Semi-Random Anecdotal Thoughts on Language
I’ve always been a voracious reader but, with apologies to many if not most of my colleagues in the Iowa Writers Collaborative, I’ve never really been much of a fiction reader. I moved in fifth grade from reading baseball books—okay, themselves a form of fiction—to reading history, and of course I had English every year through high school. Whatever else the teachers assigned, we read a Shakespeare and a Dickens each year.
Subsequently, in college, my participation in an honors program placed me in a two-semester freshman course called Great Books, which consisted of Greek and Roman classics. I must admit that while I never would have registered for this course on my own, I was glad—even at the time—that I was required to take it.
(Anecdotally, this was the era when college professors could still make demands on their students. Great Books was my very first college class, meeting at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On our first day the professor peered out over the assembled students and said, “I presume you have read the first 150 pages of Homer’s Iliad; your assignment for next time is the next 150 pages.” So, as of the first five minutes of my college career I was already 300 pages of reading behind—in just one of my five courses!)
Perhaps unusually enough, it was my experience learning foreign languages that gave me a real interest in languages. Five years of Spanish in grades 8-12 placed me out of an undergraduate language requirement, but I had to learn German and French in graduate school for my doctoral work. I was lucky to have language teachers with a sense of humor. I often heard them say, for example, that while English is the language of business, Spanish is the language for praying to God, French is the language of literature, Italian is the language of love, and German is the language in which you talk to your horse!
I always found Spanish and German to be languages in which everything looks the way it sounds and sounds the way it looks. To me, at least, in French nothing sounds the way it looks or looks the way it sounds. And yet consider English—when we pronounce “rough,” it sounds like “ruff.” But when we put a “th” in front of “rough” to make “through,” it doesn’t sound like “thruff”—it sounds like “threw.” Sigh.
And then there is the old saying that the British and the Americans are two peoples separated by a common language. During my first several months of studying in Oxford, I often found that I thought British friends and I were saying the same thing when we weren’t, sometimes embarrassingly so. This occurs even between English and German: when a Briton says the time is “half seven,” that means it’s 7:30 (half-past seven), but when a German says the time is “halb Sieben” (“half seven”), that means it’s 6:30 (half-way to 7:00).
Now, politics is about power, but it is power manifested in language. Real languages illustrate the main principle of classical conservatism, which is that norms, values, and practices develop slowly, through unconscious and even haphazard accretion rather than through rational, conscious choice. Contrast lengths (inches, feet, yards, and miles), weights (ounces, pounds, and tons), and even temperatures (Fahrenheit) with the metric system of meters, grams, and Celsius.
Edmund Burke, the godfather of classical conservatism, valued the vagaries of experience over the “cold rationalism” he attributed to the radicals of the French Revolution. Indeed, when Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 1 suggests that “it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” he takes a profoundly unconservative position. If Esperanto exemplifies the idea of “reflection and choice,” then natural languages exemplify the idea of “accident and force.”
More significantly, there is an enormous literature on the relation between thought and language that perhaps I’ll be able to study someday. My amateur view is that we don’t think, then mentally put thoughts into language, and then speak; we usually learn a foreign language that way. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that we have no memory of having learned our native language that way. We always think in a language, and that language structures our thinking.
It’s no coincidence, I think, that German and proper British English (not Cockney) were always very formal languages, and their manners are very formal. American English, by contrast, is much more casual and less structured, and so are our manners. Note the way we Americans address complete strangers by their first names rather than more formally as Miss, Ms., Mrs., or Mr.—or, as the Germans would title me, “Herr Professor Doktor!”
Whatever the details of that relationship between thought and language, then, the idea that language structures our thinking directly implicates politics because it implicates the concepts of power and ideology (think of our “pronoun wars”). Language is extremely interesting not just in literary terms, but also as a political phenomenon. There’s a lot to learn there, and I’ve only just begun.
