Wednesday 14 June 2006

Pic of the day: We're not in Kansas anymore... but everyone still understands us. How nice.

Language as IQ test

When I moved out from my home at the age of 15, it was to go to high school. At the time, high school was not compulsory in Norway, and sparsely populated districts such as ours did not have one. Those who wanted higher education left, leaving the farmers and factory workers to do their thing with only primary school. You can imagine what kind of society this would create over time. Luckily all municipalities are now required to have a high school. On the other hand, the high school is not nearly as high as it used to be. Back then, there was less stupidity in high school than now. Not that we missed it, there was plenty as it was.

High school had different "lines", back then. They are now called "directions of study", I think. The school I came to had two: Maths and Language. I opted for Language, since I already had better grades in those. I did not know that this was where most of the girls ended up as well, but it would probably not have changed my decision...

English had recently become the main language of the Language line. Before, it had been Latin, and it had sensibly been called the Latin line. One of our teachers still resented this, but the English teacher did not. Remember, this was in Norway, and English is not our primary language. We already have two Norwegian languages, one mainly based on the west coast dialects and one a compromise between written Danish and the cultivated speech of the cities. Writing the minority native language, Nynorsk (New Norwegian), I had been exposed to the competing version from early childhood. So English was actually my third language. I had also learned a little German, which we now had more of. I disliked it, of course. In high school we also learned some French, but not much. We had fewer hours, and our teacher was very old and heavily into the bottle, not to mention hard of hearing.

***

This is all nearly 30 years ago. Since then, English has spread like a wildfire here in Norway. Stock phrases are known by pretty much everyone, and children understand a good deal of English before they start school, since TV films are usually subtexted rather than dubbed. The children pick up the meaning from the context just like they do with their mother tongue. And of course they learn it earlier in school than we do. But even adults tend to pick up more English now. In the book kiosks, English books and Magazines are nearly as common as Norwegian, and far more than Swedish and Danish, which are largely understandable with no extra education, just take a little time.

Doctors, veterinarians and odontologists still need to know their Latin nomenclature. But I doubt they would be able to read De Bello Gallico, much less write anything interesting in that language. You will rarely impress anyone by speaking Latin these days. But you will un-impress people by not knowing English.

This may seem strange to those of my readers who have English as their first language. Stupid people seem abundant. But if a Norwegian writes in English for Norwegians, he will filter out a lot of stupid people without even trying. He will also filter out a lot of old people, but most old people are stupid too, more's the pity. Conversely if we write in Norwegian, we will attract those who are left when the English-writers shook them off.

Watching some Norwegian blogs is a sad sight indeed. Not because they are bad, this varies. But because the comments show a very high swine to pearl ratio.

(Speaking of Norwegian blogs, I just have to (again, I hope) recommend my old online friend Bjørn Stærk. Imagine if I wrote much less often, but still included my best gray entries. Now put this in a more standard blog format (which, to my defense, was not invented when I started the Chaos Node). You might end up with something similar to bearstrong.net, although he seems to have more human warmth and genuine feeling than I. On the other hand, you don't get under his skin in the same way. He is just a voice that shouts in the desert. Still, highly recommended.)

***

Back to languages. I have written in the past about the irony of holy languages: Until recently, Catholics had their mass in Latin. But the early church, in the actual Roman empire, had Greek as its holy language, and the New Testament was written in it. But actually Jesus spoke Aramaic, and the Jews at his time (and later) had Hebrew as their holy language, a language closely related to Aramaic but noticeably different. It is uncertain how long the notion of holy languages has existed, but a likely hypothesis would be from the invention of writing. Once spoken language developed to the point where it was different from the old written texts, the old language would be revered. The notion may have begun even earlier though. One of the most recent cultures to develop an alphabet on their own (rather than getting it from missionaries) was the pre-Viking northern Germanic cultures, who invented the runes seemingly inspired by the Greek alphabet, but without any direct similarity in the actual letters. This all happened so recently (perhaps 1500 years ago) that we know how the early runes were used. They were seen as divine, magical and powerful.

English is certainly not seen as divine, magical and powerful among modern Scandinavians. But it still holds some degree of status. I propose that this is because it takes time, hard work or intelligence to learn a completely foreign language. Those who don't have these resources are automatically lower on the pecking order. In the same way as Latin, but less elitist, it separates the wheat from the chaff. There's just so much more wheat these days. Perhaps too much. So instead of Latin we get jargon, where the elite speak casually about quadrants and memes, postmodernism and deconstruction, self-actualization and transpersonal consciousness.

Sometimes it seems to me that the transpersonalists with their polysyllabic jargon are trying to say much of the same that my old pious friends explained with obscure Bible quotes in outdated Danish translation. Perhaps the evolution of the mind isn't going quite as fast as we hope...