As a speaker of the American English language, I will un-knowingly cross cultures and languages with every flick of my tongue. Even the most rudimentary of English is a mishmash of hundreds of years of immigration, assimilation, and integration. Our words are a reflection of the diversity of our culture.
I agree with Lightiris that there is no “pure” English. The fact that we have recognizable language differences across simple geographic boundaries (where’s my bubbler?) can attest to that. However, I find the rest of this comment to be troubling, not because I have anything against lightiris, but because what she said is already manifesting itself in Academia.
If we simply go along for the ride and stop focusing on learning to comprehend English — old English, we lose valuable resources, valuable knowledge, and put ourselves in a position to be lied to.
My example is going to be the American Revolution.
Today, if you ask a student, upwards of even college, what is the cause of the American Revolution, you will no doubt oftentimes hear that it was caused by unfair taxation of the American colonies by British administration. While part of the cause, this is by no means the whole potato. However, should one suggest to this student, in the hopes of them broadening their scope of knowledge, that they read some Alexis de Toqueville, Rousseau, or Kant, many students will be unable to process the information. Thus, they can’t read primary texts for themselves and are forced to have someone else explain orally, or, have someone else create a sort of “for dummies” version of the text. Don’t you think it would play into the “tea baggers” hands to have a generation of students convinced taxation was the sole cause of the American Revolution?
This causes some severe issues. First of all, one would have to put absolute faith and trust in the person who is transmogrifying the primary source to do so in an unbiased and accurate fashion. I could walk up to a number of students, present them with something written in the meaty language of the Enlightenment, give them a totally erroneous summation of the work, and there is a good chance they will not be able to process the text enough to prove me wrong or recognize my bias.
Have you read a number of bills pumped out by our esteemed Congress? People laugh and say “you shouldn’t need to be a lawyer to read a law”, but how easy would it be to cross people and dupe them if they can’t wrap their minds around a law put right in front of them.
I try not to be a fool. I realize the shifts and movements of the oral English language, and am part of that shift. However, I refuse to acknowledge that there is no place for “conservatism” in language. The written work of hundreds of years is far too precious to be relegated to a position of antiquity in language because we have evolved “lean” English. I would rather see the great works of years past burned in a bonfire than being mass-translated into stupid-talk.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
–James D. Nicoll
I don’t read in lightiris that we should chase after the latest linguistic trend with abandon. So many of them flame out that it’s pretty easy to start to see a rhythm. Remember when the cent sign used to exist on keyboards?
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p>As a matter of fact, there are some pretty steadfast rules about the English language — for example, the lifespan of a hyphen in a new word is just about 5 years. Remember when it was called “e-mail”?
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p>There is a place for holding to a standard, with acknowledgment that the evolution of a language means that some changes are more wrong than right. Happily, time usually decides which is which. The language emerges the stronger for it.
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p>PS: Six years of working in Canada have certainly colored my own use of the English language — an affectation for double consonants in conjugated verbs, a preference for “grey” over “gray”, and an overuse of the word facile.
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p>Exactly. What I’m trying to convey is that true evolution in a language is not evidence of corruption, it’s evidence of need and influence.
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p>I slog through enough MLA-formatted critical analyses of major works of American and British Literature each year to know that holding the line on Standard Written English is a constant battle. But I’m also aware that language standards change. The addition of the serial comma rule, for instance, by the MLA some years ago was immensely helpful in reducing ambiguity. Some people, I’m betting, posting on this very topic, still believe that the last comma in a series is optional. It isn’t. As well, the verb “to marginalize” is useful in literature and sociology, but there was a time–in the past ten years–when English teachers I knew disputed its legitimacy. And, of course, there’s the literary term/notion of “the Other,” which, too, has had to claw its way into legitimacy. And there’s always “to contact” as a verb…. The list is endless, the rules change, and that’s okay.
Chicago, in its latest edition, has come around on this as well.
I know that MLA and Chicago have both laid down the law on it, but I have to say I hate the Oxford comma. To me, it’s as unnecessary as a necktie.
Frost:
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p>The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
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p>OR
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p>The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
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p>_________________
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p>These two lines do not mean the same thing. One contains a series and the other does not. The serial comma is often extremely helpful and is designed to reduce ambiguity, as in the case above.
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p>Frost was extremely upset when editors took his comma OUT of the line because it changed his meaning significantly. After many years, the comma was restored and the intended meaning of the line clear.
I’ve noticed commas disappearing from correspondence that comes back from review and typing at work, and now I know why. Thanks for an example I can use to fight back.
…of holding poetry to absolute standards. In this case it also changes the cadence of the line.
only using the Frost line as an illustration that the serial comma is essential in some contexts for intended meaning. Poetry, either in form or in free verse, is never, to my knowledge, constrained by punctuation.
(iambic quatrimeter) with or without the comma. One can would normally read the line with slightly different intonation, but the scansion remains intact.
depending on whether I pause after “dark” or not. I take the point about the literal scansion.
I’m going to hold business correspondence to poetic standards.
I’m sure you noticed the comment I posted in reply to the comment you quoted above. There is certainly a place for retranslations with something like the Bible, in order to make it MORE understandable. However, I think in general specificity and consistency of rules accomplishes exactly that, which is why I defend them. This is why I often help write governing documents for organizations I’m part of – because the language I use will be precise. I guess this tendency is why I’m often asked if I’m a lawyer. I’m not, which I think prevents me from going too far the other direction and making such documents incomprehensible to laypeople.
As far as English origins are concerned, my understanding is that by 1300 the variations in local (measured in 10s of miles) dialects in England varied quite considerably, but that of the dialects the one that can be considered the ‘root’ dialect of what we now use was the dialect spoken in London around that time – the one Chaucer wrote in.
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p>”However, should one suggest to this student, in the hopes of them broadening their scope of knowledge, that they read some Alexis de Toqueville, Rousseau, or Kant, many students will be unable to process the information.”
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p>This is true, but trivially so. Given the flexible and ever-changing nature of the language it is hardly surprising that cross-generational understanding of text can present challenges. Indeed, the an understanding requires that the particular issues on how language is mutable and has mutated be understood This is quite contrary to any notion that sufficient understanding of ‘standard’ English would yield the necessary understanding of cross-generational (never mind cross-era) text.
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p>Given that such is an issue, it really goes without saying that some ‘sign-posting’ is needed for comprehension. It then goes further without saying that ‘someone’ would have be the guide. This is why annotated editions of old texts are invaluable, and the fact that some might ‘need’ annotation is expected and not alarming in the least.
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p>”I could walk up to a number of students, present them with something written in the meaty language of the Enlightenment, give them a totally erroneous summation of the work, and there is a good chance they will not be able to process the text enough to prove me wrong or recognize my bias.”
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p>This is, of course, true, but I don’t think it signifies anything in particular. Certainly the more educated one becomes with regard to old text the easier it is to ‘be one’s own guide’ in reading them. But such should hardly be a requirement for citizenship, or even a requirement for approaching the work in the first place. Just because we aren’t all academics doesn’t mean that such works shouldn’t be accessible. If that requires a 3rd party interpretation, so be it. That you point out that such interpretations can be deliberately misleading isn’t really news. That it can be isn’t really an excuse to mandate that everyone arm themselves with the necessary tools to interpret these works for themselves. What that sounds great in theory, it necessarily mandates efforts toward the academic study of language that go beyond what would be considered necessary for ‘good citizenship’. Reliance on trusted sources for interpretation is nothing new and nothing to be afraid of.
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p>”However, I refuse to acknowledge that there is no place for ‘conservatism’ in language.”
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p>I agree with this. I just think pointing out the benefits of such conservatism toward cross-generational understanding of written works is misguided because the amount of knowledge necessary to do justice to such a notion is beyond what would be ‘generally accepted’ as the necessary command of the language for most people. A better argument for a ‘core’ language that resists change (‘conservative’) would be to promote current understanding across usage groups and dialects, rather than cross-generational issues. I don’t see the ‘core’ that exists today as being under sufficient threat to overly worry about it. More people are getting college educations today than ever before and the paper writing requirements alone for such an education should serve to sufficiently anchor us in a common tongue without worrying about the competing dialects, IMO.
… with Sabutai’s latter point. While I agree with you that one shouldn’t “…acknowledge that there is no place for ‘conservatism’ in language.”, I don’t think this is what Lightiris’ is asserting.
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p>Her statement doesn’t imply that ‘there is no place for conservatism in language’ so much as say that ‘linguistic conservatives overly worry about current expressions of the language’s mutability’.
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p>Certainly there is a ‘place’ for conservatism in language. It’s just that worries in the name of linguistic conservatism about current trends might be overstated is all.
Witness the disputes over original intent of the Constitution, or how literally the Bible is to be taken. In order to understand either of these, one must know what the various words meant when they were written, and in the case of the Bible, knowing the original language helps as well.
I also just posted this in response to Christopher on that other diary:
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p>Much of what you read in Shakespeare has been modernized, you know, in terms of spelling. Hope you realize that…. Just sayin’….
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p>When I was in graduate school, we had to pass a competency exam in a foreign language. Because I was an English (Literature) major, mine was Middle English, the language of the Canterbury Tales you mention above. I can assure you that the English of 1300, or at the advent of the Great Vowel Shift in 1450, is markedly different from the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare’s 1500-1600s. Standardizing language through spelling works wonders in standardizing pronunciation–until the function of the language itself becomes problematic or until an influx of foreign language speakers become the majority. English has more than doubled in size in the last 100 years, making it the largest language on the planet. In fact, English has more than three times the vocabulary of either French or German. Efforts to fully count and catalog every English word is ongoing, but the addition of new words and newly acquired or changing meanings of existing words make this effort virtually impossible–and the editors of the OED clearly and readily acknowledge this fact.
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p>This is patently absurd. There is no such tacit agreement anywhere and no authority in place to ensure such a notion. Indeed, contemporary English speakers frequently need support in reading and understanding Shakespearean texts. No one is in control of English except the masses who speak it, write it, and read it. Given enough time, the language will, like it always has, evolve in order to provide more efficient and effective communication.
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p>What you are talking about is not precision; it’s custom and convention. The sole purpose of language is to communicate. When communication is not effective, forces will influence syntax, diction, and vocabulary to remedy these deficiencies. If a more effective syntax catches on with enough people, the language rules will eventually accommodate that change. If a foreign word captures what English cannot, that word will be appropriated. It has ever been thus.
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p>You are free to claim some sort of affinity for the English of your youth, but time will leave you in the dust just as surely as it left the generations before us.
I’ve read plenty of Shakespeare without modification. What I said about not further evolving is one person’s theory which I read somewhere along the line, but my own experience would suggest there is something to it. After all, we can read Shakespeare with minimal assistance (an occasional footnote), but some words in Chaucer are beyond recognition. Standardized spelling is a relatively recent (last couple of centuries) phenomenon. I submit that most rules ARE in place for a reason and while those reasons may not be readily obvious to most speakers most of the time it does keep lawyers in business. I strongly suggest that standards are exactly what makes communication the most effective. For the record, I’m only 31 so my youth isn’t that long ago. I accept that vocabularly is always expanding as it should, but there’s no compelling reason to change rules of grammar and syntax that quickly.
Everything I’ve said relates mostly to changes over hundreds of years. What are you talking about exactly? I even said in one of my comments (rather facetiously) that I won’t live long enough to see any vowel shifting (much to my chagrin). The Great Vowel shift took 300 years.
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p>Your assessment of the average person’s ability to “read” Shakespeare is inaccurate, too. Sorry, but it is. Perhaps if you’ve been teaching as long as I have (both adults and kids) you’d have a better sense of this. The average contemporary reader “reads” Shakespearean texts for gist, which is testimony to the distance between us (500 years, give or take) in terms of diction and syntax.
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p>I have never argued that rules are worthless or exist for no reason. Straw man arguments don’t help here, you know. I HAVE argued that the natural evolution of English is driven by multiple factors, that change is inevitable, and that change occurs out of need or influence. Nothing in that suggests rules are bad; indeed, my statements suggests that rules change, suggesting the inherent value of rules and conventions. Clinging to outdated rules is silly, though, like the erroneous notion that we don’t end sentences with prepositions in English. Nothing in English has ever prescribed such a rule, and the fetish is merely an overcorrection arising out of Latin custom.
…I meant the time difference between when I was learning grammar in elementary school and now (~20 years). As a substitute at that level I have yet to encounter a grammatical rule in current English texts which differs from what I was taught. As for Shakespeare, I don’t doubt that some editions are more faithful to the original than others. I haven’t taught it, but I spent a good chunk of high school reading, learning, and analyzing it with my classmates (and teacher guidance of course). I’m just noting from my observations that vocabulary was almost all familiar to us and the rules of grammar recognizable. Contrast this with reading Canterbury Tales in 12th grade which really was a translation as demonstrated by sample passages printed side-by-side in the original and modern English. Keep in mind too that I’m only making this argument for formal writing; I would not hold these blog comments to the same standard.
but for reading comprehension, it’s different. Do you really think we shouldn’t have the expectation that a person read something to the effect of the Federalist Papers with comprehension in their original text?
Do I think people should be able to read at a level that will enable them currently to comprehend something like the Federalist Papers? Why wouldn’t my answer, as an English teacher and as a citizen, be in the affirmative? Because anyone’s answer to that question today would be yes, I guess I might not understand your question.
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p>The density of writing from that period poses a problem for casual or pooly skilled readers and requires a significant amount of engagement with the text, especially for teens. That said, do I think people should be able to read more skillfully in general? Sure I do.
I thought you were just another left-wing zombie. It is obvious that you are an insightful, effective English teacher. On this subject you know what you are talking about.
You think EVERYBODY on here not named JohnD is a left wing zombie. It’s really quite dreary.
You absolutely need a few people to question your silly ideas from time to time. Don’t you get it yet that if you really knew everything then the rest of the world would be joining your parade? And I still don’t understand how people can be so lockstep in their core beliefs. And are you saying that anyone who doesn’t agree with you is dreary? Oh, my goodness. What is there about diversity that bothers you so much?
Even your “apology” to lightiris is condescending and myopic.
I also seriously question your reading comprehension. It’s painting yourself as wise and everyone else as a deluded idiot that’s dreary.
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p>If you seriously think sabutai, stomv, and lightiris (to pick 3 at random) are marching in lockstep, you’re missing out.
I say only what I mean to say on a literal level. If you have read my posts you would know that I follow no party line, so please don’t wordgame about seeing value in other viewpoints. I see value in many of the ideas exchanged here, but that doesn’t mean that your collectivism imposes a complete dogma to follow.
Referring to other’s ideas and viewpoints as “silly” and “lockstep” is clearly saying they’re without value. That you see the discussion here as “collectivism” or remotely approaching a “complete dogma” just shows how close minded you are and how little you bring to the table.
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p>I will say I’m glad to see you’ve moved beyond randomly downrating posts.
I’m trying to think how I’d respond to this if directed at me.
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p>Maybe this?
How kind of you Edgarthearmenian to notice that I am only occasionally a left-wing zombie, and that, in the area of my professional competence, I know what I’m doing. In the future, I will restrict my writings to matters of English language and literature so as not to spread any zombie stench.
On the fact that many of us agree on a lot of points, didn’t I address that back in February? As huh points out, Sabutai, stomv, and Lightiris are pretty different.
…the Edgar The Albanian backhanded compliment of the month.
You’re good at recognizing when countries begin with the letter A.
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p>:-)
Next you’ll be telling me that Sabutai and Stomv aren’t the same person. 😉 😉 😉
I think public transit is for losers.
Your comment is well intentioned, so I thank you for the kind words.
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p>P.S. Highly recommend the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; it’s tremendously silly fun.
I’m wondering whether JoeTS’s question about potential readers of Rousseau and Kant has less to do with language and more to do with a sort of “twitterization” of communication.
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p>Certainly, as Mr. Lynne and LightIris point out, older writers are working in a different language, but they are also writing for people willing to read things that unfold slowly. In fact, in the 1700s most every educated writer read Latin and probably Greek. They were more experienced than we are handling texts without guides, illustrations, graphs, diagrams, summaries, and blog commentary.
a level of engagement our youth are loath to invest. The students I see have been raised on the practice of journaling, an activity that is supposed to increase a student’s comprehension as well as facilitate a student’s personal investment in what he or she is reading. Well, after a boatload of years, with student reading skills in decline, I’m abandoning the concept altogether. (Makes for feisty discussion in my 10-member English Department….)
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p>I and a few of my colleagues are going back to the traditional English-study practice of annotating. This process poses some logistical problems (students don’t own their texts and sticky notes are a pain) but we’re going to try it this year and see if they don’t manage what they read more skillfully. We’re explicitly instructing kids on how to annotate (i.e., how to mark, highlight, comment, and question) their texts as a way of having a conversation with that text. So far so good. They’ve done some good stuff with Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” as well as Arthur Miller’s 2000 Essay “Are You Now Or Were You Ever?” about the McCarthyist roots of The Crucible.
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p>…Unable to process the information because Rousseau wrote in French and Kant, I believe, wrote in German. I would suggest that if you truly want to process the the unbiased and accurate writings of Monsieur Rousseu and Herr Kant – and not “dumbed down” versions filtered through a modern translator – then you should learn to read French and German.
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p>I say the language of Rousseau and Kant are too important to be dumbed down for people too lazy to learn foreign tounges!
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p>——————–
On a serious note, should students who earn Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities be able graduate with the ability to read Emerson, Shakespeare, and say a David Hume and a John Stuart Mill? Hell yes. But keep in mind that students who read these texts usually don’t walk away processing what they just read until after a class discussion lead by a qualified professor or after reading a critical essay that grapples with the text. Even then it probably takes a few discussions and maybe writing a paper to really begin to get into the meat of it all.
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p>If we all didn’t need a little help reading these old guys, Joe, then there would not be mountains of exegetical scholarship on every little thing that they have written.
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p>I mean, there is good reason that your parish priest offers a homily after the liturgy, right?
I thought about this point when I was reading but refrained from further comment because I’ve said enough. Thank you for this:
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p>I needed my hand held through Eliot’s The Waste Land when I was in college. Same goes for Joyce’s Ulysses. There are many other texts I needed help with from professors in a classroom setting. I needed to have these texts taught to me so that I could fully understand their contextual value. Taught. That’s what teachers do. If all students with solid reading skills could pick up any text and simply learn what should be learned by a cursory or close reading, then teachers would be superfluous. Expertise is the currency of the classroom.
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p>In short, dense and difficult texts are taught for a reason. There’s nothing inherently shameful in that. I do that sort of thing every day for a living as do others on this site. I value what we do.
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p>Thanks again.
Like many a bedazzled visitor, I picked up a copy of Ulysses on my third week living in Dublin. I stopped trying to understand it my fifth week living there.
I know it’s heresy, but I have to say I just don’t understand the swooning. Emperors and new clothes come to mind….
I feel like an ass saying this, but I have excellent reading comprehension skills. This is not my opinion, my comprehension has been tested several times and the empirical data shows this to be true.
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p>I say this to help illustrate this point: every reader of English will find texts that humble them, regardless of how well they read. I found reading Enlightenment philosophers, most memorably David Hume, to be extremely humbling.
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p>I am extremely thankful to an past philosophy professor for teaching to me Hume’s “Of Miracles”. I read the text, I got gists, but I could not communicate about the text in any meaningful way until it was taught to me – we discussed ideas, he had a powerpoint presentation of modern situations to which Hume’s ideas could be applied, and he made us demonstrate that we understood the major points of the text.
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p>And yes, he spent a weekend and authored his own modern version of the text so that students who were not equipped to grapple with Hume’s language could come to class and grapple with Hume’s ideas. This is a man with a D.Phil from the University of Oxford and who publishes new translations of the works of Plato and such from ancient Greek, yet he had no problem teaching Hume using “translated” version of Hume’s text; he wanted to teach us philosophy, not 18th Century English. It’s a few years on and I’m still impressed that this Professor took the time translate that Hume essay for us.
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p>To teach. To read. To learn. These verbs certainly overlap but they are not synonyms. My most excellent philosophy professor made this point crystal clear by making me read David Hume. And then teaching it to me.
is that students should have the expectation of levels of comprehension, so it’s assumed teachers and professor would be in on it as well.
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p>You are quite right though, that it’s more of a mountain rather than a molehill. I wonder though, if contemporary teaching organizations value the place of learning this type of material in today’s world. I think in theory they do, but in practice, not so much.
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p>As far as reading in German, you reminded me of a funny writing of one of the great American writers, Mark Twain: The Awful German Language
…that unless it is part of the curriculum studying the original language, that an English translation is perfectly acceptable. In some cases looking at multiple translations might be appropriate as interpretation is a fundamental component of all this. Again, the Bible is a prime example of the challenges in this regard.
I was just trying to facetiously out-snob the elitism of JoeTS’s post in a tongue-in-cheek manner.