Of Dialects and Fiddly Endings

Since I decided to come to Taiwan, I've started reading up a bit on linguistics. I suppose it's only natural I would want to learn more about how language really works when I am now responsible for teaching it to around twenty-odd people in all my various classes.

So far, I've read three books on the subject: Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word, which deals with the question of why some languages spread and become dominant and others do not; Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language, which discusses how language has evolved from the "Me-Tarzan" stage of our earliest ancestors; and John McWhorter's The Power of Babel, which goes into more depth about how linguists believe the myriad of world languages and dialects has evolved from the original tongue spoken by our ancestors in West Africa about 150,000 years ago.

One of the key ideas I've picked up from McWhorter's book is that there really is no line between languages and dialects; often, groups of people whose speech is in fact very similar will think of themselves as speaking different languages for reasons not of grammar and syntax but of politics. For instance, McWhorter points out that Norweigian, Swedish, and Danish are all basically mutually intelligible with each other. Some Norweigians might have difficulty with some aspects of Danish speech because of what linguists call "semantic shift" (when a word changes its meaning, sometimes pretty dramatically, over the centuries).

The converse is also true: people will also call "dialects" what are really mutually unintelligible separate languages. This is very much the case with Chinese, from what I gather. Officially, there are eight or so "dialects" of a language called Chinese, but these are often so mutually unintelligible that they really are separate languages. Mandarin and Cantonese, from what I'm told, are so different from each other that speakers of one cannot readily comprehend speakers of the other. They are thought of as dialects of the same language only because both are spoken within the bounds of the People's Republic of China, and because they share a writing system. This way of looking at the languages would be rather like asserting that English and French are one and the same language, because they are both written in the Roman alphabet.

To really illustrate the point, McWhorter notes that, prior to the Dayton Accords, Serbs and Croatians thought of themselves as speaking separate "languages", even though there are actually households in these countries where the husband speaks, say, Serbian, the wife speaks Croatian, and yet they are perfectly able to communicate. The only major difference between these two "languages" is that one is written in Cyrillic while the other is written in Roman script. After the Dayton Accords, grammars and dictionaries of the "Bosnian" language started to be published!

Empires of the Word notes that, popular myth to the contrary, a language is not just a dialect with an army and navy attached to it. Ostlers shows that, frequently in history, a conqueror has utterly failed to impose its language on the native people. He notes, for instance, that, in the first couple of centuries after Spain conquered Mexico, Spanish really did not catch on as the language of the common people. In fact, it became so only in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the Spanish court forbade the preaching of the gospel in the native languages of Mexico (an act actually contrary to the Council of Trent, which explicitly required that the gospel be preached in local languages rather than Latin or anything else). Ostler theorizes that a new language will be taken up to the extent that its grammar and syntax are similar to the existing language of local inhabitants.

The Unfolding of Language has, so far, been the most fascinating, because it has really made me see language in a whole new way. Deutscher starts with the question that plagued linguists in the 18th and 19th centuries--the seeming "decay" of European languages from Latin, with its high level of inflection and case endings, to its various daughter languages in Europe.

Now, this question begs an assumption that I have never really shared. Even when I studied Latin in high school, which I enjoyed, I never bought the idea that Latin's system of case endings was somehow a more "perfect" or "refined" system of communication. In fact, it often struck me as incredibly imprecise. The dative in Latin, for instance, might mean to, with, by, or for. All of these mean different things and, as you can imagine, Latin still had to rely on prepositions when more exactitude was required. I had a teacher in high school, for instance, who had the words Ex Libris (from the library) imprinted on his books. Ex means "from"; libris is the genitive (of, from, belonging to) of the word for library. Clearly Latin's "higher" case system didn't do what classically trained linguists of the 19th century wanted to believe it did.

Deutscher shows pretty convincingly that, through a process of erosion, new grammatical particles are constantly being brought into being. This can result in the loss of case endings, but it can call result in their creation. For instance, Latin's case endings most likely began as postpositions (prepositions that come before, not after, the words they govern). As speakers tried to save themselves effort (the kind of economy that has led to Y'all and I'm gonna in informal English), they slowly came to elide these postpositions with words, giving rise eventually to case endings.

I remember asking teachers in school just why European languages had lost their endings. I think they generally said something about it just being "easier" to speak without them. Well, this isn't entirely true. Hungarians and Russians still manage to use fiddly case endings. It' just that case-free nouns are what erosions has produced at this stage in French and, more to the point, English.

Deutscher also talks about how language elements grow out of thedeadening of metaphor. Prepositions for "to" in many languages, for instance, evolved originally from verbs meaning to give or to go. Modals of verbs can also evolve this way. Deutscher, for instance, goes at length into the evolution of the "going to" future construction in English.

Originally, going to constructions always involved (not surprisingly) literally going somewhere. In the 1500s, for instance, you could say, I'm going to deliver the letter, but not I'm going to sing a song. And when you said I'm going to deliver the letter, it had a more forceful meaning: it meant "I am leaving right this minute to deliver the letter", not "I have a plan to deliver the letter," as it does in modern English. Eventually, people started using going to in more metaphorical ways. By the mid-17th century, for instance, there are texts that say things like She was going to be delivered into hell. Clearly, no intention on the part of the she referred to can be inferred here. Finally, the term evolved into the form we know today. By the end of the 17th century, you could say I'm going to sing a song, or The fort is going to be attacked. The metaphor of going was fully deadened into a grammatical construction. To illustrate the point further, the informal gonna is always and exclusively a grammatical particle. No matter how poor his command of formal grammatical English, for instance, a native speaker would not say I'm gonna the store or I'm gonna the movies. But when gonna is used, it's always with an infinitive after it: I'm gonna take a sentimental journey, etc. Gonna is not simply a sloppy way of saying "going to" but an evolution of the "going to" future into a total grammatical particle.