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Sunday, October 01, 2006
Linguistic Diversity An Asset
I remember a book, dating from the height of bicameral enthusiasm, which seemed to argue that Polynesian seafarers, speaking what might have been termed a low-noun or high-abstraction language, were thus in much better contact with their holistic half and could thereby perform abstractional feats of navigation that might defeat the intuition--if not the instruments--of the rocketmakers of Peenemünde.
This variety of linguistic relativism--not really derivable from S or W--is not modish and believed widely to be false. All languages have identical expressive power, at least in whole. From this belief, Walter Benn Michaels lab-ideates that the disappearance of languages is not to be lamented, since there will always be another, as good as any other in every relevant way.
I believe this to be an exercise in Fishian contrarianism, and the linguistic details about what “linguistic relativism” and “expressive power” actually mean can only bring what’s at stake here into sharper focus. In the spirit of the exercise, however, I want to suggest that it the argument applies to the burning of books (in any language) just as well. Most books are unread and those read will increasingly become unread as books grow and mutate. While every book is unique in its own way, that uniqueness stems from its diachronicity--the interaction of a means of expression with its particular time, interpreted, inevitably, developmentally by the reader. Since there is no eternal past for us to move into, whatever can be transmitted from this diachronic encounter already has been. Thus, burning the books that have affected us will not matter, as the effect is ineradicable; and burning the books that have not affected us does not matter, because they couldn’t change our knowledge of the past or thoughts about the present or future anyway. Whatever is truly unique in a book is lost in historical translation, so therefore its means of transmission might as well not exist, especially if it takes up valuable computing and recreational space. (Ontogenically, yes, such disappearances might matter; but that’s noise.) Books are not discrete entities from the historical view. They are connected to each other in patterns anterior to language, and the node-bearing books, those of connective significance, have already been identified.
Do you have the intuition that it’s a far worse fate for a language to disappear than a book?
Comments
A painfully strained analogy. No is suggesting that languages should be burned or in any other way actively extirpated. A more useful analogy would be: what if people stopped reading books and starting getting their words elsewhere, say from the internet? To what lengths should we then go to save the book?
The lack of active preservation is active neglect, I’d imagine. And I think the question of record and memory--their representative power--has implications for our intuitive sense of the subjective quality of different languages, said sense composing a large part of the preservationist instinct (which is distinct from the exclusionist/chauvinist instinct).
So my “active neglect” of, say, Karen Hughes’s *George W. Bush: Portrait of a Leader* is the equivalent of my having burned it? That is what your analogy implies. And it also implies that I should feel bad about it.
Just as a general comment, the argumentative mode called above “Fishian contrarianism” that seeks to identify liberal pieties with their supposed opposites strikes me as not so much instructively ludic in intent as plainly nihilistic in effect.
Above, I tried to comment upon the relationship between the concept of equality of expressive power of a language and the historical/cultural descriptive power of its written records. I think that’s interesting, theoretically, though it has many corners to brighten.
The dodo-reductio of Karen Hughes, however, fails. How could Bush be brought into factual relief without consulting the hagiographies? How could you ignore its coded lessons for the wise?
You are the one who melodramatically asked us to compare the loss of languages through cultural change to the Nazi practice of burning books. I would say you got hoisted upon your own dodo-reductio.
It may be a tad melodramatic of you to link that ancient and noble practice to the Nazis here, but this is far afield of the point.
What is qualititatively different about the uniqueness of books that makes them worth preserving from the uniqueness of languages that does not? Is it a matter of ideational actuality relative to expressive potentiality?
The proper analogy would be to suggest that whether you read Fred Barnes’s Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush or Eric Alterman’s The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America is a matter of indifference; if the capacity to read one was lost, you could simply read the other.
If this appears to be a distortion of Benn Michael’s argument, consider that he makes Shakespeare absolutely equivalent to Cervantes, without paying the slightest attention to the ideological differences between the two men.
I suspect that somewhere, in some dusty room, someone might comment upon the aesthetic differences first, Joseph, but I’m sure that’d be walking into a trap.
I hope that someone in the upcoming event is going to consider the question of Borat.
Jonathan, Michaels addresses this argument in the same chapter that NY Times article’s excerpted:
We don’t, for example, want to lose great works of art—not because they’re part of our culture but because they’re great ... It’s only because, rightly or wrongly, we think Shakespeare is good for everyone—regardless of identity—that we want his plays to survive. And we think works of art are different from languages precisely because, unlike languages, they can be better or worse. If we really thought that every work of art (like every language) was just as good as every other work of art, it would indeed be hard to defend the idea that the works of art we happen to be familiar with should survive; there’s no loss worth mourning if the things we love die with us and just replaced by the things our descendents love instead. (156)
What’s unique about books is that they’re not unique.
Pace Joseph, they’re not exactly identical, either, though I don’t think Michaels would contend otherwise.
I wrote this post in full knowledge of the fact that the objections I was raising might be anticipated in the book itself, which I haven’t read. I haven’t yet decided what I think of the gold standard one, so I don’t want to rush into this newfangledness just yet.
For those of you who have read it, however, I would like to know just how deeply Benn Michaels delves into the consequences of the linguistic relativism question, which seem to me to be foundational to literary interpretation and not resulting in strong intentionalisms, as far I can see.
Not at all as far as I can tell, and I’ve read the book. His position in the book is pretty much what he stated in the NYTimes piece.
It’s less an engagement with Paul Friedrich than him clipping the cord of linguistic essentialism from cultural identity, if that’s what you’re asking.
Have we seen babykong before?
People with a strong interest in this specific question should spend some time at languagehat.com . This is one of his main interests and there’s a wealth of information in his archives. Right now he has something up on the relationships between Arabic, Berber, and French in the Maghreb.
No, John, I don’t think we have, but I’m happy to have him here.
I want to second the languagehat recommendation, and note that I already shot him an email asking him if he’d like to participate (and offering to scan that whole chapter if he was). I haven’t heard back from him, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Also posted at Unfogged:
There’s a book out by Wixman about the languages of the Caucasus. Basically Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have more language diversity than all of the rest of the Middle East and Europe combined.
There isn’t a corresponding cultural diversity. There’s an enormous amount of trilingualism (on up), and a lot of intermarriage. The significant diversity there is according to religion, location (mountain or lowland), urbanization, education, and maybe ideology.
Problem is, there are good scholarly (and political) reasons for mourning the “death” of a language.
Most of the disappearing languages were never on the radar of anthropologists or linguists to begin with. Which means they might have a lot to teach us about language in general.
Furthermore, the main reason people mourn the disappearance of a language is *rhetorical*, and Michaels is never good on the rhetoricity—as opposed to truth/falsehood—of claims. Languages disappear often because a people’s way of life is being eroded, and that erosion generally occurs by force.
Michaels is, of course, right that no one language is better than another. But the disappearance of a language is often used as a rhetorical ploy to gain sympathy for the destruction of a people’s way of life. And even if we don’t *like* that people’s way of life, we must allow that a people should have some self-determination and not be forced to change their langauge or culture.
We should worry, though, that good American liberals feel sadder about the death of a language than the forced erosion of a people’s way of life.
While every book is unique in its own way, that uniqueness stems from its diachronicity...
I’m not buying this argument at all. If anything, I think unique readings are more likely to come from the juxtaposition of a book and readers other than those for whom it was originally intended.
(In fact, I’d be more likely to buy the argument as applied to language—if, for instance, someone were to assert that adult learners of dead languages never recover the expressive power available to the original native speakers. I’m not a big Sapir-Whorf fan, so I wouldn’t say I actually believe this, but it’s less self-evidently bizarre.)
David, after the dash, I wrote, “the interaction of a means of expression with its particular time, interpreted, inevitably, developmentally by the reader,” which I think covers “readers other than those for whom it was originally intended,” which question of original intent, I think, is very hard to conceptualize.
And even if we don’t *like* that people’s way of life, we must allow that a people should have some self-determination and not be forced to change their langauge or culture.
Even if they choose to exercise their self-determination by ditching their native tongue in favor of English? Preserving languages places burdens on other people in a way that preserving books does not.
Jonathan, then I’m still missing something. Maybe it has to do with the phrase “its particular time.” Where do future readers fit into this picture?
Let me repeat that the question we’re talking about here isn’t very central to Michaels’ argument, and that I’m sorry he brought it up. There are a number of endangered Native American languages in the US, many of which seem past the point of no return, and you also have Louisiana French and New England French, but none of these have a very big profile in the big national argument.
{Production[Conditions(particular time) means(language)]+++++consumption(readers in futurity)}
Those plusses represent justice, I think.