Esperanto is Old School

Wittgenstein described language as a city. Three's the Old Town with its twisted streets and the new suburbs that are neatly organized. The entire city is constantly changing and growing.

That's the way it's supposed to be, but is language evolving enough? We are adding a lot of slang and that's fun, but is it really moving us forward? We could be working to create language evolution that would enhance our understanding and bring thought to a new level.

Children can learn a language by a fairly young age, knowing all the difficult grammar and learning a very sizable vocabularly. Why stop there? Why not make basic communication a lot more difficult, so we have to keep learning? The beauty of learning language is that we internalize it, so it is more powerful than academic book learning.

Here's an idea, somewhat half-baked but I present it as a start to the conversation... The world could move to one written language, and it should not be phonetic. Different groups will interpret the written form differently, resulting in a rich collection of spoken languages. But those groupings don't have to be geographic or historical; there can be different spoken interpretations for poets and accountants and so on. Meaning has always been layered, but it will become much more so, allowing different perspectives on existence to display different strengths in insight and communication.

There was a time when scholars from all of Europe wrote in Latin. The new language would go further in that it wouldn't be just for scholars, and there wouldn't be just one verbalization of it. The same symbol, word or phrase might be interpreted by different groups as eternity, death, the sky, forgotten memory. The new language might be partly mathematical. (Math has insufficient vocabulary.)

By learning a new verison of the language, we'd be internalizing new layers of meaning. That would allow a deeper understanding of the interconnections between different perspectives: for example, it could make us aware at a deep level of the sameness of math and music, poetry and philosophy, different schools of thought in physics.

As it stands, our science is growing but our overall understanding of the world is growing less so. To move to a new level we need human evolution, not just more technology. We need to dream bigger and reach higher.

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Miss Pronownciation

I just heard an anchor on CNN International pronounce Azberbaijan in a way so bizarre, so incorrect, that she must have read the word off her teleprompter wihtout ever having heard it before. Eyes squinting a bit, in a questioning tone, she laboriously said something like, Eh-zber-gee-an?

Now in Canada we obsess over pronunciation. A couple of decades ago there was virtually a national debate over Lithuania: Lith-YOO-ania or Lith-OO-ania. I believe it was Joe Clark who fell afoul of public opinion with a dodgy YOO version. I remember championing the OO side with some gusto, although I may have simply been unable to accept the articulation of a Conservative. After a great deal of taxpayer-subsidized research, the CBC made a ruling and, well, I seem to have forgotten what it was.

CBC announcers are given pronunciation guidelines. CNN announcers - not so much. They seem to wing it. For example, Qatar, usually pronounced something like kuh-TAR, is regulary called cutter on CNN. For that matter, American government officials often say cutter as well. Given the dominance of US TV, after a while the poor Qataris (kuh-TAR-ees) will probably give up and become KUT-ter-ees. That's certainly what happened to poor old al Qaeda - no AYE-EE left in that name.

Just guessing here, but the widespread disregard that American media has for the correct pronunciation of foreign words, isn't that based on a sense that Americans don't follow no furrin ways? This attitude has had some admirable effects - I am a great fan of American spelling and think it superior in all respects to British forms. But language is more than 99% about following and less than 1% about leading, and American visual media could show a little more respect for accepted pronunciation.

Ahmadinejad, anyone?

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102 Official Languages?

According to CBC Radio's The House this week, the Canadian Senate is looking into providing translation services for their speeches. The translators will cover a number of aboriginal languages so that aboriginal senators can speak in their native tongue in the senate.

The House interviewed a Liberal Senator from New Brunswick who is pushing the idea. When The House asked about the high cost of such a service, the senator said that these are living languages that we should preserve, and compared to the cost of digging up dinosaurs and building museums, this will not cost much.

That, of course, begs the question of how speaking in the senate will help preserve a language.

More importantly, it shows remarkable short-sightedness. We have two official languages, French and English. Will we now add a hundred-odd aboriginal languages to our list of official languages? When asked whether this will set a precedent that the House of Commons will also have to meet, the senator said, "Of course. It will be difficult for anyone to back away from that practice once it is accepted."

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Ever-Evolving English

I was just reading a review of the new James Bond movie in an American publication and noticed a new (to me) spelling. The review described the two women in the movie as a blond and a brunet.

My first thought was that Americans are deFrenchifying their language. That might be true. However, this article says the change is part of the degenederification of English - that blonde/brunette were feminine forms and so are now considered sexist.

(My humble o is that referring to people by their hair color (or any other body part) is sexist, as it is only done with women and is an objectivization.)

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Incentivizing the Masses

I grew up in the 60s, a time of moral relativism, in which the religious underpinning of moral behavior was abnegated and we were left with our gut as the only justification for our sense of right and wrong. Right and wrong became societal, not universal, and were subject to change.

Over the last 40 years, this tectonic shift in the foundation of moral behavior has led to a change in perspective: in the obverse of John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you/Ask only what you can do for your country," we have shifted from talking about how we should behave to how to make people behave in desirable ways. The Ten Commandments have been replaced by the Constitution: that is, what is right is replaced by what is legal - an appeal to our sense of morality is replaced by incentives (both carrot and stick) to make us behave.

One might speculate whether the current cult of incentivizationalism will in turn lead to a backlash movement... antiincentivizationarianism, if you will.

Okay, sorry about this, I'm just messing with you. I couldn't sleep and thought up the word antiincentivizationarianism and wondered whether I could find a way to use it in context. Now I've scratched that itch...

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