The Mother Tongue (18 page)

With all their grammatical intricacies and deviations from standard vocabulary, dialects can sometimes become almost like separate languages. Indeed, a case is sometimes made that certain varieties
are
separate languages. A leading contender in this category is Scots, the variety of English used in the Lowlands of Scotland (and not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, which really
is
a separate language). As evidence, its supporters point out that it has its own dictionary,
The Concise Scots Dictionary,
as well as its own body of literature, most notably the poems of Robert Burns, and it is full of words that would leave most other English speakers darkly baffled:
swithering
for hesitating,
shuggle
for shake,
niffle-naffle
for wasting time,
gontrum niddles
for a cry of joy, and countless others. Although Scots, or Lallans as it is sometimes also called, is clearly based on English, it is often all but incomprehensible to other English speakers. A few lines from Burns's poem
To a Haggis
may give some idea of its majestic unfathomability:

Fair fa' your honest sonsie face,

Great chieftain o' the puddin'-race!

Aboon them a' ye tak your place,

Painch, trip, or thaim:

Weel are ye wordy o' a grace

As lang's my arm.

In America, a case is sometimes made to consider Cajun a separate tongue. Cajun is still spoken by a quarter of a million people (or more, depending on whose estimates you follow) in parts of Louisiana. The name is a corruption of
Acadian,
the adjective for the French-speaking inhabitants of Acadia (based on Nova Scotia, but taking in parts of Quebec and Maine) who settled there in 1604 but were driven out by the British in the 1750s. Moving to the isolated bayous of southern Louisiana, they continued to speak French but were cut off from their linguistic homeland and thus forced to develop their own vocabulary to a large extent. Often it is more colorful and expressive than the parent tongue. The Cajun for hummingbird,
sucfleur
(“flower-sucker”), is clearly an improvement on the French
oiseaumouche.
Other Cajun terms are
rat du bois
(“rat of the woods”) for a possum and
sac à lait
(“sack of milk”) for a type of fish. The Cajun term for the language they speak is Bougalie or Yats, short for “Where y'at?” Their speech is also peppered with common French words and phrases:
merci, adieu, c'est vrai
(“it's true”),
qu'est-ce que c'est
(“what is it”), and many others. The pronunciation has a distinctly Gallic air, as in their way of turning long “ā” sounds into “eh” sounds, so that
bake
and
lake
become “behk” and “lehk.” And finally, as with most adapted languages, there's a tendency to use nonstandard grammatical forms:
bestest
and
don't nobody know.

A similar argument is often put forward for Gullah, still spoken by up to a quarter of a million people mostly on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. It is a peculiarly rich and affecting blend of West African and English. Gullah (the name may come from the Gola tribe of West Africa) is often called Geechee by those who speak it, though no one knows why. Those captured as slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted but also the further misfortune of coming from one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world, so that communication between slaves was often difficult. If you can imagine yourself torn from your family, shackled to some Hungarians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, taken halfway around the world, dumped in a strange land, worked like a dog, and shorn forever of the tiniest shred of personal liberty and dignity, then you can perhaps conceive the background against which creoles like Gullah arose. Gullah itself is a blend of twenty-eight separate African tongues. So it is hardly surprising if at first glance such languages seem rudimentary and unrefined. As Robert Hendrickson notes in his absorbing book
American Talk,
“The syntactic structure, or underlying grammar, of Gullah is . . . ​extraordinarily economical, making the language quickly and readily accessible to new learners.” But although it is simple, it is not without subtlety. Gullah is as capable of poetry and beauty as any other language.

One of the first serious investigations into Gullah was undertaken by Joel Chandler Harris, known for his Uncle Remus stories. Harris, born in 1848 in Eatonton, Georgia, was a painfully shy newspaperman with a pronounced stammer who grew up deeply ashamed that he was illegitimate. He became fascinated with the fables and language of former slaves during the period just after the Civil War and recorded them with exacting diligence in stories that were published first in the
Atlanta Constitution
and later compiled into books that enjoyed a considerable popularity both in his lifetime and after it. The formula was to present the stories as if they were being told by Uncle Remus to the small son of a plantation owner. Among the best known were
Nights with Uncle Remus
(1881),
The Tar Baby
(1904), and
Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit
(1906). All of these employed the patois spoken by mainland blacks. But Harris also produced a series of Gullah stories, based on a character called Daddy Jack. This was a considerably different dialect, though Harris thought it simpler and more direct. It had—indeed still has—no gender and no plurals.
Dem
can refer to one item or to hundreds. Apart from a few lingering West African terms like
churrah
for splash,
dafa
for fat, and
yeddy
or
yerry
for hear, the vocabulary is now almost entirely English, though many of the words don't exist in mainstream English.
Dayclean,
for instance, means “dawn” and
trut mout
(literally “truth mouth”) means “a truthful speaker.” Other words are truncated and pronounced in ways that make them all but unidentifiable to the uninitiated.
Nead
is Gullah for underneath. Learn is
lun,
thirsty is
tusty,
the other is
turrer,
going is
gwan.

Without any doubt, the most far-flung variety of English is that found on Tristan da Cunha, a small group of islands in the mid-Atlantic roughly halfway between Africa and South America. Tristan is the most isolated inhabited place in the world, 1,500 miles from the nearest landfall, and the local language reflects the fact. Although the inhabitants have the dark looks of the Portuguese who first inhabited the islands, the family names of the 300-odd islanders are mostly English, as is their language—though with certain quaint differences reflecting their long isolation from the rest of the world. It is often endearingly ungrammatical. People don't say “How are you?” but “How you is?” It also has many wholly local terms.
Pennemin
is a penguin;
watrem
is a stream. But perhaps most strikingly, spellings are often loose. Many islanders are called Donald, but the name is always spelled Dondall. Evidently one of the first users misspelled it that way generations ago and the stuck.

*
 However, unlike America, Australia has three layers of social accent: cultivated, used by about 10 percent of people and sounding very like British English; broad, a working-class accent used by a similar number of people (notably Paul Hogan); and general, an accent falling between the two and used by the great mass of people.

8.

Spelling

T
he mainland of Europe never produced an alphabet of its own. Our own alphabet has its roots in pictographs. Our letter
A
comes from the Semitic aleph, meaning “ox,” and originally was a rough depiction of an ox's head.
B
comes from the Semitic bēth, meaning “house.” But the people of the Near East, unlike those of the Far East, made an important leap in thought of almost incalculable benefit to us. They began to use their pictographs to represent sounds rather than things. The Egyptian symbol for the word
re
began to stand not just for sun but for any syllable pronounced “ray.”

To appreciate the wonderfully simplifying beauty of this system you have only to look at the problems that bedevil the Chinese and Japanese languages. There are two ways of rendering speech into writing. One is with an alphabet, such as we have, or a pictographic-ideographic system, such as the Chinese use.

Chinese writing is immensely complicated. The basic unit of the Chinese written word is the radical. The radical for earth is
 and for small is
. All words in Chinese are formed from these and 212 other radicals. Radicals can stand alone or be combined to form other words. Eye and water make
teardrop.
Mouth and bird make
song.
Two women means
quarrel
and three women means
gossip.

Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters, of which about 4,000 are in common use. Chinese typewriters are enormous and most trained typists cannot manage more than about ten words a minute. But even the most complex Chinese typewriter can only manage a fraction of the characters available. If a standard Western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide—about the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed together.

Dictionaries, too, are something of a nightmare. Without an alphabet, how do you sensibly arrange the words? The answer is that in most dictionaries the language is divided into 214 arbitrary clusters based on their radicals, but even then you must hunt randomly through each section until you stumble across the spelling you seek.

The consequences of not having an alphabet are enormous. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no palindromes, no anagrams, no Morse code. In the age of telegraphy, to get around this last problem, the Chinese devised a system in which each word in the language was assigned a number.
Person,
for instance, was 0086. This process was equally cumbersome, but it did have the advantage that an American or Frenchman who didn't know a word of Chinese could translate any telegram from China simply by looking in a book. To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan where the writing system is also ideographic, there is no logical system for organizing documents. Filing systems often exist only in people's heads. If the secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.

However, Chinese writing possesses one great advantage over other languages: It can be read everywhere. Chinese is not really a language at all, but more a family of loosely related dialects. A person from Fukien can no more understand the speech of the people of Shanghai than a Londoner can understand what people are saying in Warsaw or Stockholm. In some places one dialect is spoken over a very wide area, but in other parts of the country, particularly in the deep south, the dialects can change every two or three miles. Yet although the person from Fukien couldn't talk to anyone from Canton, he could read their newspapers because the written language is the same everywhere. The ideographs are pronounced differently in different areas but read the same—rather in the way that
1, 2, 3
means the same to us as it does to a French person even though we see it as “one, two, three” while they see it as “un, deux, trois.”

An equally useful advantage of written Chinese is that people can read the literature of 2,500 years ago as easily as yesterday's newspapers, even though the spoken language has changed beyond recognition. If Confucius were to come back to life today, no one apart from scholars would understand what he was saying, but if he scribbled a message people could read it as easily as they could a shopping list.