Right brain, left brain, hare-brain. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks tries and fails to unite language, thought and religion.

I have found it difficult to know where to begin with Jonathan Sack’s extraordinary mangling of linguistics on Start the Week (BBC Radio Four, October 17th 2011) available here -   http://tinyurl.com/6xkv25f  -at least for a while, then maybe you will need to search the BBC archives. The Rabbi has written a book, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning, and was on the national airwaves to promote it. He began with what inspired him to take on this subject. His ‘moment of discovery’ came, he says, when he realised that all languages that do not include symbols for vowels in their alphabets, (such as Hebrew) take a right to left path across the page. Languages written in an alphabet that does include symbols for vowels (such as Greek) go from left to right.

This, he says, is evidence of a fundamental difference: there are right-brained languages (Hebrew) and left-brained ones (Greek and all other European languages). Sacks claims that the Chinese, who write from top to bottom have ‘triangulated this difference’, ignoring thereby the rather obvious fact that Chinese script is not alphabetic, so has symbols for neither vowels nor consonants.

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Planet Word, part two: Fry still struggling.

I don’t know who coined the term linguicide, but it does not seem apt to me, any more than the death of George VI could be called regicide. His Majesty passed away after a long illness, rather than got his head chopped off, and this is surely a better analogy for what is happening to the vast majority of the world’s languages. Some are being actively —even violently—persecuted, but most are ill and slipping away with their elderly speakers. A very moving book on this subject is Nicholas Evans’ Dying Words. This could have guided Stephen Fry to any number of languages that are down to their very last few speakers, but the tone of this would not lend itself much to humour, and humour is again central to Fry’s topic in week two of Planet Word: the relationship of a person’s language to a person’s identity.

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Fry’s Planet Word: Too much Fry, not enough Word, Planet not necessary.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by documentary makers that you must talk to camera a lot, especially while walking towards it or driving with it along a highway somewhere. It is essential to visit many parts of the globe to find answers to questions, while staring dreamily over a beach or cityscape. If you think the subject matter might be getting complex for your audience, try making it into a comedy.  It’s entertaining also to have a few actors dress up to enact an historical scene, and it’s always good to pose unchallenging questions to a few real experts on the topic, safe in the knowledge that you need not follow through with anything but a fascinated nod. 

In episode one of his documentary series, Stephen Fry does not take the cameraman for a ride in his car, but he employs all the other conventions. He does the talking to camera as he walks through forest, along beach and down street. He stares into space. He shows us TV clips from long ago of his face doing wordy comedy sketches. He has actors in eighteenth century costumes with candles. He flies himself and crew to East Africa, to Germany, to the United States in order to give us bits of linguists Jean Berko, Steven Pinker, Michael Tomasello.....  All the basic documentary items are here, but Fry does not succeed in putting them into a coherent whole. If there was a thread of an argument running through this show, I was not able to pick it up.

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Stephen Fry: tried hard but could have done better

On Radio Four at 8.30 a.m. on September 26th, Stephen Fry stepped up to plug his new BBC TV series and book, entitled Fry’s Planet Word.

Already I’m disposed to dislike it, even before he has spoken one syllable. It’s the title. Why is his name in it? Why did he call his radio show Fry’s English Delight? How come physics gets TV documentaries presented by physicists (Brian Cox), history gets historians (Lucy Worsley), medicine gets doctors (Michael Mosley),  and music gets people who are musically trained to some degree (Simon Russell Beal, Gareth Malone), while anything to do with language tends to get presenters who are famous for other stuff? *

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Been there, done that. Why there is no need to listen to Melvyn Bragg's radio programme on Saturday

How does this man sell his ideas to the BBC? He has managed to persuade them to give him a hour on their ‘Archive on  Four’ radio series to expatiate upon Received Pronunciation  (RP RIP, August 6th  8.00 pm) when all the while they have a  brilliant archive of their very own on this subject, compiled by the face of British linguistics himself, Professor David Crystal. It’s here, if you would like to have a read:

http://tinyurl.com/3uzk3te

It’s a part of the BBC project called Voices which covers the history of English in five neat pages with links to audio/video clips. This particular page is all about Received Pronunciation, and includes a link to a short audio piece entitled .......... RP RIP.

So it looks like Bragg has lifted this nifty title in order to re-hash something that is scarcely new. The pre-broadcast press release

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012zy1c

tells us that ‘changes are afoot’ in British society which are threatening the dominance of RP with people like Cheryl Cole leading the way for the emancipation of regional accents. But it is ridiculous to present this change as if it’s just started. To quote Crystal, "  ...from the 1960s (RP) slowly came to be affected by the growth of regional identities, resulting in the re-emergence of regional colouring - a phenomenon now described as 'modified RP'. "  So that's over fifty years ago, when Bragg was still in short trousers.

Given Bragg’s form on matters linguistic, I suspect his programme will be much like his book on the history of English; a bit of scholarship when it suits him, a lot of personal anecdote when it does not. I predict references to the Cumbrian accent will get a lot of air-time, but I am not sure I can bear to listen to see if I am right.

One last thing.  I most definitely do not like the way the Lynne Trusses of this world wag their prissy fingers at apostrophe crimes, but in the BBC press release referenced above, I find this --The popular music scene developed an accent of it's own--to be irritating.  I’d much rather apostrophes be left out than crop up where there is no need for one, and I have the (entirely unscientific) feeling that they are cropping up in unnecessary places more than ever due to fear of being excoriated by an owner of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

 

Top language, top Bible, top people: Melvyn Bragg meets the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible in English, Melvyn Bragg (a man not noted for his reliability on such matters—see my post for March 30th last year) managed to get himself a BBC documentary on the subject. (King James' Bible: The Book that Changed the World) The credits say that he wrote it as well as narrated it, so all errors are his own, with the possible exception of the director’s decision to devote so much of the hour to close shots of Bragg’s face as he muses on his subject. This is always an error, even when the narrator is photogenic. Bragg, reading from his autocue, is an old man with distractingly young hair and a gaze point somewhere just above the viewer’s right eyebrow.

 

But I digress. The real point of this post is to unpick the bizarre thesis of the programme, namely that the true power of the Bible lay dormant for centuries until it was translated into English in 1611 by a committee of scholars working for King James. Yes, I am simplifying here somewhat, but that is because the lines of argument taken by Bragg are meandering and self-contradictory. Nevertheless¸ the main idea is that God’s word was inevitably muffled until it was made available to humanity through the sparkling medium of early Modern English, whereupon its effect was electric and immediate, inspiring  democratic revolutions, civil rights and all of modern science. 

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Hold the front page: prairie dogs still don't have language

Back in February 2010 I posted a piece about Dr. Con Slobodchikoff’s research into prairie dogs and their language, expressing my deep scepticism. This eventually came to Dr Slobodchikoff’s notice and he posted a comment inviting me to check out his webpage, ‘freely available on Google’ he said, where I would find details of the many peer-reviewed research papers he has published on the subject. Well, I did check out his list of publications, and there are lots of them, but none at all in linguistics. Journals like Behavioural Ecology, Mammology  and Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing, are not in any Learning Resources Centre near me, nor are they freely available to people who might want to get hold of them. So I picked a not-too-expensive book, ‘Kinship with Animals’ edited by Solisti and Tobias, in which Dr S. has a chapter about his prairie dog research. Having now read this, I can confidently reaffirm my initial scepticism about them having language. They don’t.

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Subjunctives and fuzzy logic: the Queen's English Society revisited

Dear Nick

Thank you for your long comments on my piece of June 15th this year, If I were running the Queen’s English Society, I would shut it down, in which you repeatedly laugh out loud at all the subjunctives you are slipping in which show me how wrong I am to have claimed they are dead in modern English.

 I am puzzled, though. If you read my post more carefully, you will see that nowhere do I say that English subjunctives have disappeared. That would be a daft thing to claim because of course they exist. I even used one in my title.  (Not all your examples are actually subjunctives, however. The ‘throw’ in "It is believed that he once had his guards "throw" random citizens to the lions " is an infinitive.)

This is not your only confusion, and as you are most eager for me to respond to you, I’ll reply blow by blow:

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Knowledge vs Pedantry

In the readers' letters page of  the current issue of the New York Review, a bad linguist called Sam Abrams writes to complain about the use of the word inchoate in an article by Tony Judt. Here is Mr Abrams' text:

To the Editor:
It is truly discouraging to see, in a column by Tony Judt about sensitivity to language, "inchoate" used as a synonym for "chaotic". [Words, NYR July 15th]. Although this solecism is quite common, it still pains the ears of those few of us who are sensitive to etymological resonances of English words. Didn't Professor Judt learn Latin at the fancy school he went to?

If Mr Abrams had written this snotty put-down about my use of inchoate, I might well have replied with a long essay about why Latin etymologies cannot determine 21st century English use. I would have insisted that I don't need anyone to teach me what inchoate means, and I would have told him that the sooner he and his 'sensitive to etymological resonances' ilk shuffle off this mortal coil, the better for us all. In short, I would have been immoderately cross.
But Professor Judt's reply to Mr Abrams, which the NYR prints immediately below the complaining letter, is so measured, so elegant and so perfect in its absolute crushing of this smug pedant, that I reproduce it in full for your admiration.

Like most people of your kind, you assume too much: regarding both what I wrote and what you are qualified to infer. "Inchoate" means: "Just begun, incipient; in an initial or early stage; hence elementary, imperfect, undeveloped, immature" (OED). And that is just what I meant-- the words begin to form but do not complete. If I had meant to say they were "chaotic" I would have said so.

At the "fancy school" I attended (my education cost precisely nothing from the age of five to twenty-four: what about yours?) I was taught Latin, but also how to distinguish between knowledge and pedantry. I am glad to say that forty years later I can still smell the difference at fifty yards.

Tony Judt was an internationally renowned historian and Professor at New York University. He died on August 6th 2010,  just a few days after writing this reply to Mr Abrams. He had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2008 and by the time of his death it had completely paralysed everything except his mind. He was a remarkable man whose obituary you can read here:

http://tinyurl.com/27qrvlo

 

Simon Heffer and a cartload of rubbish

Predictably and depressingly, the BBC has again allowed someone with no qualifications in linguistics to hold forth on the subject.  Why? WHY?*

This morning we had Simon Heffer, a journalist and editor at the Daily Telegraph, complaining that young people today don’t know their grammar and it’s time people like him got into the classroom to show them what’s what. You can read the report and listen to the interview here:

http://tinyurl.com/39e3t2z 

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About

I teach Applied Linguistics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It's a great subject, and an important subject, but because it is not taught at schools in the UK, it's not a widely known subject. Nevertheless, there seems to be a lot of otherwise perfectly nice and intelligent people out there who are not shy of expressing strong opinions about 'language' in the public media even though they know very little about it. This blog is unlikely to change their minds, but might help their audience spot the nonsense.

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