McWhorter on the death of languages

[Spengler]

McWhorter on the death of languages on the Spengler Blog


by David Layman


Give the familiar Spenglerian theme of demographic death and the end of languages, I thought his readers ought to know about a recent essay by linguist John McWhorter, "The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English".

He poses the question:

What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it.

But using the example of the two major pronunciations of "disgusting" ("diss-kussting" and "dizz-gusting"), he argues that different languages do not express different cultural frameworks, but are simply happenstance. What if, he hypothesizes, if all humanity had a single culture with many different languages.

In this we would be like whales, whose species behave similarly everywhere, but have distinct “songs” as the result of happenstance. Who argues that we must preserve each pod of whales because of the particular songs they happen to have developed? The diversity of human languages is subject to the same evaluation: each one is the result of a roll of the dice.

The main loss in the loss of languages is, he argues, aesthetic:

The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.

But let’s remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota.

At the end, he suggests, the loss of languages is the price we pay for globalization.

[ellens]

Thanks for the interesting topic, Prof. Layman.

Unfortunately, I disagree with Prof. McWhorter. This is what he says in the middle of his essay.

"For the better part of a century, all attempts to conjure any meaningful indication of thought patterns or cultural outlook from the vocabularies and grammars of languages has fallen apart in that sort of way, with researchers picking up only a few isolated shards of evidence."

On this issue, he may well be right. Only a professional linguist who has reviewed the scholarly literature would be capable of drawing that conclusion, so I will take his word for it. However, he has missed the point entirely. While different languages in and of themselves may not lead to different thought patterns or cultural outlooks, they are almost always associated with different thought patterns and cultural outlooks. Does anyone think the cultural outlook of a Russian, for example, is the same as a Japanese or an Israeli Jew or a Zulu or Papua New Guinean speaking pigeon English. Each of these groups has a very distinctive cultural outlook, as anyone who has ever met members of these groups can attest to.

What makes the cultural outlook of a Russian different from that of a Russian Jew or a Pole, even though they may all live near each other, is not the language difference per se, but the social groupings, endogamous marriage and different education that their children receive, as the result of belonging to different language groups. Before the Revolution, in Russia, when there was freedom of choice to a degree, Polish children would live in a world of Polish people who were a second class minority in the Russian Empire looking to restore their national homeland. Their children received a religious education from the Catholic Church and looked to Western Europe for their inspiration.

The Russians meanwhile, received their religious education in the Orthodox church, viewed their ethnic group as a dominant group destined to rule over other smaller peoples. These ideas came through very clearly in the cultural/social framework of Russian society. The Russian Jews meanwhile, educated their children in Judaism, in Yiddish and Hebrew, whose main books encouraged them to look for inspiration to a small piece of land in the Middle East and to their distinctive religion, and to view their own group as being chosen for a special destiny among the peoples.

It was the linguistic differences, above all, that helped to preserve the religious and social differences among these 3 groups, and led to very deeply entrenched cultural differences. How deeply entrenched? Even after 70 years of forced assimilation and no religious education, the cultural identity of both the Jews and Poles in Russia could not be obliterated totally, although it atrophied significantly. When Soviet Jews began to organize themselves unofficially in dissident circles after the Six-Day War, the very first thing they began to do was study the Hebrew language and read the Hebrew Bible. They understood quite well, that one could not be Jewish in any meaningful way without learning that particular language and reading that particular book.

The loss of language therefore usually means the loss of distinctive cultures, not because the language creates the culture. But rather because the language creates the social separation and barriers necessary to produce distinctive cultures. I think a world where everyone speaks one language, therefore, will never occur, but I hope it doesn't because it would be an immeasurably impoverished world from a cultural perspective. Especially so given the rotten and repelling condition of American culture at this particular moment. And contemporary American culture would be the one swallowing all the others.

[Richard Greene]

"Learn a language, learn a culture" is indubitably valid.

And, I submit, the best way to learn a new language is with a sleeping dictionary — even better than Rosetta Stone.

[PaulR]

"...Obviously, the discomfort with English “taking over” is due to associations with imperialism, first on the part of the English and then, of course, the American behemoth...."

The "discomfort" is only McWhorter's own. I guess such comments are the typical PC genuflections required if one is to survive at Columbia University.

I don't believe the many Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese parents I know, who are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per year to teach their 6 year-olds English on mornings and weekends, are at all concerned with McWhorter's notions of "imperialism."

[Jack in Danville]

Boy, talk about much learning (well, I assume McWHorter is learned) without understanding! Spengler, can anyone who has learned German well enough doubt the affect language has had on German thought? I think putting the verbs at the end of the sentences demands a rigorous thought process. It’s no accident 19th century German academics put most of the finishing touches on the rigor of academic math and science. The down side is the deleterious affect German thinkers from Kant to Habermas have had on western culture, with dopes like Al Gore confusing form for content. If not so tragic it would be comic when Gore quotes Habermas, since I’m sure he reads him in translation.

Yep, my sleeping dictionary put the polish on my German, but long ago I got bored with the political correctness of Die Zeit and the unabashed anti-Americanism of Der Spiegel and haven’t been in Germany for nearly 30 years, so my German is now very rusty. I read Faust about ten years ago. Wish I had read more Goethe back in the day. Wish I knew what my sleeping dictionary is doing…

[rhapsody]

This Spengleresque screaming and sobbing about languages, cultures and peoplez daying out..... it's all but hysteria. This is the normal procedure in nature: things come and go.

Cry me a river...

[total issues]

The German delegate is speaking at an international conference, precisely, verbosely, pedantically... after five minutes, he is still on the first sentence. The interpreter interrupts in desperation "The verb, man, for God's sake, the verb!"

I had the good fortune to be brought up bilingual, and in two languages which have a very different style. Compared to English, French seems woolly, with a much more limited vocabulary (although it can be precise when it needs to be) - but easier to convey complex emotional tones in, than English. English translated in French has the sort of stodginess that German into English often has. Interesting that Shakespeare translates well into German, but not French - in the same way that Goethe does not translate well into English.

The death of a major language is a cultural tragedy, but despite Spengler's predictions of the vocabulary of hell, it is unlikely to happen. The world has survived global lingua francas before, from the days of Greek koine throughout what is now the Middle East. Multilingualism is the norm in most of Europe, Africa and India; an educated European in 1300 would speak Latin, in 1800 French, now English, but they have not at any stage abandoned their domestic languages. They of course will borrow wholesale from English, but then what is English but a German tongue which was almost overwhelmed with French borrowings, to the great benefit of its rich vocabulary?

As for minor languages, take heart from the Irish - they lost their language, but not their independent culture, and indeed have made of the intrusive Saxon tongue something quite their own.

[ethan_jin]

What does the loss of a single Indo-European tongue indicate in terms of the loss of cultural and linguo-genetic information? Given the high degree of mongrelisation of European tongues that has taken place over the last 2 millenia, and the fact that modern European borders are hardly coincident with the original ethnicity of the tribes that once straddled these territories, the answer is "not much". Consider the Greek "yper", which has made its way into German as "uber", and English as "over / hyper". Or the way the Spanish "molesta" has made its way into English as "molest".Tens of thousands of similar examples abound. If anything, English has absorbed so much from other European languages so that even if these vanish from the face of the earth as whole tongues, remnants of these will survive, albeit as isolated ponds of linguo-genetic information within English, which has successfully assimilated tens of thousands of vocables from its neighbours and former colonies and inducted these to its own selfish ends of propagating Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic hegemony. International commerce and the ability to traverse vast distances imply that many of the world's languages will soon become redundant. Still, it will be a long time before prestige foreign languages, like French and German die out.

The reason why functional monoglots who trumpet the universality of the English language and who wail about failing to master a foreign language (and end up with anaemic vocabularies in their second and third languages) is that they fail to recognise the amount of effort required, which is not any less than learning a musical instrument - several thousand hours are required to learn tens of thousands of words necessary to not come across as an idiot. You can make up that number of hours by spending a few, every day, for several years. So, smart people will continue to beef up their CVs by adding foreign languages and musical instruments to their repertoire of skills.

[Michael]

An important fact that Prof McWhorter overlooks in his essay is the extent to which a nation's history is embedded in its vocabulary.

To take a very trivial example, the English word "bishop" is clear proof that word was borrowed into continental English, at a very early date long before their migration to Britain. The word is obviously from Greek ἐπίσκοπος, almost certainly via Latin Episcopus. Now the shift from c to h occurred very early - compare Germanic horn with Latin cornu or hundred and centum (both derived from a common indo-european root.) This shows an early kowledge of Christian institutions. "Spade" is another early Greek borrowing (σπαθη) again via Latin - the same word is found in Freisian; it is also the origin of French L’ épée, a sword.

Or take the two verbs "to ward" and "to guard" and the two corresponding nouns "warden" and "guardian." They are not merely synonyms, they are plainly variants of the same word. It is a case of double-borrowing from French: "ward," like "war" (French guerre) was borrowed before the w sound disappeared from the old Picard dialect and "guard" afterwards (around 1150) This is evidence of a prolonged exposure to French influence.

Words like "oxygen" and "hydrogen" (compare German sauerstoff and wasserstoff) proves the familiarity of eighteenth century British scientists with ancient Greek (and the influence of Romantic Nationalism in Germany amongst scientists equally familiar with the Classics)

These are all deliberately trivial examples. When we get onto the moralisation of status words - "gentle and "kindly," both come from words (and, ultimately, one word - gnascor and kin are closely related) meaning well-born, or to religious, legal and political terms, even the most conscientious scholarship is seldom impartial. Try the evolving meaning of "sensible," "liberal," "secular," or, specially for Americans, "tory."

We can learn a great deal about a people from the etymology of its vocabulary.

[lzzrdgrrl]

We can learn a great deal about a people from the etymology of its vocabulary.

Do we?........

We use words ahistorically with only their current usages in mind. The rule of thumb is even the most revered customs and habits of mind pass out of living memory within three generations, unless they're carefully maintained. Otherwise it is merely a curiosity, like your family genealogy .......

[Michael]

We can learn a great deal about a people from the etymology of its vocabulary.

Do we?........

We use words ahistorically with only their current usages in mind. The rule of thumb is even the most revered customs and habits of mind pass out of living memory within three generations, unless they're carefully maintained. Otherwise it is merely a curiosity, like your family genealogy .......

Izzrdgrrl

In a sense, I am sure you are right. On the other hand, words are coined or borrowed to express a concept and, to the extent that the meaning or connotation of words change, they serve as markers to a change in thinking and, quite often, as markers of more or less unconscious or unremarked changes in attitudes, too.

The change in the meaning of “commuter,” from a season ticket holder (someone who commutes the daily fare for an up-front payment), to someone who travels in to work, usually by car, is a trivial example, but reflects a very important socio/economic change. The change in the meaning of “spiritual,” (from Latin spiritus = breath) is far from trivial.

Another example: what does the difference between a “noble man” and a “nobleman” (from Latin notabilis = notable or prominent) tell us about social attitudes and values?

Sometimes, when a word is cut off from its roots, it no longer has any real meaning at all, but continues to be used for its emotive force. Words like “ought” and “duty” and “obligation” originated as legal concepts and were applied to ethics by people who believed in a divine law-giver: what, exactly do they mean now, in a society that has largely abandoned that belief? Precisely what concept (if any) do they now express?

And, of course, we have the whole idea of "Political Correctness."

[aldisagio]

Ignorance of multiple languages means ignorance of human history.

A monolingual present will not have access to the multilingual past.

This is bad.

At the very least, it will mean that the past will only be mediated by a small clerisy. Do they merit that kind of trust?

[Spengler]

A loss of a language, as Michael observes, erases historic memory embedded in vocabulary. Even worse, in my view, is the loss of its poetry. Language cannot say the most important things directly: it gets at them indirectly through poetry, in the simplest and most ancient case (as Socrates observes somewhere) through epigram, and in the songs and poems of a nation. A shared sense of the sacred is transmitted through the text: Homer, the Bible, the Vedas, and so forth. That is how people sustain their sense of immortality. The most ancient of the surviving cultures -- Indian, Hebrew, Chinese, Greek -- have the strongest sense of text continuity. It is absurd to imagine the survival of the Jews without the Hebrew Tanakh and its commentaries: talmud Torah always has represented a living connection to the revelation at Sinai. To lose a language is to extinguish past as well as future; it is to kill off the presence of the dead among us, and cut us off from our children.

The exception to this terrible sentence is Christianity, which offers a life-after-death of ethnicity through adoption into Israel. Rosenzweig warned that the nations who become Christian still want immortality (election) in their own skin, and that the promise of Christianity risks becoming empty except by reference to the actual, living Israel. How problematic this is, we have been discussing for years.

[rhapsody]

Maybe reality is a bit boring when the past is not so present anymore. On the other hand, it might free up space that allowes for other things to be more present of different but also worthy quality.

If the past is what matters most, then beware of the anti-matter that wants to destroy it. When the two meet, things get hot in the room.

The most interesting anti-matter guy is perhaps U.G. Krishnamurti.

Interviewed by Luc Sala in Amsterdam with some nice anti-matter material.

[ellens]

I agree with Spengler that in most, although not all, cases, the loss of a language means the death of a culture. There are examples where this is not so, as in the case of the Irish Catholics, as TI points out. They did lose their language, which was Gaelic, to English, but have remained distinct from the English and the Scotch Irish mainly because of the religious differences. This emphasizes that the two things that distinguish most cultures are language and religion.

Notice how race is not an important distinguishing characteristic, although for many generations that was the one characteristic that obsessed and preoccupied Americans. Race and physical differences are the most trivial of all differences, unless they are markers for religious and cultural differences. In America, skin color has been a marker for very large cultural differences between blacks and whites, and this is what has resulted in such resistance to assimilation over the last 40 years (since the Civil Rights laws were passed). Hispanics and Asians who are both physically different from whites have much, much higher rates of assimilation than blacks because they are less entrenched in their own particular cultural worlds and willingly give them up. Blacks have not done so in a majority of cases and have not been assimilated to anywhere near the same degree. There is nothing wrong with that, in any case. Why do people want a homogenous society? Certainly, Jews should not be in favor of that since that would mean we disappear too. In my view, cultural variety is what makes life interesting and rich, especially when the dominant culture is now so horribly low in its quality.

Prof. McWhorter minimizes the importance of language most likely because of concerns about political correctness. Sorry to say, but a professor at Columbia University today would be surrounded by a claustropohobic emphasis on political correctness, aided and abetted by the legacy of one of Columbia's most prominent professors, Edward Said, who is now mercifully dead. By claiming that all languages are equal in value - a click language is no better than German or Chinese or Hebrew - he is just trying to make clickers feel better about the fact that they have no literature in their language at all. Other primitive peoples have primitive literatures, but nothing worth preserving or of inspirational value. McWhorter points out that only about 200 of the existing 6000 languages have a national literature worth reading. That's a good point, and it is from among those 200 languages that we will still have native speakers 100 years from now. None of them will be clickers, most likely.