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hardback £14.99
Cornerstone
Paddyfield.com
hardcover $25.00
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (hmh)
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
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hardback £12.99
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More reviews by Peter Gordon
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley
The Alphabet by David Sacks
Cantonese, they say, is "just a dialect"; even Cantonese-speakers use this term, which seems to be as pejorative in Chinese as it is in English. Cantonese is, linguistically, a language; its appellation as a "dialect" is surely political.
"A national language," quotes MARK ABLEY, "is a dialect with an army."
Some current proposals to, for example, replace Cantonese teaching in the schools with Putonghua would be immediately recognizable to speakers of Welsh, Provencal, Mohawk, and the many other minority languages (which have also through the years been referred to by mainstream speakers as "jargon", "dialects", "gibberish", etc.) discussed in SPOKEN HERE: TRAVELS AMONG THREATENED LANGUAGES.
The world is losing languages at the rate of about one every two weeks. This is certainly sad -- the world will be a poorer place without Welsh or Naxi or Uyghur -- and it hits close to home (Cantonese will certainly survive, but Macanese Portuguese is close to extinction).
Even minority languages can be aggressors: kriol (which is a creole) is as much an enemy of aboriginal languages in northern Australia as is English. Or think of Hakka in Hong Kong.
Losing a language is sad, but is it important? So what if everyone ends up speaking English? As Abley travels around the world to meet some of the last speakers of endangered languages and the language activists trying to preserve them, he argues that languages encode different ways of looking at the world.
Anyone who is even moderately bilingual will know that there is some truth to this, that no translation is completely accurate, that there are things one can say in Chinese or Spanish, to say nothing of Yuchi (an American Indian language) or Mati Ke (an Australian Aboriginal language), that cannot be said in exactly the same way in English.
And yet, as Abley equates languages with species and languages with culture, his argument would seem to be that we need these languages in order to appreciate and understand unique concepts that are not available in our language and that cultures cannot exist without their languages to support them.
There are a couple several problems with this argument. One is that it is romantic: one could make a similar argument for poetry. Poetry may add depth to our lives, but one could express the same concepts, closely enough, in prose. Losing a language is perhaps not the same thing as losing biodiversity: when we lose a language, the concepts don't disappear, only one particular way of expressing them.
The second problem is that it is patronizing: the only real way to preserve a language or a culture from the polluting influence of English (or Chinese and any other powerful language) would be to keep it and its speakers isolated from the modern world, from television, communications and the modern economy. Too forcible and directed a preservation smacks of a linguistic zoo.
A considerable amount of linguistic consolidation seems inevitable. Nevertheless, with Cantonese being explicitly targeted, Abley's book should be required reading for people interested in language and education in Hong Kong -- and, since this is hardly a unique situation, the other parts of Asia as well.
DAVID SACKS's rather more lighthearted new book is a history of SPOKEN HERE: TRAVELS AMONG THREATENED LANGUAGES, arguably one of "the most consequential inventions of world history".
Sacks goes through each letter, tracing it back to its pre-Phoenician roots, through Greek, Etruscan, Roman, uncial and Carolingian minuscule, printing and modern typefaces, and adding tidbits of information as to why X is the sign for an unknown variable and why it also stands for "kiss".
This is a popular history, written in a breezy, unthreatening style and it will serve a s a good general introduction to the history of the alphabet, writing and printing, and how these affected the rest of human history and vice versa. Even those who already have some familiarity with the subject will find fascinating corners they perhaps had not visited: the letters V and J, for example, did not have their places in the alphabet assured until well into the 19th century, or the expression "not a jot" is actually the same as "not an iota".
However, the letter-by-letter structure leads to a certain amount of repetition; some points seem to be made, well, twenty-six times. And Sack's attempts at wit, such as saying goodbye to each letter at the close of the chapter, detract from the truly interesting material.
Language, being ubiquitous, is often taken for granted. But as both MARK ABLEY and DAVID SACKS illustrate in quite different ways, language, any language, is a thing of wonder.
Peter Gordon
07/03/2004
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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