The Mother Tongue (5 page)

The grammar of the vulgate also became simplified as Latin spread across the known world and was adopted by people from varying speech backgrounds. In classical Latin word endings were constantly changing to reflect syntax: A speaker could distinguish between, say, “in the house” and “to the house” by varying the ending on house. But gradually people decided that it was simpler to leave house uninflected and put
ad
in front of it for “to,”
in
for “in,” and so on through all the prepositions, and by this means the case endings disappeared. An almost identical process happened with English later.

Romanians often claim to have the language that most closely resembles ancient Latin. But in fact, according to Mario Pei, if you wish to hear what ancient Latin sounded like, you should listen to Lugudorese, an Italic dialect spoken in central Sardinia, which in many respects is unchanged from the Latin of 1,500 years ago.

Many scholars believe that classical Latin was spoken by almost no one—that it was used exclusively as a literary and scholarly language. Certainly such evidence as we have of everyday writing—graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, for example—suggests that classical Latin was effectively a dead language as far as common discourse was concerned long before Rome fell. And, as we shall see, it was that momentous event—the fall of Rome—that helped to usher in our own tongue.

3.

Global Language

A
ll languages have the same purpose—to communicate thoughts—and yet they achieve this single aim in a multiplicity of ways. It appears there is no feature of grammar or syntax that is indispensable or universal. The ways of dealing with matters of number, tense, case, gender, and the like are wondrously various from one tongue to the next. Many languages manage without quite basic grammatical or lexical features, while others burden themselves with remarkable complexities. A Welsh speaker must choose between five ways of saying
than: na, n', nag, mwy,
or
yn fwy.
Finnish has fifteen case forms, so every noun varies depending on whether it is nominative, accusative, allative, inessive, comitative, or one of ten other grammatical conditions. Imagine learning fifteen ways of spelling
cat, dog, house,
and so on. English, by contrast, has abandoned case forms, except for possessives, where we generally add
's
, and with personal pronouns which can vary by no more than three ways (e.g.,
they, their, them
), but often by only two (
you, your
). Similarly, in English
ride
has just five forms (
ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden
); the same verb in German has sixteen. In Russian, nouns can have up to twelve inflections and adjectives as many as sixteen. In English adjectives have just one invariable form with but, I believe, one exception:
blond/blonde.

Sometimes languages fail to acquire what may seem to us quite basic terms. The Romans had no word for gray. To them it was another shade of dark blue or dark green. Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of
yes
or
no.
They must resort to roundabout expressions such as “I think not” and “This is so.” Italians cannot distinguish between a niece and a granddaughter or between a nephew and a grandson. The Japanese have no definite or indefinite articles corresponding to the English
a, an,
or
the,
and they do not distinguish between singular and plural as we do with, say,
ball/balls
and
child/children
or as the French do with
chateau/chateaux.
This may seem strange until you reflect that we don't make a distinction with a lot of words—
sheep, deer, trout, Swiss, scissors
—and it scarcely ever causes us trouble. We could probably get by well without it for all words. But it is harder to make a case for the absence in Japanese of a future tense. To them
Tokyo e yukimasu
means both “I go to Tokyo” and “I will go to Tokyo.” To understand which sense is intended, you need to know the context. This lack of explicitness is a feature of Japanese—even to the point that they seldom use personal pronouns like
me, my,
and
yours.
Such words exist, but the Japanese employ them so sparingly that they might as well not have them. Over half of all Japanese sentences have no subject. They dislike giving a straightforward yes or no. It is no wonder that they are so often called inscrutable.

Not only did various speech communities devise different languages, but also different cultural predispositions to go with them. Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it. There are more of these speech conventions than you might suppose. English speakers dread silence. We are all familiar with the uncomfortable feeling that overcomes us when a conversation palls. Studies have shown that when a pause reaches four seconds, one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something—a fatuous comment on the weather, a startled cry of “Gosh, is that the time?”—rather than let the silence extend to a fifth second.

A vital adjunct to language is the gesture, which in some cultures can almost constitute a vocabulary all its own. Modern Greek has more than seventy common gestures, ranging from the chopping off the forearm gesture, which signifies extreme displeasure, to several highly elaborate ones, such as placing the left hand on the knee, closing one eye, looking with the other into the middle distance and wagging the free hand up and down, which means “I don't want anything to do with it.” According to Mario Pei, the human anatomy is capable of producing some 700,000 “distinct elementary gestures” of this type. We have nothing remotely like that number in English, but we have many more than you might at first think—from wagging a finger in warning at a child, to squeezing the nose and fanning the face to indicate a noisome smell, to putting a hand to the ear as if to say, “I can't hear you.”

Estimates of the number of languages in the world usually fix on a figure of about 2,700, though almost certainly no one has ever made a truly definitive count. In many countries, perhaps the majority, there are at least two native languages, and in some cases—as in Cameroon and Papua New Guinea—there are hundreds. India probably leads the world, with more than 1,600 languages and dialects (it isn't always possible to say which is which). The rarest language as of 1984 was Oubykh, a highly complex Caucasian language with eighty-two consonants but only three vowels, once spoken by 50,000 people in the Crimea. But as of July 1984 there was just one living speaker remaining and he was eighty-two years old.

The number of languages naturally changes as tribes die out or linguistic groups are absorbed. Although new languages, particularly creoles, are born from time to time, the trend is toward absorption and amalgamation. When Columbus arrived in the New World, there were an estimated 1,000 languages. Today there are about 600.

Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like
airport
and
quarter-pound cheeseburger.
In English, by contrast, the change has been much more dramatic. Almost any untrained person looking at a manuscript from the time of, say, the Venerable Bede would be hard pressed to identify it as being in English—and in a sense he or she would be right. Today we have not only a completely different vocabulary and system of spelling, but even a different structure.

Nor are languages any respecters of frontiers. If you drew a map of Europe based on languages it would bear scant resemblance to a conventional map. Switzerland would disappear, becoming part of the surrounding dominions of French, Italian, and German but for a few tiny pockets for Romansh (or Rumantsch or Rhaeto-Romanic as it is variously called), which is spoken as a native language by about half the people in the Graubünden district (or Grisons district—almost everything has two names in Switzerland) at the country's eastern edge. This steep and beautiful area, which takes in the ski resorts of St. Moritz, Davos, and Klosters, was once effectively isolated from the rest of the world by its harsh winters and forbidding geography. Indeed, the isolation was such that even people in neighboring valleys began to speak different versions of the language, so that Romansh is not so much one language as five fragmented and not always mutually intelligible dialects. A person from the valley around Sutselva will say, “Vagned nà qua” for “Come here,” while in the next valley he will say, “Vegni neu cheu” [cited in
The Economist,
February 27, 1988]. In other places people will speak the language in the same way but spell it differently depending on whether they are Catholic or Protestant.

German would cover not only its traditional areas of Germany, Austria, and much of Switzerland, but would spill into Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Poland, and it could be further divided into high and low German, which have certain notable differences in terms of vocabulary and syntax. In Bavaria, for instance,
Samstag
is the name for Saturday, but in Berlin it is
Sonnabend;
a plumber in Bavaria is a
spengler,
but a
klempner
in Berlin.

Italy, too, would appear on the map not as one language entity but as a whole variety of broadly related but often mutually incomprehensible dialects. Italian, such as it is, is not a national language, but really only the dialect of Florence and Tuscany, which has slowly been gaining preeminence over other dialects. Not until 1979 did a poll show for the first time that Italian was the dialect spoken at home by more than 50 percent of Italians.

Much the same would be the position in the Soviet Union, which would dissolve into 149 separate languages. Almost half the people in the country speak some language other than Russian as a native tongue, and a full quarter of the people do not speak Russian at all.

Such pockets would be everywhere. Even Latin would make an appearance: It is still the official language of Vatican City.

All these languages blend and merge and variously affect one another. French normally puts the adjective after the noun it is modifying (as in
l'auto rouge
rather than
le rouge auto
), but in Alsace and other Rhineland regions influenced by Germany, the locals have a tendency to reverse the normal order. In a similar way, in the Highlands of Scotland, English speakers, whether or not they understand Gaelic, have developed certain speech patterns clearly influenced by Gaelic phrasings, saying “take that here” rather than “bring that here” and “I'm seeing you” in preference to “I see you.” In border areas, such as between Holland and West Germany or between West Germany and Denmark, the locals on each side often understand each other better than they do their own compatriots.

Some languages are not as distinct as we are sometimes led to believe. Spanish and Portuguese are closely enough related that the two peoples can read each other's newspapers and books, though they have more difficulty understanding speech. Finns and Estonians can freely understand each other. Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians often insist that their languages are quite distinct and yet, as Mario Pei puts it, there are greater differences between Italian dialects such as Sicilian and Piedmontese than there are between any of the three main Scandinavian languages. Romanian and Moldavian, spoken in the Soviet Union, are essentially the same language with different names. So are Serbian and Croatian, the only real difference being that Serbian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian uses Western characters.

In many countries people use one language for some activities and a second language for others. In Luxembourg, the inhabitants use French at school, German for reading newspapers, and Luxemburgish, a local Germanic dialect, at home. In Paraguay, people conduct business in Spanish, but tell their jokes in Guarani, the native Indian tongue. In Greece, for a long time children were schooled only in Katharevousa, a formal language so archaic that it was (and indeed still is) no longer spoken anywhere in the country. The language for common discourse was Dhimotiki, yet perversely this everyday language was long held in such low esteem that when the Old Testament was published in Dhimotiki for the first time in 1903, riots broke out all over the country [Peter Trudgill,
Socio-linguistics,
page 115+].

In countries where two or more languages coexist, confusion often arises. In Belgium, many towns have two quite separate names, one recognized by French speakers, one by Dutch speakers, so that the French Tournai is the Dutch Doornik, while the Dutch Luik is the French Liège. The French Mons is the Dutch Bergen, the Dutch Kortrijk is the French Courtrai, and the city that to all French-speaking people (and indeed most English-speaking people) is known as Bruges (and pronounced “broozsh”) is to the locals called Brugge and pronounced “broo-guh.” Although Brussels is officially bilingual, it is in fact a French-speaking island in a Flemish lake.

Language is often an emotive issue in Belgium and has brought down many governments. Part of the problem is that there has been a reversal in the relative fortunes of the two main language groups. Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking half of Belgium, was long the economic powerhouse of the country, but with the decline of traditional heavy industries such as steel and coal, the economic base has moved north to the more populous, but previously backward, region of Flanders. During the period of the Walloon ascendancy, the Dutch dialect, Flemish, or Vlaams, was forbidden to be spoken in parliament, courts, and even in schools. This naturally caused lingering resentment among the Dutch-speaking majority.