LITERACY

Here we are at Times Square, and we’re surrounded by words; we’re surrounded by signs and there are a lot of people that tell you that we have a great deal of functional illiteracy in this country, but what amazes me is how much literacy we do have. After all, there are all these signs here and they’re designed to be read by people, including the people that are walking past me right now. What’s amazing to me, as a linguist, is that this business of writing is something that actually has only come along very late in the history of our species. Homo sapiens go back about a hundred and fifty thousand years. Writing, as far as we know, only goes back about six thousand, seven thousand at the most, and yet we’ve certainly taken the ball and run with it. Our first evidence of it is from the Middle East, although of course it began as an elite activity generally used for record keeping or for high literary endeavors; they were unfamiliar to the masses. Only relatively recently do we have the kind of widespread literacy that makes, for example, a Times Square possible.

Writing creates a whole new way of being human for a lot of people in the world. It’s easy to forget that if we’re just speaking, what we’re doing is manipulating a mouthful of air. When there’s a way of writing, then we can make what we say permanent and that creates a whole new phase in how humanity has progressed throughout time. For example, only when you have writing can you have a large body of literature that goes beyond the strictly practical. The memory can only hold so much and so, if there’s no writing, you’ve got your religious lore, you’ve got your recipes, you’ve got your stories, you’ve got enough history to give you a sense of basic place in the world. But taking down the things that aren’t strictly necessary - creating a chronicle blow by blow of what has happened to you, or just making a taxonomy, so to speak, of all of the animals and plants that you see around you just because they’re there - is something that can only happen if you’ve got writing because the memory can’t hold all of those things.

ENGLISH IS A BASTARD TONGUE

Something interesting to know though is that most of these words surrounding me right now are not even English. This language is full of words that were taken from other languages; not only in the obvious ones like ballet, or Hagen Das, or pizza, or the ones that we’d know come from other languages and still feel as foreign. I mean ordinary words like neck, happy, skirt, sneak, art… So I don’t mean fancy language, I don’t mean some sort of trick that you can pull, I mean the language that these people right here are speaking right now. We speak what is very much a bastard tongue.

For example, up here we have the word “gifts” and over here we have the word “luggage”. Old English didn’t know from gifts and luggage; those words were not in the language at all. Gift was a word that was given to us by Scandinavian Viking invaders over a thousand years ago, and luggage as far as we know is partly from the Scandinavians and then the little part on the end, the ‘uge’ is something that we inherit from French.

LANGUAGE CHANGES

Look at all these people; they’re standing here in line waiting for theatre tickets. Even that depends on writing the way it’s done here in Times Square. Many of these shows run for years and years and years, and they’re done exactly the same way every night. That couldn’t happen without these things being written down so that people could read them. If you don’t have writing, then language changes, and it changes a lot faster than we might think. All sorts of things happen, and so for example, think about the word “sloth”; it just seems like this word to us, but actually it comes from the word “slowth”. And so, for example, something could be warm and then you’ve got warmth, something could be deep and you’ve got depth, something can be slow, you’ve got slowth - that word has evolved and so now its sloth. Or for example if I say right now, “sure is noisy, plus it’s humid”. Sure, noisy, plus, and humid, none of those words are English; all of those words are originally from Latin. And yet today it’s a very ordinary sense of English that anybody would understand. That’s how language changes.

For example, there are all sorts of words that we use now that we think of as very ordinary that Shakespeare would have trouble with or an Old English speaker would find completely bizarre. And so, for example, “good-bye” - have you ever thought about what good-bye was? Actually what this comes from is what started out as “God be with you”. Now this was something that people said so often that they started saying it more quickly. So, over time, God be with you became goodbye. Or, for example, it used to be that if you were dealing with a rather exotic orange fruit that I don’t know why everybody likes so much, you’d say “give me three noranges please”; that was the word, just like in Spanish the word for that fruit is “naranja”. But you might also say, “give me a norange”; well, if you say that fast it’s “give me an orange”. And so the N got lopped off and now we have this thing called orange, which nobody way back in the day would have recognized as a word.

Language changes one of the things that I study; I’ve been fascinated by it since I was a kid. The word “silly” used to mean blessed; that’s what it means in ancient documents. Now if you’re blessed you might be a little bit weak. If you’re weak you might be a little bit foolish, and if you’re foolish then you might be silly. So gradual series of reinterpretations led to the change; that’s happened to lots and lots of words. Nowadays if you talk about a hound, it’s a particular kind of dog. It used to be that hound was the only word for dog, and the word dog just kind of loped in with its tongue hanging out at a certain point and has since taken over. Nor is this always a matter of the archaic.

As recently as 1856 for example, you could have heard thieves using a kind of slang where they may have said something like, “the coves had screwed the gig of the jug. ‘Bingavast’, one of them said, ‘we’re cackled.’” Now what that meant was that thieves had used a false key to get into the door of the bank. “Let’s get out of here, someone has ratted on us”. So language changes; it’s changed since 1856, it’s certainly changed since the time of Beowulf, and was always changing in the times in between.

“CORRECT” ENGLISH

Writing is permanent and if you have a kind of language that’s sitting on the page, often it can look like that way of using the language is the right way and that the way that we speak, which is often different, is the wrong way. So as a result, once literacy became widespread we had a new notion, the idea that there is a right kind if language and a wrong kind of language.

So for example, we’re told that you’re not supposed to say “Billy and me went to the store”. You’re supposed to say “Billy and I went to the store” because after all ‘I’ is a subject and ‘me’ is not. But if it’s that simple then how come there’s no such thing as saying ‘I and Billy went to the store’? “I” is a subject after all; clearly there’s something more going on than that. Or lets say someone says “who did that?” and you want to express that it’s you would did it, you wouldn’t say “I”, or if you did you’d be in a British sitcom or you would be a very peculiar person. You would say “me”, but, after all, the “me” is a subject; you’re saying that “me” did it in a way. So what we see is that the whole idea that subjects must always be subjects in English is really just something somebody made up because Latin happened to work that way.

Latin, our bugbear Latin; don’t hang a preposition at the end of a sentence. Now, you cannot speak English for ten minutes without doing something like that; it’s something that we’re all used to, for example. The reason we were told not to do that is because, well, Latin doesn’t work that way. Don’t split an infinitive; so we’re not supposed to say “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Well the reason that we were supposedly not supposed to do this was because Latin didn’t split their infinitives, but in Latin the infinitive was only one word; there was no “to” before it, so it was hard to split it because it was a word. Now the people who told us that we were not supposed to split our infinitives when our infinitives were two words with a space yawning between them just waiting to invite and cushion a word, is really rather sad.

“I ain’t seen nothing; I never go nowhere”. We’re told that those constructions are bad logic, that they’re evidence of the fall of human kind. Well really the only reason that we feel that way is because we were told this by people who noticed that, well Latin happened not to use double negatives and therefore English shouldn’t. Many many languages in the world have to use double negatives such as French and a great many others that you may have learned. Interesting that every single other kind of English, you talk about regional British English, you talk about any kind of vernacular American English, uses double negatives all the time. It’s only the standard dialect of English, one of the hundreds, that does not use them, and this is largely an artificial situation. There are double negatives used by literate characters occasionally even in Shakespeare. We live in a different time when our language has been fumigated away from this construction simply because of this fetish-ization of Latin, a dead language that almost none of us speak.

Once you have writing, sitting on the page, teaching people that there’s a good form of language; language has changed more slowly. So for example, we can understand the language of Shakespeare with difficulty, but Shakespeare after just about the same amount of time would have found old English completely opaque.