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Documentary Series:
                     LINGO
 
                           
The World of Language

Lingo is a four part series which answers big questions about language. Where did it come from? Where is it going? How does the language we speak affect our lives? Can we ever escape from it? It gives an overview of verbal communication on the planet — it is intended to do for words what Life on Earth did for animals.

Style:
Each episode has one overarching theme, a question that it tries to answer. Within that framework its style will be an eclectic carnival of ideas, personalities and stories. Stories (episodes, sequences, call them what you will) will be taken from the widest possible range of sources: reportage of contemporary events, observation of people’s behaviour, stories from the past, interviews and visits to the eminent and to the ordinary, myths and legends, poems and extracts from literature. Anything to do with language is fair game for this series. The patchwork doesn’t fall apart because it is held together by a team of presenters and a strong unifying theme.

The purpose of this series is to amaze and delight with the sheer diversity and weirdness of language.

People:
There is no one person who can carry the full burden of a subject like this. Instead there will be a team of presenters, chosen both for their eminence in a particular field and for their ability to appear on television. They will each introduce items and stories, embellishing and adding to, sometimes even contradicting what has gone before; but always, by the end of the programme, adding up to a coherent argument.

 

Episode 1:

Er ... Sprache - The Origins of Language

The medieval emperor Friedrich II, a man who was as intellectually curious as he was vicious, devised an experiment to discover the origins of language. He had two new-born babies put alone into a cell. They were to be fed and cared for by mute guards who were forbidden to speak to them. He hoped that as they grew up uncontaminated by cultural influences the sounds they made might give some clue as to the original human language.

Archeologists and paleoanthropologists now believe they have a clear idea of the origins of language. They tell the story of a group of hominids, recently down from the trees, who found that making a series of grunts send the message "Look out he’s behind you!" improved the group’s chances of survival. The ineluctable force of evolution took over, the size of the hominid cranium expanded rapidly (thereby squeezing the upper jaw which has giving us trouble with our wisdom teeth ever after) and pretty soon homo loquens was eloquently chewing the fat around the fire with his friends.

From these practical beginnings language developed at an explosive rate. The puzzling thing is that this simple device to help tribal security would gave rise, pretty much instantly, to the fully formed apparatus of language — James Joyce, Shakespeare, the Koran, psychobabble, and gangster rap were all suddenly possible with the first hominid chinwag.

That seems to be born out by the fact that there aren’t any intermediate stages in the development of language — all languages appear equally sophisticated. It is said, for example, that the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert have a uniquely sophisticated method of expressing degrees of uncertainty that exactly matches the needs of quantum mechanics. We take a Bushman to the European nuclear research establishment at CERN to investigate.

Diversity is what makes language interesting. The world offers a freak show of languages: people communicate with whistles, shadows on the ground, clicks in the throat. There are languages with no past tenses, languages with no word for yes and no word for no, languages which only men are allowed to speak and languages which no-one is allowed to speak. And as if that wasn’t enough there is a bizarre collection, built up over the centuries, of languages that people have constructed themselves.

Some parts of the globe are blessed with a particular abundance of languages. The archipelago of Vanuatu in the Pacific has a population of 160,000. Between them the inhabitants speak 110 languages — it is the most linguistically divers region in the world. What does it do to the life of the islanders to have a new language every half mile along the road? Fate has singled out Vanuatu in another way: international agreement has given them the internet addresses with the suffix ‘.tv’ Their main source of foreign currency is licensing their internet addresses to US television companies.

Whilst globalisation means that there are languages dying out all around the world, in another sense there has never been so much language. Email, mobile phones, chat rooms and TV soaps: people growing up today live in world of increasing and developing language. The 21st century is the age of chat, language has never been more import ant.

What happened to the two children the Friedrich locked up? The story goes on to say that because they were deprived of language and deprived of love they both died. That tells you how much we need language.

 

Episode 2:

At The Front ‘Ere - Where is Language Going?

"Hare Krisna, Hare Krisna, Krisna, Krisna, Hare, Hare," goes the song. The chant which enriches Oxford Street to this day is one example of an extreme version of one view of language — it relies on the power of the word alone to bring the chanters to spiritual bliss. It would be futile to translate Hare Krishna or to try to paraphrase it in modern English, that would be to miss the point. The chanters believe that the words have a power independent of their meaning.

Human beings seem to need to turn language into something permanent. The first examples of writing we have are the implacable inscriptions that embellish the monuments of long dead rulers. Perhaps the graffiti artists who risk their lives to decorate the concrete walls of Britain’s main railway lines are also accessing this idea.

Language, made apparently immutable by the written word, has long been used to carry the authority religion. Some words are so sacred they cannot be spoken; texts are seen as so much the word of God that they cannot be translated; once written the words cannot be destroyed. In European history translating the bible became inextricably mixed up with political movements of the late middle ages. Behind it all is the feeling that the connection between words and the world must be solid, something more that just convention.

But it is obvious that language itself has a natural tendency to change: even in remote languages only spoken by a few hundred people, ‘Fab’ is replaced by ‘Groovy’ which in turn is replaced by ‘Cool.’ Sometimes change is deliberately engineered: scientists self-consciously pester their colleagues in the classics department to help them find new Greek-derived words. Sometimes it is spontaneous: ‘Doodlebug’ and ‘Grockle’ pop up just in time to express new concepts.

People continue to be shocked by changes. In Japan the conservative older generation is disturbed to hear young women using male grammatical forms (but then, as somebody said, in Japan being rude to your boss is a grammatical mistake). But the most vociferous forces of reaction in he world must surely be Britain’s own Radio Four audience. We talk to some of the people who habitually write in to complain about ‘different from,’ misuse of ‘hopefully’ and other elements of language that bring the Today Programme its largest postbag. But, despite protest, languages still move — in emergencies they can move really quickly.

Nambawan Piccaninny Blong Missus Kween is how the inhabitants of certain Pacific islands refer to the person designated His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales by the inhabitants of Britain. The first phrase is an example of a creole. Creoles are not the result of comical lack of linguistic ability but the rational response to a cataclysmic social change. When slaves of different nationality were transported together from Africa and were obliged to communicate instantly not only with each other but with their anglophone abductors they developed an emergency stopgap: a stripped-down, easy-to-learn amalgam of familiar terms. Creoles have developed all over the globe: in 1066 when the French-speaking Normans invaded Anglo Saxon speaking England the natives had to learn to communicate with the invaders quickly ...... English is a creole.

The philological family tree has now been drawn right back to the original Ma and Pa of all languages. But the important question is not, ‘where has language come from?’ but ‘where is it going?’ Can we predict what is going to happen? Just as Latin split with the fall of the Roman Empire into Spanish, Italian, French, and Rumanian (Latin’s nearest relative) will English split in the same way into American, Australian and English English? As somebody pointed out there are so many people learning English in China that is could be the biggest English speaking country in the world. Or is there some bigger event waiting to change the language map of the world?

 

Episode 3:

De Facto Lingua Franca - Language and Empire

Two cavemen stand grunting in front of their cave. A third joins them and they grunt a greeting. ‘No,’ the newcomer articulates painstakingly, ‘We don’t need to make that noise any more. I have invented language — now we can articulate sounds and communicate more fully.’ The other cavemen look at him blankly then one of them swings a club and knocks him to the ground with a single blow. He watches him fall, turns to his companion and says, ‘Je l’ai tué parce que je déteste les Anglais.’

Language is unavoidably political - it defines and brings together groups of people. It has been used to rally those who felt forgotten and oppressed from Wales and Ireland to East Timor and the former USSR. Rebels and freedom fighters learn and cherish the special language of their own people; exiles go misty eyed at a few words from it; oppressors ban its use. Language is usually close to the idea of nationhood.

Conversely, running a single political unit with many languages always involves effort: in Switzerland and Singapore they manage to do it efficiently, the European Union invests heavily in trying to do it, and the United States may soon have to face up to doing it as the language of States like California and Florida becomes more Spanish than English.

To affirm their identity nations will even reconstruct their languages from the past. The authorities in Greece during the time of the colonels went through a phase of trying to make their language more like its classical ancestor. But the most famous example is the reconstruction of modern Hebrew from the bible. Using the biblical language had some special problems: in the whole of the Hebrew Bible, for instance, there is no occurrence of a word for ‘thirst.’ The makers of modern Hebrew had to invent a word based on the name of the Negev desert.

Groups much smaller than nations also use language to define themselves, to provide cohesion within and exclusion without. For example, you will get nowhere in business if you don’t talk the correct talk. We visit a business meeting and hear talk of "getting your ducks in a row," "synergies of disintermediation" etc. then we translate it in to English, get someone to say it again and see what happens.

Language is the perfect instrument of Empire. In the 16th and 17th centuries the conquerors with their Spanish and Portugese languages spelt the end for thousands of South American languages. In their turn the English-speaking empires have driven small languages to extinction all over the globe. The Chinese and Soviet empires have also done their bit. At the moment there are about six thousand separate languages in the world but their number is decreasing every year. Will all languages one day be superceded by a single global lingua franca? Would this be a good thing? What would it be like if the whole world was, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, separated by a common language?

We should be as concerned about the loss of languages as we are about the loss of animal species. Like an extinct animal, an extinct language which exists only as incomprehensible signs on a wall or as half memories of the way granny used to speak, produces a forceful sense of loss. Each language gives us its own unique way of seeing the world, any one of them might produce a valuable insight; it might even give us a way to escape from the traps and tricks that language sets for us...

 

Episode 4:

Whereof One Cannot Speak .. - The Limits of Language

In Tom Stoppard’s play Professional Foul a French and an English philosopher argue drunkenly in a bar. While the Frenchman is giving a full explanation in French of the fine points of semiotics the Englishman keeps interrupting him insisting, "I want to know what you mean, not what you want to say." No amount of explanation in French will ever satisfy the English philosopher because there is no French word which adequately translates the word "to mean." Some people have suggested that whole schools of structuralist, post-structuralist, and semiological thought have been brought into being by that simple deficiency.

Does the language we speak affect the way we think? Do individual languages impose particular thoughts on their speakers? What, for example, does it say about the ancient Greek attitude to relationships that they actually had a special pronoun for addressing a couple or speaking as a couple (I love, thou lovest, he loves, we two love, those two love etc ...). Does it make French sexual politics different from English that they don’t have a word for to rape (they just say to violate)? Do different languages have a different ‘feel’ to them? If the answer to these questions is yes then we might well ask what are the peculiarities of thought to which our own language constrains us.

In a country where gangs of righteous citizens hunt down pediatricians to punish them for their unspeakable crimes, it might be worth asking whether language doesn’t in fact cause as many problems as it solves. There is some evidence for this: during the cold war the Pentagon organised war games where teams role-played countries negotiating with each other on the world stage. Games almost always ended in all-out global conflict until someone tried limiting the amount of communication between the countries. It worked — the less communication there was between the gaming countries the less they resorted to war. It is much easier to tolerate someone you don’t have to speak to.

Philosophers and psychologists still debate whether thought is even possible without language. Many believe that it is not, but then their debate is conducted through the medium of language. Dr. Temple Grandin would argue that some thoughts can only be expressed without language. She has made a very successful career even though she was diagnosed early on as autistic. She designs buildings for handling livestock and she claims that the secret of her success is that she doesn’t think in words. She is able to imagine directly how the cattle see the building and therefore how they will react even before it is built. Her buildings do not make cattle panic. She has saved the American meat industry millions.

Many of the worthwhile parts of our personal experience seem to reside in that hard to reach area just outside the limits of language. The eccentric Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that true understanding could only be achieved without words — language was like a ladder that had to be pulled up after you. The medium of television itself is an example of something which is not dependent on language: conflicts frequently arise in the cutting room between those who see a programme as a film with words and those who see it as a commentary with pictures. One exasperated programme maker tells his assistants "Every time you write a paragraph of commentary an angel dies."

But language has a history of moving its boundaries so as to include the areas that were once outside its grasp. There was a time when there was no word for psychology, there were no homosexuals (or gays), people didn’t discuss their relationships or speculate about their own and others unconscious desires. They weren’t possible until language included them. This is the age of chat, of the mobile phone and the text message. Language has many more changes to come.


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