h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

just as well he told us, I'd never have known

The most disgusting thing I encountered along those lines was at the time of the first Gulf War, or shortly after. Someone gave my young daughters a popular American magazine for children (it might have been "Sesame Street", I can't quite remember). There was a parents' section in the front, and there were plenty of letters from readers praising an article for kids the magazine had run about "Mommy and/or Daddy going off to war". One woman wrote (forgive me for not being able to quote this 100 percent after more than 20 years): "Great article, thank you very much. Of course, children in various parts of the world have been affected by this war, but none as much as the children of our American soldiers whose parents went over there to fight."

Excuse me, lady? What about the children in Baghdad who had bombs fall on their heads, losing family, limbs, or even their lives? What about children in Israel who had to wear gas masks to bed for months? Those childrens obviously didn't count because they weren't American. Or was being right in the center of a war just a mild inconvenience compared to the plight of an American child whose parent just went abroad for a little while?

The most shocking part was that the magazine printed the letter and left it uncommented.

Yarreau

Your post reminds me of the Second Gulf War when I was in France during the fighting. I was following the BBC World Service with its reporters embedded with British and American troops, and also French Radio which had its reporters embedded with the Iraqi civillian. As the post that started this off said "Some people live in a different world".

Cass

Welcome to Cass's journal Yarreau - it's a good place to meet people.

Yes...Sorry KB.. I think we have been here before-with me failing to observe protocol over Journal ownership...

It is in no small part because I live in a different world, one very much shaped by the whole sweep of world history and which is "racist" in the older and longer-established sense, which is not inappropriate to a thread that started with floods..The most helpful and useful meaning of the word "race" refers to a forward dynamic, commonly found in the action of water, but as in "The English Race" applied in the same way to a strong current leading from the Past into the Future to which any and every person who wishes can marry into and join their efforts in with everyone else.. The Biological application of Race was a total denial of this capacity of Humankind to shape its destiny and its future as in the ancient idea that we are all descendents of Adam and Eve.

Cass

I've no idea what's going on either. My sympathies and condolences to those who have lost loved ones in the floods.

However, as for the French improving things by dubbing - Just three words from me: "The Magic Roundabout".

I want the story of this Roundabout business. Please.

As you well know, poor Mark Twain didn't have the advantage of machine translation, but he did his best. As you might not have known, he was fluent in German, but on a war footing with the French tongue.

Here's a link to his erudite 1903 tome, 'The Jumping Frog: In English, then in French, the clawed back into a civilized language once more by patient, unremunerated toil.':

http://archive.org/stream/jumpingfroginen00twaigoog#page/n8/mode/2up

I'm going to steal those illustrations for , just see if I don't.

Read the introduction. Twain says, 'Even a criminal is entitled to fair play,' and then proceeds to complain about the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' and what it did to his short story.

If you want to read Twain's Babelfish version, it starts on page 40.

I'm sorry, KB. This has nothing to do with flooding, unless you include the frog. But I thought y'all might enjoy it.

The Mark Twain business just emphasis the point I was making, for it throws up the vital difference between the English and French approach, as represented in their respective languages.

Dr. Johnson, who is credited with the first English dictionary, was congratulated that he had done in c3 years what it had taken a whole team of the Academie Francaise c27 years to achieve. Johnson quipped that a ratio (that he worked out) of one to 700 as between the competence of an Englishman and a Frenchman was just about right.

But in his dictionary Johnson merely exploited his incredible knowledge of written and spoken English, as the language of the English people and produced a compendium of existing usage. So, when Boswell suggested that a second edition might have a guide to correct pronunciation, Johnson said that there was no correct pronunciation in English. He instanced the fact that the greatest orator in the House of Lords and the greatest orator in the House of Commons pronounced the word "though" in totally different ways, and yet English people could understand both perfectly well. The point of English speech is to be able to inter-act with other people (which comes back to my Freedom of Speech theme).

Since the Eighteenth Century Johnson's English philosophy has allowed English to become the major world language (if one discounts the huge mass of Chinese people stuck in China and just beginning to get out into the world)..

But the work of the Academie Francaise was intended to define French as it should be according to the ruling elite, and even at the Revolution the National Schools took up this idea of forcing "educated and refined language" on the populous.. The burden is thus on the French people to understand what French officialdom has to say, rather than a burden on French officialdom to be able to really speak to the people in a way that they will understand.

And of course most British people try to learn "correct French", just as my wife and her father tried to learn "correct English". And it is why, in spite of encouragement from many French people, I have never really been able to get around the lyrics of Georges Brassens. My French is not sufficiently "popular" and I just do not get the "vulgar" jokes and inuendoes that make Brassens so popular.

Mark Twain was something of a Georges Brassens figure in US literature.

Cass

You're also, apparently, discounting Spanish as a world tongue. I believe it's still the most widely spoken language, even if Chinese has more speakers and English more second-language learners.



I seriously doubt that the difference in relative power status between the French and English languages has anything to do with the linguistic styles of their lexicographers. Most English speakers too have the idea of a "perfect tongue" handed down from above, even if that idea is lacking from the rarefied air of the offices of the OED. That's the sort of prejudice that has to be forced out of you when you begin to study linguistics.

TRiG.

Amen, TRiG. And well spoke, says this philologist.

Trig

This definition of "widely spoken" I supect as being based upon simple numbers of people speaking it officially and simple calculations of surface area; and given that English is the common language of India I am not sure about Spanish..or it greater role than English in actually making the world tick as a world.

When I opted for a course in Latin American History in the mid-1960s our Lecturer was sure that Latin America would become a place of central world importance over the next half-century- and thus all its speakers of Spanish and Portuguese assume a central importance in World affairs. This prediction has not come true and events in Spanish and Portuguese speaking Latin America have rarely been "Headline News" or really at the heart of global dynamics. In fact every so often I feel perhaps I should go back to my notes and re-learn the history of the region from 1500-1960s. But why bother? No one else seems to.

As for English speakers having the idea of a perfect tongue, that is not something that I recognize from most of English history.

It is true, however, that during the late Nineteenth Century (1860s), when French/German type statism did seem to be "the way ahead", the educational revolution in England and Wales (Scotland had had its own in the very early Eighteenth Century) did introduce this strange idea that English people should be taught English. But it was the new "book English", the new English of Middle Class power- that replaced the less effective and inefficient English of the old ruling elite. But this was essentially only for the "Meritocratic elite", and Dickens, for example, accepted the rich variety of local dialects within normal life. When Elementary education for all was finally introduced ordinary children were taught how to converse as the future "Masters" with those who would weild the actual power.

In a very powerful study of German culture since 1793 entitle "The Disinherited Mind" Eric Heller described how a tradition of oral language that still found a final expression in the poetry of Goethe gave way to a "Prosaic Age", when language was dominated by "book speak" and the consequent dehumanisation of thought. Matthew Arnold saw the crucial significance and expressed it in his poem "Goethe in Weimar sleeps", in which he saw the death of Goethe, following those of Byron and Wordsworth left a dangerous legacy that would be devoid of that gift of poetry to convey an essential truth that could touch every soul.

Prosaic language is sledge-hammer language, and I suppose I have had to adopt it in order to fight back against the inheritance of this my age of "The Disinherited Mind" in which the "Establishment" tell us "trust us I am a doctor" etc.. "Let us do your thinking for you. We will tell you what is going on, and what you should think and feel about it."

With Wireless Broadcasting "BBC English" was a form of Prosaic and formal language that could be be sent into every home, equipping people within the "Empire on which the Sun Never Set" to actually converse with each other- as their rulers wished.

Nevertheless this new Middle-Class English was better equipped for the Prosaic Age than most. Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian writer, was asked why he wrote in English rather than either of his other two languages- Russian and French. He explained that English was much better equipped to deal with real life and was a living language not cluttered up with complications and formulae like the other two. In English it was possible to just "tell it like it is".

And of course Nabokov was writing at a time of liberation from ideas of White Supremacy and the White Man's Burden to rule the world ideally in text-book English. The anti-Imperialist struggle meant that we heard many leading figures speaking second language English or versions of English that stressed regional rather than national identity..Though what was immediately striking to everyone from his first appearance on TV as a young Alabama Pastor, was that Martin Luther King had a full command of the language of power from his graduate and post-graduate studies. But he could also preach to a Southern Baptist congregation in their poetic language of imagery and soul.

I was thinking after I wrote before of the role of Paris, about its possible impact on James Joyce, whose Ulysses I can only understand as a kind of journey, the Odyssey of an author in search of his own true voice, inspired by this varied input to which he had been exposed. Was it W.B. Yeates who had really pioneered the Irish revival? I have to say I find Ulysses difficult because the message seems to be in the medium. The quest for an Irish writer to find his own language in between the Poetic and the Prosaic. It is a real 'tour de force'- a 'tour of the world' of English, but I find it personally a verbal equivalent of musical virtuosity when we are just suppose to admire and marvel at the ability to produce "such stuff". But to what purpose?

Interestingly this year I have seen lots of attention in France on he writing of Ferdinand Celine, of a similar period to Joyce. An author who is described as just chewing up all existing French styles and vomiting out his own sickening view of the Twentieth Century. It is now suggested that he should be rated as the greatest French author of the Twentieth Century, anticipating the "merde" that the world would be in up to its necks before things get better.

I suppose this could bring me back to severe floods because they often mean sewage bursting out all over.

Cass