12 May 1998, 2211 words
"It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words....A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that 'equal' had once a secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that 'free' had once meant 'intellectually free'....There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable."
Nineteen Eighty-Four- George Orwell
The idea that words have some transcendental power is probably as old as language itself. In foraging societies, people often have a secret name which, if learned by another, they believe gives that person power over them. Priestly castes preserve power at least partly through a special language, which explains the long retention of Latin in Mass by the Catholic Church. Technocrats do the same thing. Plato also believed that all nouns represented perfect Forms which existed on some Heavenly plane.
Unfortunately, even in modern Western societies, intellectuals still get distracted by these superstitions about language. It is a bad sign when this happens, because such distraction can lead to a concentration on trivial shadows when there are matters of substance to be dealt with.
Last year, the novelist Ian McDonald received an honorary degree from the University of the West Indies. In his address to the graduates, McDonald asserted that, "Independence of thought requires honesty of opinion and clarity of expression. The three go absolutely together." In the April issue of the T&T Review, Lloyd Best expressed his disturbance about McDonald's assertion, asking, "How, ex ante, do we set about achieving that delightful convergence in the language of another? And with what complications? At what personal price?"
Best's questions, in turn, disturb me, because they seem quite beside the point. And the point is that we have real issues to tackle, and while attitude is certainly one of those issues, language is in this respect an effect, not a cause. To think otherwise is to begin tackling a problem from the wrong end.
Consider Best's phrase about the "language of another." The assumption here seems to be that English is somehow a fundamentally different language from the Trinidadian dialect. That might be so if there were some universally accepted English standard, but I don't think even the BBC would be so bold to claim that nowadays. But even this is not the crucial issue: the crucial issue here is that no language ever studied is fundamentally different from any other. Language may influence thought, but not as much as priests, politicians and philosophers would like to believe. And, that being so, the issue of convergence of clarity of expression, honesty of opinion and independence of thought becomes moot. Trinidadianese is quite as adequate as standard English for this task.
The evidence for this comes from a relatively new concept in linguistics called "mentalese." I say new, but Leibniz actually suggested the possibility of "a kind of alphabet of human thoughts" three centuries ago. He was on the right track because, by studying languages comparatively, 20th-century linguists have found that location in space and force are two fundamental metaphors of all languages. According to Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works, "a handful of concepts about places, paths, motion, agency and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words in English and every other language that has ever been studied...Mentalese is the mind's lingua franca, the traffic of information among the mind's mental modules that allows us to describe what we see, imagine what is described to us, carry out instructions and so on."
In other words, the issue of dialect somehow constraining our thoughts simply does not arise, unless the Trinidadian brain is somehow biologically different from that of a speaker of standard English.
Best raises the following question: "How is what we know about ourselves affected by what we utter- and how we utter it, our choice of idiom?" The answer is, in no way at all. One reason for this is that the relationship between words and meanings in all languages is entirely arbitrary. The grammarians Anna Maria Si Sciullo and Edwin Williams coined the term "listeme," the unit of a memorized list, to refer to the sense of "word." The term combines "morpheme," the unit of morphology, and "phoneme," the unit of sound. So a "word", as they define it, becomes more than a "syntactic atom", which is its usual definition.
In respect to idioms, Pinker in another of his books, The Language Instinct, notes, "There is no way to predict the meaning of kick the bucket, buy the farm, spill the beans, bite the bullet, screw the pooch, give up the ghost, hit the fan, or go bananas from the meanings of their components using the usual rules of heads and role-players....The meanings of these phrase-sized units have to be memorized as listemes, just as if they were simple word-sized units, and so they are really 'words' in this second sense."
He also makes the telling point that, "The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications....[But] think about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have the feeling, there has to be a 'what we mean to say' that is different from 'what we said.'"
Now all this is not to say that words do not influence thought to some extent. Marvin Minsky, author of the seminal work The Society of Mind, says, "If we're to understand how language works, we must discard the usual view that words 'denote' or 'represent' or 'designate'; instead, their function is to 'control'...Once we assume language and thought are separate, we're lost in trying to piece together what was never separate in the first place." This might seem to contradict Pinker's view, but only partially, for Minsky also asserts that "Words themselves can't be the substance of our thoughts. They have no meaning by themselves...we must never forget that thinking-in-words reveals only a fragment of the mind's activity."
The crucial point, though, is that all languages are adequate languages, save pidgins. Pidgins are formed when speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity or desire to learn each other's languages. But even pidgins become full-fledged languages after one generation, which is the strongest evidence of the existence of Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Indeed, the linguist Derek Bickerton has presented evidence that in many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full language instantly, once a group of children is exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue. The children create grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a new and quite expressive language, which is called a creole. Thus, even Newspeak could never have the effects its totalitarian creators want, for it would be changed into a fully competent creole by children.
These points, I hope, provide adequate proof that Trinidadianese is in no way an inferior language and, indeed, that such an animal does not exist. But I needn't even quote expert opinions to prove my assertion: just walk into any rumshop or market anywhere on the island - you will find Trinidadians of all kinds expressing themselves adequately, and even eloquently.
To read some of our intellectuals on language use, though, you'd think that Trinidadians were all turning into retarded Trappist monks. The columnist and poet Wayne Brown continually suggests that an inability to match verb and noun or use "will" and "would" correctly are clear signs of cultural and mental degeneration. And even those persons who are experts in Caribbean creoles hold similar views: linguistics lecturer Denis Solomon has actually suggested that Trinidadian dialect may be reverting to a pidgin, a phenomenon which, as far as I'm aware, has never happened anywhere on the planet.
In any case, I doubt that such monumental consequences can flow from such trivial instances as noted by Brown and Solomon. As far as intellectual deterioration goes, there are crucial differences between the written and the spoken word - a growing number of errors in the former may reflect flaws in the education system, without necessarily reflecting deterioration in thinking. And, even in this respect, one linguist has compiled a list showing that by far the greatest number of grammatical errors occur in learned academic proceedings rather than in ordinary conversation. What really lies behind these assertions is a kind of intellectual snobbery: in Brown's case, a paranoiac contempt for the Trinidadian society; in Solomon's, a liking for arcaneness which is common among professional academics in every field.
Now this kind of thing is not good for our society, especially at a time when the persons using language most forcefully are politicians, who apparently believe that language was invented in order to contradict facts. "When you tell lies/Language dies" writes the St. Lucian poet Jane King and, if this is so, language in Trinidad must be in intensive care already. The blatant lies told by politicians, particularly by UNC spokespersons, leave one breathless both for sheer effrontery and sheer stupidity. Yet, contrary to popular belief, language does not lend itself easily to lies. Where people believe untruths, it is often because they are motivated to believe untruths, whereas disinterested observers can usually see through duplicity just by analyzing the form in which assertions are couched. This may be one reason why public opinion polls showed a majority of Trinidadians believed Barbadian Minister Owen Arthur over Trinidadian Prime Minister Basdeo Panday in respect to the Julian Rogers work permit issue, even before Panday belatedly admitted he had in fact been "mistaken" about Arthur raising the matter.
In this issue of effective language use, intellectuals have a crucial role to play. Academics like Dennis Pantin, Selwyn Ryan and Denis Solomon perform an important task because they use a popular medium - newspapers - and write in a logical manner backed up by evidence. Solomon's precise and analytical prose style alone is a powerful prophylactic to the hysterical tone favoured by political hacks and Chamber of Commerce demagogues. The thing is, though, that intellectuals do not generally enjoy great respect in the English-speaking Caribbean, but this is mostly their own fault. In fact, I am not all sure that intellectuals should enjoy great respect: in societies where this has been the norm, political extremes are often the result. Even so, it is precisely in the political arena that intellectuals need to make their voices heard, but this won't happen as long as they favour jargon over clear discourse.
Unfortunately, jargon is the stock-in-trade of most academics. Their liking for obscure and convoluted language is really rooted in mental laziness (it takes much more effort to express oneself clearly than in jargon) and intellectual cowardice (it is harder to be criticized if people don't understand you.) Obscurity also has two negative consequences: it encourages unclear thinking and it automatically creates a gulf between experts and laypersons, even when such laypersons are educated and intelligent.
This last is especially pernicious. The Government doesn't worry about the opinions of the T&T Review or V.S. Naipaul or Earl Lovelace, but it is scared stiff about what Sugar Aloes might sing at Dimanche Gras next year. Indeed, so widespread is the contempt for intellectuals among our politicians than even our most popular poet/calypsonians - Rudder and Shadow - always escape political censure.
The critic and novelist Arnold Bennett once opined that "the democratization of art...is surely the duty of the minority to undertake." I would argue that the same holds true, and is even more important, in respect to the democratization of academic culture. But the only society where this seems to be happening is the United States, where books by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker become bestsellers. Everywhere else, academics are generally content to remain within their safe little ivory towers.
We cannot hope to repeat such successes here, even on a smaller scale, nor indeed should we want to. Yet Trinidad is a reading culture: it is just that we read newspapers rather than books. But this need not be a constraint. In Japan, they read comic-books, so the Japanese have turned manga into high art, educational texts, as well as pornography. Here, the democratization of intellectualism can be developed through the forms our culture already favours: newspapers, periodicals, calypsos, talkshows, plays, stand-up comedy and so on. But, no matter what avenue we use, McDonald's exhortation - "use good, clear, straightforward English" - remains good advice, even if what we speak and write is not really English.
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh