LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

Reflections offered to the Colwinston Philosophical Society, Old South Wales in January, 2004

The English philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell founded the contemporary Analytic and Linguistic trend in philosophy based on the idea that precise analysis of language is critical to philosophical inquiry.  Russell wanted to create a logical language to describe the world around him and stated that complex concepts can be resolved into their simplest components, called ‘atomic propositions’. Wittgenstein claimed that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts” and his conclusions arrive at ideas similar to Russell’s logical atomism.  He stated that the world is basically made up of simple facts that language is created to describe.

The world, however, insists on working in a different way.  Language insists on being far more complex than it ‘needs’ to be.  However much we might wish to simplify the language we speak, users insist on building difficulties into it.

I suggest that descriptions of Bertrand Russell’s ‘simple facts’ vary according to language, that language develops at different rates historically and geographically and that within the same language area groups differentiate their language in order to establish identities for social or political reasons.  The book The Meaning of Tingo contains examples of words for actions, situations and things that English has not seen fit to describe, for example: the Czech language has a word litot to describe ‘the state of torment created by the sudden realization of one’s own misery’; Malay has the word geragas meaning ‘to comb one’s hair in anger’ and Japanese has a word to describe a woman who looks attractive from the back but less so when seen from the front.

I suppose the example of language and identity most of us first met is this story from the Old Testament:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Judges 12: 5-6

These differences apply to other languages as well.  In southern Africa there is a language known as !Ora (pronounced ‘kora’) which is distinguished by a clicking sound made at the back of the mouth.  Those of us of certain age will remember the song sung by Miriam Makeba in the 1950s based on this technique taught to babies, which is unpronounceable by those not taught to make the sound from their earliest years.  Anyone who has tried to learn Arabic will know the difficulty in pronouncing the ‘r’ sound of that language.  Conversely, Arabs have difficulty in distinguishing between the sounds ‘b’ and ‘p’ and ‘e’ and ‘i’ in English.  There is a story of a Saudi father phoning a language school in England to ask why his son had not written home.  The school principal called the boy, who said indignantly he had written once a week.  “What did you do with the letters?” he was asked.  “I put them there”, the boy replied, indicating a container marked LITTER.

The same divisions are apparent among the non-Welsh speaking Welsh: it is very interesting to note that in a very precisely defined area between and including Port Talbot and Swansea, the verb ‘want’ is pronounced as ‘wunt’. That is a geographical identity marker but in the city of Cardiff you will find a different marker that denotes the speaker’s social class identity.  This is the adding of final ‘s’ to all forms of the verb: “I comes home at six o’clock and me and my husband we goes off to the supermarket.” This is a working class construction which I have only found within the city limits of Cardiff.  Recently a domestic gas engineer from Cardiff was in my house and produced the construction “He have done it”, a reversal of the final ‘s’ rule, in the one example of the English verb that should have ‘s’. I can only describe this as a form of ‘linguistic perversity’ deliberately done to reinforce the uniqueness of this identity marker.  It must be deliberately done because no teacher ever taught the construction and the speakers have never heard it in the media.  In other words, the gasman is saying: we in this social class in this particular area have taken to ourselves the right to alter this small part of English grammar – as well as creating the phonetically unique ‘flattening’ of the ‘ar’ sound in words like ‘Cardiff’ itself, to sound something like ‘Cyerrdiff’.

A similar example is the pronunciation of final ‘-os’ in non-Hispanic or non-Greek American English.  No American has ever heard a native Spanish-speaker pronounce the name ‘Carlos’ as ‘Carloce’, nor any Greek-speaker say ‘cosmoce’ for ‘cosmos’, but that is how these sounds are pronounced by the majority of Americans.  It is a purely invented form of pronouncing this ending which distances Anglo-Saxon Americans from (especially) Hispanics.

Back in Britain, other markers reveal middle-class identity and age group identity that do not have a specific geographical limitation: I was at a New Year house party on the Isle of Wight this year and when the crowd of young people (i.e. 25 and below, which is young when you are my age) arrived, you could distinctly detect that subtle change in the vowel sound usually represented by the letters ‘ou’ or ‘oo’, producing ‘yiu’ for ‘you’ and ‘giud’ for ‘good’ that has gradually been creeping into the spoken language of this group (watch TVAM – if you can stand it).  The pronunciation is also accompanied by a vocabulary change that I find particularly annoying.  When asked “How are you?” members of this age group tend to reply: “I’m giud (good)”, which would be a response to the question “What is your moral condition?” rather than “How is your health?”  But again, it is limited to this sector of society that is establishing its identity as young, middle class 21st-century citizens.

So where are we now?  What I’ve tried to set out so far is that language is used in all its aspects: pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, as a way of identifying ourselves as members of particular subgroups, in other words – tribes.  Many of my Nigerian students had facial scars in patterns denoting tribal origin.  Those identity markers could never be changed without the help of plastic surgery but language markers can change.  The identities of the Nigerian students were modified linguistically according to their life patterns: if a parent married someone from a different tribe the offspring would speak both tribal languages as well as one of the three major languages: Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba.  Another level was added to denote educational status – speaking English.  And even within English there are officially recognised subdivisions: Educated Nigerian English and Pidgin.  In other words, the combination of languages spoken by a Nigerian gives that person a very precise social and geographical identity, and I would guess that there are generation differences there today as well, thanks to globalised media.

This observation leads us to a consideration of what identity means in the modern world: in traditional societies individuals tend to have one identity which they keep from the cradle to the grave.  In modern, mobile, meritocratic sections of society we may have several identities which we indicate by changing the way we dress and the way we speak, according to context.  Nigeria today contains both types of society, whereas since World War II, Britain has fallen fully into the multi-identity group.

Paradoxically, more traditional societies do not necessarily have more primitive language forms.  The Harvard palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson describes it thus:

Even the peoples with least complex cultures have highly sophisticated languages, with complex grammar and large vocabularies, capable of naming and discussing anything that occurs in the sphere occupied by their speakers.  The oldest language that can be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view.

Indeed, the most powerful language the world has ever seen in terms of geographical coverage and possibly the most powerful one in terms of flexibility and imaginative scope (thanks to Chaucer and Shakespeare), the one I’m using at the moment, is actually one of the simplest in terms of pronunciation and grammar.  The relationship between spelling and pronunciation is admittedly idiosyncratic thanks to the way in which William Caxton adapted the pronunciation of his time to the letter combinations he used on his new printing press, but imagine having to speak Chinese, where the same word may be pronounced with four different intonations that give it four different meanings.  The vocabulary of English is immense but a basic and perfectly adequate English grammar was created in the 1930s using only about a thousand words of vocabulary.  We shall speak later of the lack of masculine/feminine differences between nouns, but think also of the simplicity inherent in not having to use a subjunctive, using an alphabet rather than ideograms and only one written form.

What the complexity of Chinese does is reinforce the separateness of the Chinese Empire, which spent many centuries in voluntary isolation from the rest of the world, as did Japan, another country whose language remains stubbornly difficult to learn – even for the Japanese.  When I lived there I would sometimes ask native Japanese people to translate a written text and they would spend several minutes deciphering the (originally Chinese) ideograms.  There are four different written forms in Modern Japanese, not to mention the different forms of language used by men and by women and the different verbs to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects.  This is one reason the Japanese proudly call themselves ‘differently different’ and it has the effect, in China and Japan, not only of keeping foreigners outside their culture and from sharing their identity, but also of creating an internal identity differentiation between those who have learned more than the basic 3,000 ideograms and those who have not. 

The thesis of this essay is based around precisely this point of the unnecessary complexity of language and why it is created.  The idea finally crystallised in my mind when I translated an article about the indian languages of the Amazon basin for a colleague of mine at the University of Brasilia.  (In parenthesis, it is worth noting that this friend is a Catalan born in Spain but working in France who speaks to me only in French.  Modern Catalans do everything they can to avoid speaking Castilian Spanish because, like the Welsh, they are re-establishing a tribal identity that a powerful central state had tried to stamp out.)

My friend’s article described two things: an immensely complex grammatical structure created by Stone Age peoples and secondly, that within the overall family of languages known as Tupi-Guarani, there were differences in these structures that occurred in two dimensions.  Firstly, changes that had occurred in the history of some variants had not yet occurred in other forms of the same language family, and secondly changes are occurring today in some areas that are not happening in others.  So the differences are both chronological and geographical.

A possible interpretation for this situation is that, within the Indian tribes, a permanent state of identity separation has been deliberately maintained because inter-tribal warfare was an important part of the culture: it was a form of population control and, as one of its motives was wife-stealing, it brought new blood into the genetic structure of small tribes. 

In what may be a parallel situation to the Amazon, there are apparently 300 languages spoken among the tribes of the relatively small area of Borneo and these tribes too, at least until recently, lived in a state of permanent but controlled warfare with their neighbours.

I have suggested this theory to my Brazilian wife, who was not convinced, but in fact she provided an example that tends to confirm it: in the 19th-century wars with the Spanish colonists of Uruguay, prisoners taken on the ill-defined frontier were told to say the Portuguese word pãozinho (small loaf of bread); if they pronounced it pãosinho in the Spanish manner, their throats were cut: an updated version of the shibboleth technique.

A specific example of unnecessary complication of language is that of gender in nouns.  I’m sure we can all recall the problems remembering if cage and plage in French are masculine or feminine and then remembering to make adjectives agree with them both by gender (and by number – another unnecessary complication that English doesn’t have).  Mercifully, English has done away with these structures, but why on earth do they exist in the first place?  Linguists have attempted to reconstruct the earliest known language, proto-Indo-European, and have found evidence of gender difference in its nouns, a characteristic was inherited by the languages developed from it.  The idea seems to be that the language first of all distinguished between human and non-human (i.e. neuter) nouns and then divided the human ones into male and female.  This works well enough with ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘bull’ and ‘cow’, but why should a table be feminine in Latin and later in French and Spanish?  Why is a woman feminine in German but a girl neuter?

In Latin, the word Sol (Sun) was masculine and the word Luna (Moon) was feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but in German (and Germanic languages in general), the opposite occurs. The learner of a language thus must regard the gender as part of the noun, and memorize accordingly to use the language correctly. A frequent recommendation is to memorize the definite article and the noun as a unit.  Even in English we have remnants of this: some personal pronouns have different forms based on the natural gender of the thing referred to: e.g. ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’, ‘his’, ‘hers’ and ‘its’ though in the plural, we use the common ‘them’ and ‘their’, as in “The boys and girls put on their hats”.  

Gender-specific pronouns vary considerably across languages: there are languages that have different pronouns in the third person to differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, like Hungarian and Finnish, but this distinction is usually forgotten in spoken Finnish.

Conclusions

·         Development of language change is chronological and digressive – in other words, some Tupi-Guarani language elements change faster in some versions than in others, and change in different directions.  And the same can be said of languages on a global scale – in India, English is still constructed in patterns of the 1930s; in the United States there are regional differences between the East and West coasts.

·         I have tried as well to show how language differences are used to create a social class identity as well a tribal one.  Finally, there is the use of language to create cultural identity, as shown by the words and phrases describing actions like combing one’s hair in anger. 

·         We can also say that there is no such thing as a primitive language: language complexity is unrelated to economic and scientific development.  The English-speaking world dominates science and technology and uses a relatively uncomplicated language to describe its triumphs, but Finnish is one of the most complex languages in the world and the Finns stand up well in terms of science and technology.  The Japanese and Chinese share many of the same linguistic complexities but Japanese Research and Development are light years ahead of China. 

·         Finally, the most striking element in all of this is that language difficulty seems to be deliberately built into languages, first of all to mark those who belong to the tribe, secondly to keep strangers out.  We could start talking about mutations in Welsh, but we'll leave that for another time….