LEARNING LANGUAGE THROUGH LITERATURE

I have recently put on the Internet a website that summarises my efforts over the years to marry together teaching literature with teaching language.  Materials on the site are sold (very cheaply) but you might be interested in seeing this sample.  The material is aimed at more advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language, but I think many native speakers might enjoy it as well.  The site is at: www.litandlang.co.uk

How do I love thee?

and

Yet, love, mere love (1850)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax; and equal light Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed: And love is fire. And when I say at need I love thee ... mark! ... I love thee -in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures Who love God, God accepts while loving so. And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.

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Writer’s background

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born the eldest of twelve children at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, in the North of England. For many years, the Barrett family had run sugar plantations in Jamaica, using slave labour. Elizabeth’s father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, brought his family to England while keeping his Jamaican plantations. Elizabeth was educated at home and was something of a prodigy, reading Milton and Shakespeare before she was ten. By the age of twelve she had started writing poetry.

In adolescence, Elizabeth fell ill with lung problems for which the treatment prescribed, common at that time, was opium. She also suffered an injury to her spine as a teenager. Despite these problems, she spent her adolescent years learning Hebrew to read the Old Testament, later reading Greek and Latin authors and Dante’s Inferno all in the original languages. In contrast to the free-thinking tendencies of other Romantics, and while reading the modern ideas of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft (which appeared in her later, socially aware writing) Elizabeth was nevertheless a committed Christian who worked for Bible and Missionary Societies. She underwent a religious experience similar to that of William Blake, which she described as ‘not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast’.

In 1826 she published anonymously An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. In 1828 her mother died, the family fortunes declined and her father sold his English estate, eventually moving the family to London, where he ruled his children harshly, sending some of them to Jamaica to run the plantations, despite Elizabeth’s opposition to slavery (an opposition that did not prevent her living off its profits). Again, surprisingly perhaps for a Romantic writer, she translated classical Greek literature and wrote in the form of classical Greek tragedy. In 1838, she published The Seraphim and Other Poems.

Her health continued to cause problems and she spent a recuperative year at the seaside resort (a fashionable new idea) of Torquay in the Southwest of England, with her brother, who drowned there in a sailing accident. Elizabeth returned to her father’s house, spending the next five years as an ‘invalid’ (another fashion among wealthy persons of the time), while still writing.

The poems she published in 1844 brought her widespread fame, causing Robert Browning to write to tell her of his admiration for her work. Browning visited her in May 1845, and they began the celebrated courtship later portrayed in a play and a film. She expressed her love for Browning, six years younger than her, in the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Their union was opposed by Elizabeth’s father so the pair eloped to Florence, where Elizabeth’s health improved sufficiently for her to bear a son, although her father remained estranged from her until his death. Elizabeth’s Sonnets from the Portuguese were published in 1850, are typically Romantic and many critics feel they are her best work. The sonnet How Do I Love Thee discussed here was voted ‘the nation’s favourite love poem’ in one British survey.

Elizabeth’s later work is also typically Romantic in its social and political content. She supported the campaign for the unification of Italy, opposed male domination of women, the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, child labour in British mines and factories, and slavery, among other social injustices. She died in Florence.

Language and Content Study

How do I love thee?

1(a). The poet uses the word ‘thee’ where we would use ‘you’ today. When would she have used the form ‘thou’?

1(b) What word would a writer using these forms have used to mean ‘your’?

2.In l.3 is the word ‘feeling’ a verb or a noun?

3(a). In l.6, the grammar checker on our word processor would probably correct the phrase ‘most quiet’ to what?

3(b) What is the rule that operates here?

4. In l.7 the verb ‘strive’ means to ‘struggle’. What form does this verb take in the simple past and past participle?

5(a). In l.13 we find the phrase ‘of all my life’; what would be a grammatically acceptable equivalent of this phrase today?

5(b) In l.13, we see the phrase ‘if God choose’.  We would expect this phrase to be ‘if God chooses’, so what is the explanation for the present form?

6. In the last line, what would be an acceptable alternative to the word ‘but’?

Yet, love, mere love,

1. What form of ‘acceptation’ would we use today?

2. In ll.2-3 ‘Fire is bright,/ Let temple burn, or flax’, the word ‘let’ is crucial; what to make the phrase more easily understood?

3. The verb ‘burn’ follows the noun ‘temple’ so it should really take form ‘burns’; why is it not do so?

4. What is ‘flax’, and what is it used for?

5. The phrase ‘at need’ in l.5 is difficult; it is found today in the description of requests being ‘at need or on demand’, which gives us an indication of what the poet meant; can you suggest an alternative phrase?

6. The word ‘mark’ (l.6) is usually used today in the physical sense of making a mark (e.g. on a piece of paper) or in the non-material sense of making an impression (‘The Romans left their mark on Europe with their legal system’), but here is has a different meaning which is no longer used; what is it?

7. Is there a difference between ‘aright’ as used here in l.7, and the word ‘right’ that we would use today?

8. What is the modern equivalent of ‘thine’ (l.9)?

9. How could you change the order of the underlined words in the lines: ‘There’s nothing low in love, when love the lowest (ll.9-10)?

10. What is the meaning of ‘mean’ in the sense in which it is used here ‘meanest creatures’ (l.10) and what is its most common meaning as an adjective today?

11. In l.13 we find ‘doth flash itself’ , an interesting phrase that has two elements we would probably not find in modern English; what are they and what would the modern form be?

Literary analysis

How do I love thee

As noted above, this poem was recently chosen the greatest love poem of all time in a large readers’ poll in Britain. It is one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese Elizabeth addressed to her husband, who used to call her ‘My little Portuguese’ because of her dark complexion. The conventional sonnet is said to have the ability to convey intense expressions of emotion (see Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? on this site). Queen Victoria had come to the throne in 1837 so Elizabeth’s poems are firmly within what we call the ‘Victorian’ era, famed for its public Puritanism and insistence on rules. Nevertheless, this poem is an outspoken expression of passionate love and indeed, privately Victoria herself (1819-1901) was deeply in love with her husband Prince Albert and had eleven children with him. When he died relatively young she disappeared from public life for a long period and apparently slept with his folded nightshirt in her bed for the rest of her life. The dull cloud of what we know as ‘Victorian Puritanism’ actually begins to close over Britain later in Victoria’s reign – there was naked bathing on Britain’s beaches until the 1840s, for example – and was probably a reaction to the social problems caused by urban overcrowding in the later Industrial Revolution, as well as a rejection of the decadence of the Regency era that preceded Victoria’s reign. The period of Elizabeth’s creativity reflects the development of new ideas originating from the thinkers associated with the time of William Blake (also on this site).

There is a tradition in love poetry of ‘listing’ and ‘measuring’ the extent of one’s love for the other or the qualities of that other. This sonnet begins with the writer ‘counting’ the ways she loves her man and measuring the depth and breadth and height her soul can reach when it looks for the limits of being and of ideal grace. Notice how these statements are contained in the first four lines (quatrain) while the second quatrain introduces the repeated phrase ‘I love thee’, which again ‘lists’ different aspects of love. We can see that the passionate personal love the writer feels is compared to wider forms of love such as the way men ‘strive for right’ and ‘turn from praise’. Notice also that, despite Elizabeth’s independence of spirit, she is happy to use ‘men’ to include women. Today she would have to use the politically correct ‘As persons strive for right’, which doesn’t carry quite the same effect.

It is interesting to speculate on the religious nature of this poem, with its reference to the Christian concept of ‘ideal grace’ contrasting with ‘childhood’s faith’ and ‘lost saints’. In fact, there is no contradiction here: Elizabeth had been brought up within the strictly conventional traditions, beliefs and rituals of the Church of England, but seems to have felt that she could apply the Christian way of life to her dealings with the adult world without depending too much on orthodox religious structure.

Studying this poem shows how useful it is to have some knowledge of the writer’s life. Knowing how difficult her younger life was, with a tyrannical father (who never gave his permission for any of his children to marry, and disowned all those who did), losing her mother at a relatively young age and her favourite brother even younger, together with her own health problems, gives a deeper meaning to ‘my old griefs’. This awareness of early death in the family, together with her own ill-health, also gives extra resonance to the final phrase ‘and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death’. (Compare this sentiment to that expressed by John Donne in A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning, on this site.)

Yet, love, mere love

This is a rather more difficult poem than the previous one, although it shares the same form of the sonnet, and so I have included a modern ‘translation’ after the Answers to the Language and Content Study questions. It is a passionate statement of love from a person who is putting herself in a lower position than the object of her devotion. The work sits comfortably within the tradition of Christian European love poetry, seeing human love as a reflection of God's love.

The main idea of the sonnet is to say that all love, however ‘mean’ (in this sense, humble or of low value), is still a reflection of God's love. The writer claims that people can be made physically more beautiful as a result feeling love: ‘How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s [work]’.

Internet Research questions (for both sonnets)

1. Is the language of the poem the same as the informal language of the letters Elizabeth exchanged with Robert Browning?

2. Given the rhyme scheme of these sonnets, are they Petrarchan, Spenserian or Shakespearian?

Answers

How Do I Love Thee?

1(a). When the ‘you’ was the subject of the sentence; here ‘thee’ is the object of the verb ‘love’.

The system is:

Subject	Object	Possessive adjective	Possessive pronoun
I	me	my	mine
you (singular)	thee	thy	thine
he/she/it	him/her/it	his/her/its	his/hers/ø
we	us	our	ours
ye	ye	your	yours
they	them	their	theirs

1(b) thy

2. It is the present participle of the verb ‘feel’; the writer is describing how she is trying to find the limits of being and grace which she cannot see.

3(a). Quietest

3(b) (i) Regular adjectives of one syllable usually add -er and -est.

(ii) Adjectives of two syllables and end in -y (pretty), -ow (narrow), and -le (subtle in the), may also add -er and -est.

(iii) Usually, adjectives of two or more syllables use the words ‘more’ and ‘most’ to create comparative and superlative forms.

Examples: (i) sad, sadder, saddest (ii) pretty, prettier, prettiest (iii) beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful.

4. ‘strove’, ‘striven’

5. ‘my whole life’.

5(a) It is a rare example of the English subjunctive, which could also be written as ‘if God should choose’.

6.‘only’

Yet, love, mere love,

1. ‘acceptance’

2. ‘whether’, so the phrase would be: ‘whether a temple burns, or flax’

3. It is in fact the English equivalent of the subjunctive that is not often found today, although you will find it in certain phrases (Whether he be man or beast).

4. Flax is grown both for its seeds, which are used in cooking and to make linseed oil, a solvent used by artists. Its fibre is used to make textiles, paper and soap, among many other uses. It is also one of the earliest plants to have been ‘domesticated’ by man.

5. I would suggest: ‘as I have to’.

6. ‘take note’ or ‘notice’.

7. Not really -they both mean ‘correctly’, as in ‘did I hear you aright?’ and ‘did I hear you right?’. The only point here is that ‘glorified right’ is very clumsy, so we would probably say ‘properly glorified’. This is an example of how we actually use English, as opposed to how English can be used. If you are a learner, you may have heard a teacher say: ‘Yes, you could say that, but a native speaker would not say it’. And that is the point of these exercises: by making you look at the changes in English over time, we introduce you to examples of how the language is used today.

8. ‘yours’ (see the table above).

9. ‘when the lowest love’

10. ‘low in the order of things’. Today it is most commonly used to describe someone who is ‘tight-fisted’ and does not like giving things to others.

11. The literal modernisation of the phrase would be ‘flashes’. The ‘doth’ is an older form of ‘does’, which is found with the verb today in three cases: the question form (‘Does he live in Manchester?’), the negative form (‘No, he doesn’t.) and the emphatic form (‘I tell you, he does live in Manchester!’). None of these cases applies here, but the ‘do’ auxiliary in normal sentences is often found, as in the Queen Gertrude’s famous line in Hamlet: ‘The lady doth protest too much’.

So English has eliminated ‘do’ as an auxiliary verb in ordinary statements but keeps it for questions and negatives, which is the cause of many mistakes for learners. We find people producing questions like *‘What you do?’ or *‘What you are doing?’ and negatives like *‘I not like this book’.

A modernised version of the sonnet Yet, love, mere love

Still, love, simple love, is really beautiful and worth accepting. A

fire is just as bright whether it is burning a temple or flax, and the

same light jumps in the flame coming from a plank of cedar wood

or from a weed; and love is fire. And when I say, as I have to, that

I love you – take note! – I am changed in your eyes and appear in

my real glory, aware of the new rays of light that shine from my

face into yours. There is nothing low in love because even the

lowest creatures can love; God accepts the lowest creatures who

love Him and loves them in return. And my feelings flash across

the poor features of my face and show how the great work done by

love improves the looks Nature gave me.

Internet Research questions

1. It is not easy to find the text of the letters written by Elizabeth and Robert, but the following address may be useful -
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16182/16182-8.txt. The most noticeable difference is that she no longer uses the ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ forms. It seems as if these forms are already antiquated at the time of writing, but have a certain formality which she feels gives perhaps more depth to the poem. The truth is ... since we really are talking truths in this world ... that I never have doubted you – ah, you know! – I felt from the beginning so sure of the nobility and integrity in you that I would have trusted you to make a path for my soul – that, you know…. If you could turn over every page of my heart like the pages of a book, you would see nothing there offensive to the least of your feelings ... not even to the outside fringes of your man’s vanity ... should you have any vanity like a man; which I do doubt.

2. Look at http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm where you will find that it is Petrarchan.

LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

The English philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell founded the contemporary Analytic and Linguistic trend in philosophy which is based on the idea that precise analysis of language is critical to philosophical inquiry.  Russell, originally a mathematician 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 to the ideal of the philosopher.  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 language.

What I am suggesting is that:

·         descriptions of Bertrand Russell’s ‘simple facts’ vary according to language;

·         language develops at different rates historically and geographically, and

·         within the same language area, groups differentiate their language in order to establish identities for social or political reasons. 

The recent book 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 that means ‘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 the 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.  This technique taught to babies and 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 wonderful 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.

Within God’s own earthly paradise of Wales, it is worth pointing out that there are many variations of the latter, with a marked division between North and South Welsh.  Thus the ancient tribal identities within Wales are carried forward to the present day. 

The same divisions are apparent among the non-Welsh speaking Welsh: we note that in a very precisely defined area between and including Port Talbot and Swansea, the verb ‘want’ is pronounced as ‘wunt’.  

That is the geographical identity marker but if you go to Cardiff you will find a different marker that denotes the speaker’s identity within social class.  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.  Since I started to write this, a 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 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 engineer has never heard it in the media.  In other words, he is saying: we in this social class in this area have taken to ourselves the right to alter this small part of English.

Back in Britain, other markers reveal age-group identity but 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”, which is 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, (generally middle class) 21st-century citizens.

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.  When I taught Nigerian students at Cardiff University many of them 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 one parent were married to someone from a different tribe, the offspring would speak both tribal languages as well as one of the three major languages of Nigeria: Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba.  Another level was added to denote educational status – speaking English.  And even within English there are official 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.

One of the paradoxes of language is that more traditional societies may have extremely complex language forms.  The Harvard palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson described it this way:

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 paradoxically one of the simplest in terms of pronunciation and grammar.  The relationship between spelling and pronunciation is admittedly idiosyncratic thanks to the way 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 different meanings.  The vocabulary of English is immense but a basic and perfectly adequate book was created in the 1930s to teach English that used only about a thousand words.  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, of course, is to 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: ‘aru’ is for inanimate while ‘iru’ is for animate ones. In negative sentences, ‘nai’ and ‘inai’ are used respectively.  This is one reason the Japanese proudly call themselves ‘differently different’.  All this 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 indigenous 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.)

In my friend’s article I noticed that he was describing 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.

Most of these indians live in the Brazilian Amazon and of course in Brazil as a whole the major language is Portuguese.  Paradoxically, one of the most striking aspects I find, living in Brazil, is the very lack of regional variation within the Portuguese language, except for the Northeastern region.  So, on the one hand we have the indian tribes demarcating their identities by means of language difference (reinforced by body painting) whereas the larger, modern state that has been imposed over them is characterised by linguistic unity except in the Northeast, which has a strong tradition of military and cultural resistance on the part of its black slave community.

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. 

For the European colonisers of Brazil on the other hand, political and social unity was vital to maintain power over a state the size of Europe populated by a relatively small number of Europeans, and the homogeneity of the Portuguese language was a major force in achieving this.  During World War II, when President Vargas allied Brazil with the anti-Nazi powers, he banned German and Italian language newspapers among the sizeable immigrant groups who spoke those languages.  If we accept this argument, the impenetrability of the Northeastern dialect and accent may possibly be attributed to a kind of linguistic resistance movement on the part of black slaves.

(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 tried this theory out on 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 this complication, but why on earth does it 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 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 on earth should a table be feminine in Latin and later 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’.  

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.

Conclusion

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 they change in different directions.  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 also tried 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 languages share many of the same linguistic complexities but in Research and Development the Japanese 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 I promise, you really don’t want to know….