The map and the memory: The enduring tension between standardized language and the vernacular

“ In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing political and social questions. “Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,” this is what has remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe; and in America comparative philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the unhallowed theory of slavery. ”

“ The relative positions of the families and the relative size of the areas occupied by them, however, and not their exact boundaries, are the chief concern in a linguistic map, and for the purpose of establishing these, and, in a rough way, the boundaries of the territory held by the tribes composing them, these data are very important, and when compared with one another and corrected by more definite data, when such are at hand, they have usually been found to be sufficient for the purpose. ”

“ You may have observed that I always took it for granted that the science of language, which is best known in this country by the name of comparative philology, is one of the physical sciences, and that therefore its method ought to be the same as that which has been followed with so much success in botany, geology, anatomy, and other branches of the study of nature. ”

“ Their language is the memory of the language they hear spoken in their homes. Countless repetition of the conversation of daily life has impressed certain words and phrases upon their memories, and when they come to talk themselves, memory supplies the words they lisp. Likewise, the language of educated people is the memory of the language of books.
Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. At first my little pupil's mind was all but vacant. She had been living in a world she could not realize. LANGUAGE and KNOWLEDGE are indissolubly connected; they are interdependent. ”

“ This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for the notorious failure of our schools to turn out students who can put their ideas into words with simplicity and intelligibility. What their professors try to teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands quite outside their common experience, and into which they have to translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. Bad writing consists in making the attempt, and failing through lack of practise. ”

“ Avenue is used in England, but only rather sparingly; it is seldom applied to a mean street, or to one in a warehouse district. In America the word is scarcely distinguished in meaning from street. [3] Boulevard, drive and speed-way are almost unknown to the English, but they use road for urban thoroughfares, which is very seldom done in America, and they also make free use of place, walk, passage, lane and circus, all of which are obsolescent on this side of the ocean. ”

“ The American custom of numbering and lettering streets is almost always ascribed by English writers who discuss it, not to a desire to make finding them easy, but to sheer poverty of invention. The English apparently have an inexhaustible fund of names for streets; they often give one street more than one name. Thus, Oxford street, London, becomes the Bayswater road, High street, Holland Park avenue, Goldhawke road and finally the Oxford road to the westward, and High Holborn, Holborn viaduct, Newgate street, Cheapside, the Poultry, Cornhill and Leadenhall street to the eastward. ”

“ No attempt to deduce the principles of American grammar, or even of American syntax, from the everyday speech of decently spoken Americans has ever been made. There is no scientific study, general and comprehensive in scope, of the American vocabulary, or of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation. No American philologist, so far as I know, has ever deigned to give the same sober attention to the sermo plebeius of his country that he habitually gives to the mythical objective case in theoretical English, or to the pronunciation of Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French. ”

“ Until its collections are completed and synchronized, it will be impossible for its members to make any profitable inquiry into the general laws underlying the development of American, or even to attempt a classification of the materials common to the whole speech. The meagreness of the materials accumulated in the five slow-moving volumes of Dialect Notes shows clearly, indeed, how little the American philologist, is in– terested in the language that falls upon his ears every hour of the day. ”

“ A small section of the city bounded by Sixth and Eighth Avenues North and Twentieth and Twenty-third Streets North is a Scandinavian community designated locally as "Little Norway." Here Norwegian is spoken almost exclusively by the older people, although the children have acquired American speech and habits. Norwegian Independence Day, Syttende Mai (May 17) , is celebrated by the residents of this district and their homes are then decorated with Norwegian flags. Much political activity of an earlier period centered about this little community, since it generally voted as a bloc. ”

“ The lesson that was enforced in passing from the large parish plan to the county map, and from the county map to the general wall-map of the country, may now again be dwelt upon in advancing from the wall-map to the globe. And thus, by a continuous chain of illustration, the minds of the learners are led upward and outward from their school surroundings to realize the shape and dimensions of the earth. ”

“ Comparative vocabularies of the Indian tribes of British Columbia, with a map illustrating distribution (Geological and Natural History Survey of Canada) . Montreal, 1884.
The vocabularies presented constitute an important contribution to linguistic science. They represent “one or more dialects of every Indian language spoken on the Pacific slope from the Columbia River north to the Tshilkat River, and beyond, in Alaska; and from the outermost sea-board to the main continental divide in the Rocky Mountains.” A colored map shows the area occupied by each linguistic family. ”

“ Within four weeks of the submission, the House of Representatives (Nationalrat) must either vote a corresponding federal law in place of the ordinance or pass a resolution demanding that the ordinance immediately become invalidated. In the latter case the Federal Government must immediately meet this demand. In order that the resolution of the House of Representatives (Nationalrat) may be adopted in time, the President shall at the latest submit the motion to the vote on the last day but one before expiry of the four weeks deadline; detailed provisions shall be made in the Standing Orders. ”

“ The limitation period for a person to request the people’s court to protect his civil-law rights is three years, unless otherwise provided by law. Unless otherwise provided by law, the limitation period begins from the date when the right holder knows or should have known that his right has been harmed and that who is the obligor. However, no protection to a right is to be granted by the people’s court if 20 years have lapsed since the date when the injury occurs, except that the people’s court may, upon request of the right holder, extend the limitation period under special circumstances. ”

“ The classical scholar who is as yet unacquainted with modern Greek will find, in the pages of an ordinary periodical or newspaper, specimens of the conventional literary language, which he can read with ease side by side with poems or even prose in the vernacular which he will be altogether unable to interpret. ”

“ Those who have wondered at the sterile results of Vernacular education in those countries will, perhaps, not be surprised when they realize the handicap imposed by a traditional written idiom which is no longer the spoken language of the country. ”

“ Uniformity is no virtue unless it is accompanied by ease in acquisition. Sanskrit is uniform in the whole of India, but like literary Telugu it has to be acquired with great effort. The vernacular on the other hand, is acquired naturally.
214. Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu opines that if Modern Telugu is cultivated, it will acquire fixity and deviate from speech. He quotes Lounsbury to show that the changes in English during the last five hundred years were ‘insignificant’. Why should then the language of a conversative oriental people like the Telugus change more? ”

“ In the next place, consider the language that their themes are made in: 'tis Latin, a language foreign in their country, and long since dead every where: a language which your son, 'tis a thousand to one, shall never have an occasion once to make a speech in as long as he lives after he comes to be a man; and a language wherein the manner of expressing one's self is so far different from ours, that to be perfect in that would very little improve the purity and facility of his English stile. ”

“ And if it is necessary for them to learn so many English words, of course the most difficult, by reason of having nothing in their language to explain them, why not learn the other half, easy to be learned, because they have corresponding words in their own language that will explain them, & then they are introduced at once into an inexhausible fountain of religious & scientific reading. ”

“ We shall be in great want of books for teaching the English language We think it all important to acquire the native language & reduce it to writing & teach it but probably it will never be desirable to print it but only teach it to instruct & interest the parents. ”

“ Again, it is only from the annals of political history that we can learn whether one language has come in contact with another, how long this contact has lasted, which of the two nations stood higher in civilization, which was the conquering and which the conquered, which of the two established the laws, the religion, and the arts of the country, and which produced the greatest number of national teachers, popular poets, and successful demagogues. ”

“ The periods in the growth of language, on the contrary, begin and run parallel with the history of man. It has been said, therefore, that although language may not be merely a work of art, it would, nevertheless, be impossible to understand the life and growth of any language without an historical knowledge of the times in which that language grew up. We ought to know, it is said, whether a language which is to be analyzed under the microscope of comparative grammar, has been growing up wild, among wild tribes, without a literature, oral or written, in poetry or in prose ”

“ I have tried to write of the life I know, the life I have lived, and of the lives of the people whom, above all others, I love, and of whom I am so proud.
My people have been miners for generations, and I myself became a miner at the age of twelve. I have worked since then in the mine at every phase of coal getting until about five years ago, when my fellow workers made me their checkweigher. ”

“ Because the settlement has dwindled in recent years, many native customs have disappeared, although a few of the older people retain a superstitious belief in witchcraft, and there are five or six saunas, or steam baths, in which water is poured on hot stones in a tightly closed shelter. At butchering time each autumn, rye and wheat flour are hulled, ground oats are mixed with the blood of beeves, and baked in round, thin rings similar to doughnuts. ”

“ But it is among our provincial dialects that we discover many beautiful archaisms, scattered remnants of our language, which explain those obscurities of our more ancient writers, singularities of phrase, or lingual peculiarities, which have so often bewildered the most acute of our commentators. ”

“ Class dialects, too, would spring up; the dialects of servants, grooms, shepherds, and soldiers. Women would have their own household words; and the rising generation would not be long without a more racy phraseology of their own. Even we, in this literary age, and at a distance of thousands of years from those early fathers of language, do not speak at home as we speak in public. ”

“ Remove a language from its native soil, tear it away from the dialects which are its feeders, and you arrest at once its natural growth. There will still be the progress of phonetic corruption, but no longer the restoring influence of dialectic regeneration. The language which the Norwegian refugees brought to [pg 071] Iceland has remained almost the same for seven centuries, whereas on its native soil, and surrounded by local dialects, it has grown into two distinct languages, the Swedish and Danish. ”

“ The Cayuse originally spoke a distinct language from the Nez perces but have so long intermarried that Nez perces is spoken by all & the younger ones do not understand Cayuse at all. The Walla Wallas also are to a great extent able to speak Nez perces Several have been with us during the winter & spring & many express a wish to come next year & cultivate land. We shall not have access to as many Indians at first as Brother Spalding but in the end I think as many will be benefited by this station as that. ”

“ I'm not a scientist, Dr. Brill. Maybe I'm not even a very smart guy and maybe I'm just as glad of it, because my feet are on the ground and I know where I want them to go. Sure, this psi stuff could be big, mighty big. Our kids could go a long way with it. I can see that. But I'm a man, not a guinea pig. I happen to go for the woman they teamed me up with, and she feels the same way about me. That's true of most of the folks here. But we're not breeding kids for someone else. We'd rather run our own show. Guess you professors have been away from ordinary people too long to realize that. ”

“ Local memory is the ability to retain and recall isolated and non-associated facts. The vast mass of early facts accumulated in memory's store-house rests upon this emotional principle. As the years increase and the mind matures, other principles become purveyors for that store-house. The laws of classification and association become in after years the efficient agencies of the cultivated mind to furnish the data for reflection and generalization. ”

“ But in these times, when there is such a passion to become familiar with many languages, there is a corresponding neglect of the vernacular, and no end of crude, incompetent writing is the result. We are told perpetually that perfection in English is to be achieved through familiarity with the ancient classical models; or, in other words, to get the completest command of our own speech, it is necessary first to know the Greek and Latin languages. ”

“ But in reading, as in listening, the phrase presents itself, as a whole, to the mind; rules which coordinate the composition have no force until its parts are understood. It is, in fact, by language that we comprehend the grammar, not by grammar that we comprehend language. ”

“ It is the grammar and the dictionary which form the subject of his inquiries. These he consults and subjects to a careful analysis, but he does not encumber his memory with paradigms of nouns and verbs, or with long lists of words which have never been used in any work of literature. It is true, no doubt, that no language will unveil the whole of its wonderful structure except to the scholar who has studied it thoroughly and critically in a number of literary works representing the various periods of its growth. ”

“ No one who has once discovered this hidden life of language, no one who has once found out that what seemed to be merely anomalous and whimsical in language is but, as it were, a petrification of thought, of deep, curious, poetical, philosophical thought, will ever rest again till he has descended as far as he can descend into the ancient shafts of human speech, exploring level after level, and testing every successive foundation which supports the surface of each spoken language. ”