamation as a philosopher, and his comments in those fields are often viewed by their respective specialists as specious and spurious. While there is a small camp of Derrida-fans in some branches of Linguitics, since one of the main projects of the discipline has been to move toward hard data and hard science whenever possible, a largely untrained literary critic and his novel idea haven't met many warm welcomes. It must furthermore be said that Derrida's rise to prominence was based more on whom he knew rather than on what he knew.

Finally, while it is true that Semantics struggles to define meaning, other subdisciplines of Linguistics (notably Pragmatics), when married with Semantics, do begin to define how we understand what each other is saying, even if the absolute meaning is still open to interpretation.

Oh, and why I titled this post "Derridian Nightmares".... your post put in mind of a nightmare I had a couple months ago in which Derrida was alive and well and had come to teach at the college. In the dream he conned me into helping him get a tooth imprint of a woman he was in love with, but was not sure of her identity. At the same time, he was dossing down in the Administrator of Technology's office, who himself was hiding from an irrate faculty because he had given us all ridiculous and mildly insulting email addresses. It was my perogative to find both Derrida in order to deliver this still spit-moist clay tooth mold and to give the administrator a piece of my mind. I never did find the administrator, but I did, as I mentioned, find Derrida fast asleep on a vintage 1970's sofa at the back of said adminstrator's office. We had words and many twenty year old copies of Of Grammatology some with the pages still uncut went crashing to the floor as I put my hands around his neck and began pushing him around. Sundry yellowing pages then went floating through the air as I used some WCW moves on him (he was surprisingly strong!). The dream ended as I gazed on Derrida sitting on the floor rubbing his throat amid strewn remains of Of Grammatology, a small piece of clay with the bite marks of his septagenarian love-interest laying atop one of the torn pages.

I would prefer that you neither deconstruct nor psycho-analyze that dream!

Three New Expressions of Note (English)

This weekend, while watching a couple films, I heard three great expressions, versions of one of which I had heard before. But lest I forget them, I've blogged them.

1) You're as much use as farts in a jam jar.
2) No problem is insoluable if you have a large enough plastic bag.
3) We're up shit's crick in a matchbox.