Vol. 10 No. 1 · 7 January 1988
pages 22-23 | 3609 words
Only God speaks Kamassian
Walter Nash
- The World’s Major Languages edited by Bernard Comrie
Croom Helm, 1025 pp, £50.00, March 1988, ISBN 0 7099 3243 X
- Studies in Lexicography edited by Robert Burchfield
Oxford, 200 pp, £27.50, April 1988, ISBN 0 19 811945 3
- Van Winkle’s Return: Change in American English 1966-1986 by Kenneth Wilson
University Press of New England, 193 pp, £7.95, August 1988, ISBN 0 87451 394 4
- Words at Work: Lectures on Textual Structure by Randolph Quirk
Longman, 137 pp, £5.75, March 1988, ISBN 0 582 00120 X
- The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal
Cambridge, 472 pp, £25.00, November 1988, ISBN 0 521 26438 3
In the third book of Gulliver’s Travels there is a gobbledygook machine. Designed by the ingenious academicians of Lagado, it consists of a frame filled with vocables that can be shuffled at the turn of a crank, and its brave technological purpose is to generate a universe of discourse. What it manufactures, of course, is scrambled poppycock: for language is the product neither of cranks nor yet of chips, but of the human mind as it projects one ruling competence onto a diversity of actual tongues. How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world.
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Letters
Vol. 10 No. 4 · 18 February 1988
From Eugene Kamenka
SIR: Walter Nash’s interesting survey of the variety of languages in the world (LRB, 7 January) itself refutes his surprising obiter dictum: ‘It seems that we accept, as both sufficient and necessary, the system we are born into.’ Das Unbehagen in the language we are brought up in seems to me a common occurrence, especially among the intelligent or the imaginative. It is not confined to those who know more than one language. It is one reason why languages change, but it is also a reason for rejecting linguistic relativism – the belief that anything goes and that languages cannot be judged against each other, as superior or inferior in some respects (having a subtler appreciation of emotional differences, for instance, or of types of snow, or of the need, in critical thinking, of avoiding ambiguity).
Chinese children, I am told, perform quite satisfactorily the remarkable feat of memorising complex ideographs from an early age. But their capacity to do so declines sharply when they are taught the Latin alphabet and realise that there are ways of reading and writing that involve less effort. Similarly, both the respect language and the imprecision of spoken Chinese – while of great value in smoothing over social relations and conducting business of certain kinds – become increasingly irritating to younger Chinese who have acquired greater directness together with a foreign language. I was raised bilingually in Russian and German and learned English (now my best language) only at the age of nine. Each of the three languages offers me opportunities and insights that I would not so readily derive from the others. Each, very noticeably, gives me a totally different conception of the nature of moral language and the character of moral distinctions and obligations. It is not minds or machines, but historical traditions and cultures that create languages and are communicated by them.
Eugene Kamenka
Australian National University, Canberra
