The Mother Tongue (30 page)

The French, it must be said, have not been so rabidly anglophobic as has sometimes been made out. From the outset the government conceded defeat on a number of words that were too well established to drive out:
gadget, holdup, weekend, blue jeans, self-service, manager, marketing,
and many others. Between 1977 and 1987, there were just forty prosecutions for violations of the language laws, almost always involving fairly flagrant abuses. TWA, for instance, was fined for issuing its boarding passes in English only. You can hardly blame the French for taking exception to that. The French also recognize the global importance of English. In 1988, the elite Ecole Centrale de Paris, one of the country's top engineering academies, made it a requirement of graduation that students be able to speak and write fluent English, even if they have no intention of ever leaving France.

It would be a mistake to presume that English is widely spoken in the world because it has some overwhelming intrinsic appeal to foreigners. Most people speak it not because it gives them pleasure to help out American and British monoglots who cannot be troubled to learn a few words of their language, believe it or not, but because they need it to function in the world at large. They may like a few English words splashed across their T-shirts and shopping bags, but that isn't to say that that is what they want to relax with in the evening.

Go to Amsterdam or Antwerp or Oslo and you will find that almost everyone speaks superb English, and yet if you venture into almost any bookstore in those cities you will usually find only a small selection of books in English. For the most part, people want to read works in their own language. Equally they want to watch television in their own language. In the coastal areas of Holland and Belgium, where most people can both speak English and receive British television broadcasts, most still prefer to watch local programs even when they are palpably inferior to the British product (i.e., almost invariably). Similarly, two English-language satellite networks in Europe, Sky TV and Super Channel, had some initial success in West Germany, but as soon as two competing satellite networks were set up transmitting more or less the same programs but dubbed into German, the English-language networks' joint share slumped to less than 1 percent—about as much as could be accounted for by English-speaking natives living in West Germany. The simple fact is that German viewers, even when they speak English well, would rather watch
Dallas
dubbed badly into German than in the original English. And who can blame them?

In many places English is widely resented as a symbol of colonialism. In India, where it is spoken by no more than 5 percent of the population at the very most, the constitution was written in English and English was adopted as a foreign language not out of admiration for its linguistic virtues but as a necessary expedient. In a country in which there are 1,652 languages and dialects, including 15 official ones, and in which no one language is spoken by more than 16 percent of the population, a neutral outside language has certain obvious practicalities. Much the same situation prevails in Malaysia, where the native languages include Tamil, Portuguese, Thai, Punjabi, twelve versions of Chinese, and about as many of Malay. Traditionally, Malay is spoken in the civil service, Chinese in business, and English in the professions and in education. Yet these countries are almost always determined to phase English out. India had hoped to eliminate it as an official language by 1980 and both Malaysia and Nigeria have been trying to do likewise since the 1970s.

There is certainly a good case for adopting an international language, whether it be English or Malaysian or Thraco-Phrygian. Translating is an enormously costly and time-consuming business. An internal survey by the European Community in 1987 found that it was costing it $15 a word, $500 a page, to translate its documents. One in every three employees of the European Community is engaged in translating papers and speeches. A third of all administration costs—$700 million in 1987—was taken up with paying for translators and interpreters. Every time a member is added to the EC, as most recently with Greece, Spain, and Portugal, the translation problems multiply exponentially. Under the Treaty of Rome each member country's language must be treated equally, and it is not easy even in multilingual Brussels to find linguists who can translate from Dutch into Portuguese or from Danish into Greek.

A more compelling reason for an international language is the frequency and gravity of misunderstandings owing to difficulties of translation. The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English
control
and French
contrôler
as synonyms when in fact the English form means “to dominate or hold power” while the French means simply “to inspect.” The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The Japanese involvement in World War II may have been inadvertently prolonged when the Domei news agency, the official government information service, rendered the word
mokusatsu
as “ignore” when the sense intended was that of “reserving a reply until we have had time to consider the matter more carefully.”

That may seem a remarkably wide chasm between meanings, but Japanese is particularly susceptible to such discrepancy because it is at once so dense and complex and yet so full of subtlety. It has been suggested, in fact, that it is probably not possible to give accurate simultaneous Japanese-English translations because of the yawning disparity between how the two languages function. To take just one instance, in Japanese it is considered impolite to end a sentence with an unexpected flourish; in English it is a sign of oratorical dexterity of the first order. English speakers, particularly in the context of business or political negotiations, favor bluntness. The Japanese, by contrast, have a cultural aversion to directness and are often reluctant to give a simple yes or no answer. When a Japanese says “Kangae sasete kudasai” (“Let me think about it”) or “Zensho shimasu” (“I will do my best”) he actually means “no.” This has led many business people, and on at least one occasion the president of the United States, to go away thinking they had an agreement or understanding that did not actually exist.

This problem of nuance and ambiguity can affect the Japanese themselves. According to John David Morley in
Pictures from the Water Trade,
when Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to announce the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, he used such vague and arcane language that most of his audience, although listening attentively, didn't have the first idea what he was talking about. In 1988, a member of parliament, Kazuhisa Inoue, began pressing the government to form a committee to come up with ways of making parliamentary debate less dense, suggesting that the Japanese habit of hiding behind rhetoric was heightening the reputation of the “sneaky Japanese” [
New York Times,
May 27, 1988].

Having said all that, we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the English-speaking world. According to
U.S. News & World Report
[February 18, 1985], an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report to an “involuntary conversion of a 727.” It meant that it had crashed. At least one hospital, according to the London
Times,
has taken to describing a death as “a negative patient-care outcome.” The Pentagon is peerless at this sort of thing. It once described toothpicks as “wooden interdental stimulators” and tents as “frame-supported tension structures.” Here is an extract from the Pentagon's Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 sandwich cookie: “The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711. . . . ​The color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the objects held in such a way as to avoid specular refractance.” And so it runs on for fifteen densely typed pages. Every single item the Pentagon buys is similarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages).

Although English is capable of waffle and obfuscation, it is nonetheless generally more straightforward than Eastern languages and less verbose than other Western ones. As Jespersen notes, where we can say “first come, first served,” the Danes must say “den der kommer først till møllem fÃ¥r først malet” [
The Growth and Structure of the English Language,
page 6].

Because of the difficulties inherent in translation, people have been trying for over a century to devise a neutral, artificial language. At the end of the nineteenth century there arose a vogue for made-up languages. Between 1880 and 1907 [Baugh and Cable,
A History of the English Language,
page 7], fifty-three universal languages were proposed. Most were enthusiastically ignored, but one or two managed to seize the public's attention. One of the more improbable of these successes was Volapük, invented in 1880 by a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer. For a decade and a half, Volapük enjoyed a large following. More than 280 clubs sprang up all over Europe to promote it. Journals were established and three international congresses were held. At its peak it boasted almost a million followers. And yet the language was both eccentric and abstruse. Schleyer shunned the letter
r
because he thought it was too difficult for children, the elderly, and the Chinese. Above all, Volapük was obscure. Schleyer claimed that the vocabulary was based largely on English roots, which he said made it easy to learn for anyone already familiar with English, but these links were often nearly impossible to deduce. The word
Volapük
itself was supposed to come from two English roots,
vola
for world and
pük
for speak, but I daresay it would take a linguistic scholar of the first mark to see the connection. Schleyer helped to doom the language by refusing to make any modifications to it, and it died with almost as much speed as it had arisen.

Rather more successful, and infinitely more sensible, has been Esperanto, devised in 1887 by a Pole named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhoff, who lived in an area of Russia where four languages were commonly spoken. Zamenhoff spent years diligently concocting his language. Luckily he was a determined fellow because at an advanced stage in the work his father, fearing his son would be thought a spy working in code, threw all Ludovic's papers in the fire and the young Pole was forced to start again from scratch. Esperanto is considerably more polished and accessible than Volapük. It has just sixteen rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings, and no illogicalities of spelling. Esperantists claim to have eight million adherents in 110 countries and they say that with three hours of study a week it can be mastered in a year. As evidence of its success as a living language, its proponents point out that it has developed its own body of slang (for example,
luton
for hello, a devil-may-care shortening of the formal word
saluton
) and even its own swear words (such as
merdo,
derived from the French
merde
). Esperanto looks faintly like a cross between Spanish and Martian, as this brief extract, the first sentence from the
Book of Genesis,
shows: “En la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la teron.” Esperanto has one inescapable shortcoming. For all its eight million claimed speakers, it is not widely used. In normal circumstances, an Esperanto speaker has about as much chance of encountering another as a Norwegian has of stumbling on a fellow Norwegian in, say, Mexico.

As a result of these inevitable shortcomings, most other linguistics authorities, particularly in this century, have taken the view that the best hope of a world language lies not in devising a synthetic tongue, which would almost certainly be doomed to failure, but in making English less complex and idiosyncratic and more accessible. To that end, Professor C. K. Ogden of Cambridge University in England devised Basic English, which consisted of paring the English language down to just 850 essential words, including a mere 18 verbs—
be, come, do, get, give, go, have, keep, let, make, may, put, say, see, seem, send, take,
and
will
—which Ogden claimed could describe every possible action. Thus simplified, English could be learned by most foreigners with just thirty hours of tuition, Ogden claimed. It seemed ingenious, but the system had three flaws.

First, those who learned Basic English might be able to write simple messages, but they would scarcely be able to read anything in English—even comic books and greeting cards would contain words and expressions quite unknown to them. Second, in any language vocabulary is not the hardest part of learning. Morphology, syntax, and idiom are far more difficult, but Basic English did almost nothing to simplify these. Third, and most critically, the conciseness of the vocabulary of Basic English meant that it could become absurdly difficult to describe anything not covered by it, as seen in the word
watermelon,
which in Basic English would have to be defined as “a large green fruit with the form of an egg, which has a sweet red inside and a good taste.” Basic English got nowhere.

At about the same time, a Professor R. E. Zachrisson of the University of Uppsala in Sweden devised a form of English that he called Anglic. Zachrisson believed that the stumbling block of English for most foreigners was its irregular spelling. He came up with a language that was essentially English but with more consistent spellings. Here is the start of the Gettysburg Address in Anglic: “Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue naeshon. . . .” Anglic won some influential endorsements, but it too never caught on.