If John McWhorter's "Power of Babel" looks under the hood at how
language's "engine" is assembled and how it energizes the word, Nicholas
Ostler ranks the top models sold for their performance and handling.
Ostler examines how the most successful languages throughout history
succeeded or failed in perpetuating themselves as regional or, as with
English, global means of communication. As a non-linguist but with
training in English, Spanish, medieval and Celtic literatures and
languages, I found particularly intriguing his chapters on these topics.
Far slower for me were the densely detailed opening sections on Near
Eastern, Chinese, Sanskrit, and related tongues. Here, too often, my
eyes glazed over at the sheer amount of historical minutiae and
tangential illustrations. This is the problem with much of this weighty
tome: having to re-tell the rise and fall of language powers via their
historical dynamics, history has to be recapitulated as well as the
linguistic and, to a lesser extent, literary highlights. Jargon is less
present than in many linguistic studies geared at a wider audience, but
nothing's dumbed down. This book rewards concentration more than the
quick dip by the browser, as much of Ostler's argument accumulates as
the book continues towards the current rise of global English. Despite a
rather uneven pace, due to the sheer difficulty in integrating so much
history into so many languages, having a single volume devoted to what
Ostler calls "diachronic sociolinguistics" or "language dynamics" (and
he names this only on pg. 556, in the penultimate paragraph of the text
proper!) is enormously useful for those of us non-specialists who need a
compendium.
The encyclopedic and the narrative methods do jostle
each other. Once in a while, as in his marvelous analogy of "two
sisters," Judith (Hebrew) and Phoenicia (also going by Canaanite, he
points out, in other words, the Palestinian predecessor), he finds the
clever example to clarify his point. But such moments of inspiration are
surprisingly few, and often as not nestled in the footnotes as
emphasized in the text. This does make for a tough slog; despite many
pages detailing why Aramaic overtook Akkadian, I was never confident
that I understood precisely why. And the chapter organization means that
some repetition keeps occuring; while cross-referencing helps
retention, it does make for some awkward gaps. In the chapter on Greek,
little mention of its Renaissance revival and less of its Arab hiatus is
made--you have to wait for many pages for another examination of these
factors, and it's disappointingly brief.
Yet, as the early modern
eras loom, the pace quickens. In the fluid coverage of Spanish, the
reasons for its missionary instruction and the need to teach it to adult
learners (Merger & Acquisition) rather than the organic way of
letting it grow through the native mother's child raising (as many
languages do, for often the conqueror's language can lose out in the
long run to the native, for the woman and the child tend to transmit the
native and not the "foreign occupier's" language on to the next
generations in the absence of females from the same first-language
background to mate with the men when settling abroad) makes for
provocative insights. Even here, however, the book jacket tells us that
Ostler's an "expert on the Chibcha language" that yielded in South
America to 18c Spanish; we get remarkably little of this story told--one
paragraph!
Still, his coverage of English, too complicated to
summarize here, shows why a reader needs to slog through so much
material; his analysis and prognosis depends upon all of his previous
chapters and dozens of earlier linguistic examples. It's instructive, to
name only one point, how Germanic English bested British Celtic and
Norman French not only due to military power but plague devastation.
These observant chapters comprise the most lively part of the book, at
least for a native English speaker I suppose. But he does seem rather
too blasé, for one who chairs a charity, Ogmios, to assist
small-language sustainment, about the fate of threatened language
communities; he shrugs that there's nevertheless 6,000 of them
remaining. Yes, but he also predicts that half of these have their last
speakers alive today. A tie between ecological and linguistic
preservation might have illuminated his reflections better, without
romanticizing the converse to the cruel calculus that has relentlessly
led to language extinction as well as creation throughout the millennia
he chronicles so dutifully. His scholarly mien expects dispassion,
however.
Ostler's reflections on how native vs. second-language
or foreign-language speakers of English will fare as it becomes global
and more used as a "lingua franca" [sic] than as a first-language raise
many wonderful speculations that I found engrossing and fresh. He opened
my eyes to how difficult English orthography is, and how adaptable it
still is despite its daunting and growing disjunction between print and
speech. The end of this long volume makes the effort in reading it and
learning so much--trivia and substance both--worthwhile. (Amazon US 1-16-06 reprise)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment