Frequent commenter Y sent me Robert H. Lowie’s linguistic memoir “A Case of Bilingualism” (Word 1.3 [1945]: 249-259) saying “This is a fun paper, from a famous figure in American anthropology. I think you’ll like it”; I do indeed, and I think you will too. Here are some choice bits:
I was born in Vienna in 1883. My father was a Hungarian from the vicinity of Stuhlweissenburg, south-west of Budapest. In that section of the country German had remained dominant, so that he learnt Magyar as a foreign tongue. My mother was Viennese, and, accordingly, High German was the language of our household. My father’s was a generalized South German form, my mother’s richly flavored with the racy vernacular locutions which even educated Austrians affect. Typical are such words as Bissgurn ( “termagant”), dalket (“awkward, gauche”), hopatatschet (“supercilious”). She was capable of expressive original creations, such as verhallipanzt (“entangled, confused”), which appears in no Idiotikon Vindobonense I have been able to consult. Again, like many educated Austrians, she was somewhat easy-going on certain points of grammar, substituting the dative for the genitive with während and wegen. On the other hand, her father, a physician, austerely criticised such derelictions when I indulged in them. It was he, too, who urged his daughter to keep up her children’s German in America since we were likely enough to learn English there.
When we left Vienna to join my father in New York, where he had preceded us by three years, I was ten and had just passed the entrance-examination for a Gymnasium, my sister being two and a half years younger. We immediately entered public schools and rapidly acquired fluency in English. My mother, obeying her father’s injunction, maintained German as the sole medium of communication between parents and children, though my sister and I soon came to speak to each other more frequently in English. The family intimates were all Austrians and Germans, and though our morning newspaper was English, in the evening and on Sunday we regularly bought the Staatszeitung. The Sunday edition of that paper had a puzzle-column, over which we pored for hours, winning several prizes in the form of German books. We occasionally went to the two German theatres and in later years visited German societies. We read the classics and the serial modern novels that appeared in our Sunday Staatszeitung.
Nevertheless, our German could not possibly develop as it would have in Austria. The range of topics discussed with our parents and their friends did not coincide with that thrust upon us in the classroom and in association with age-mates. It was not as a matter of course, but through later deliberate effort, that I learnt gleichschenkliges Dreieck, Herrentiere, and Beschleunigung as the equivalents, respectively, of “isosceles triangle,” “primates,” and “acceleration.” Similarly, dealings with storekeepers were largely in English. Important, too, was the fact that there were, of course, no compulsory school-compositions to be scrutinized by the Argus-eyes of a German pedagogue. […]
In point of vocabulary my German, as explained, lagged behind my English in various respects, yet it remained ahead of it in the domain of domestic utensils and the like. “Skilled [sic –LH],” “rolling-pin,” and “saucepan” still click less immediately in my consciousness than Bratpfanne, Nudelwalker, and Reindl (Austrian).
Facility in German composition, of course, implies much more than lexical knowledge; it means, among other things, a control of stereotyped phrases, such as Beziehungen pflegen, Possen reissen, Nachruf auf … This is one respect in which the emigrant is handicapped; he knows them, but they are not always at his beck and call; hence, at a pinch, he falls back on a correct enough, but vaguer, colorless expression which a stay-at-home of equal cultivation would spurn.
Grammar presented difficulties of its own. The Austrian vernacular, for example, tabus the imperfect, which it supplants with the perfect. Hence the correct forms of the preterite were matters to be learnt from reading, not through conversational osmosis. Then there are some regional differences as to gender: no Viennese spontaneously says der Schinken, but die Schinke. Again, perfectly familiar nouns are not likely to be declined often in the ordinary household routine, hence doubts arise concerning weak and strong forms, and den Hirschen may usurp the part of den Hirsch. Thus, eternal vigilance is the cost of maintaining tolerably good German in a foreign country. We achieved the satisfaction of having our German pronounced much better than that of other children among our acquaintances. […]
A still more serious, because subtler, peril than the intrusion of English words lies in the spontaneous, unsuspected transfer of English idioms and the misuse of German words because of English models. I once used nur instead of erst for “only,” and on another occasion spoke of having vermisst (instead of verpasst) a train. Similarly, an Austrian lady wrote about her Rente when she meant Mietzins, and nothing seems more natural than to aufrufen someone on the telephone when usage demands anrufen. Lapses of this order always left me with a sense of shame, even when I myself discovered and corrected them. […]
By the time I graduated from public school my spoken English was superficially not perceptibly different from that of any thirteen-year-old New York boy. Closer inquiry would have established then, as now, the deficiencies already in part alluded to: only a New England wife made me realize the true essence of a “saucepan”; I never encountered the phrase “milling around” until I was on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History; and within the past year I spoke of somebody’s being “the split image” (instead of “the spit and image”) of someone else. When colleagues credit me with an exceptionally wide vocabulary, I therefore feel bound to qualify the comment. I know many long and unusual words, but I am ignorant of common locutions and not sufficiently conversant with everyday words. In lectures and academic discussions I am fluent enough, but in recounting a simple occurrence of daily life I am likely to grope and fumble for the mot juste – say, “running-board” or “dustpan.” I constantly marvel at the racy oral English of monoglot New England narrators of moderate education and feel that their achievement is utterly beyond my reach. Incidentally, interlocutors have often chided me for a certain pomposity in speech. In my opinion, this is largely due to my not having the appropriate colloquialism at the tip of my tongue, so that I am driven to seek refuge in a colorless blanket or bookish term.
In apparent conflict with my admiration for the homely authenticity of English speech as spoken by some Englishmen and Americans stands my linguistic authoritarianism. Intellectually I recognize, of course, that “standard” forms are factitious; emotionally I resent deviations. I automatically rank British above American usage and at times wonder at neologisms such as some scholars freely indulge in – say, Kroeber’s “formulable,” “authenticable.” I am shocked by Sapir’s defence of accusative “who” and outraged by his repeated use of “nuanced” as though there were a verb “to nuance.” Incidentally, a one-time disciple of his calmly speaks of “sciencing.”
Probably because of my bilingualism I do not relish even wholly legitimate latitudinarianism, such as Jespersen prizes as a signal virtue of English. I wish “people” and “committee” were always used with either singular or plural verbs; that a horse were not alternately “it” and “he”; that one could not refer to mankind as “they (Oxford Dictionary) or “it” (common usage) or “he” (Elliot Smith, Rivers).
It’s hard for me to stop quoting, but if you like what you’ve read, you know where to go for more. (It goes without saying that I bristled reflexively at his “linguistic authoritarianism,” but I understand the psychology behind it.) Thanks, Y!
I was a little alarmed to see Lowie say (p. 258, fn. 6), “It is no surprise to me that ‘bilingualism has an adverse effect on achievement in intelligence tests,’” quoting a paper by Otto Klineberg titled “Mental Testing of Racial and National Groups”, within a collection titled Scientific Aspects of the Race Problem (ed. Herbert S. Jennings, here). However, Lowie (and Boas’s students in general), along with Klineberg and Jennings, were dedicated anti-eugenicists, but worked at a time when eugenics and biological racism were still to be debated and disproved, rather than forgotten. That said, intelligence tests were considered cutting-edge science. I’d say that the effects that Klineberg unconvincingly argued for show the flaws of intelligence tests, not that bilingualism is a handicap. It feels like Lowie was swayed by that fashion, though his personal experience contradicts it.
Through reading about Lowie, I learned of a frankly scary guy, Madison Grant, a devoted and influential biological racist (and a very significant conservationist; the two are not unrelated.) In this biography of Grant I see that he called Lowie “a very dangerous anthropological Bolshevist.” I shouldn’t laugh, really I shouldn’t.
Lowie’s “linguistic authoritarianism” passage sounds perfectly reasonable to me. He is observing, as in the rest of the article, and the subject of observation is himself. It’s a perfectly fine descriptive statement to say that, say, 62% of English speakers hate the word moist, or that one personally hates it, while making it clear, as Lowie does, that the word is not objectively “wrong”.
Yes, he’s just describing his own prejudices, while being perfectly clear that they lack any objective basis. He has insight.
I liked his “shock” at Sapir’s defence of accusative “who.”
His point that knowing a language, even a L1, is not an all-or-nothing matter, rings very true. One’s knowledge tends to be domain-oriented. I daresay you could in principle do a medical degree entirely via Welsh … as a sort of bravura proof-of-concept thing. But …
(I gather that you can choose to be interviewed in Welsh when you apply to Cardiff Medical school. I heard from the parent of a child who did just that, who described how said child, a L1 speaker, was thrown off her stroke during the interview by the fact that she had either forgotten, or just never knew, some relevant but comparatively non-technical term in Welsh. Got in anyway …)
This is practically institutionalised in the stable multilingualism I encounted among my colleagues in Ghana. The question of how you say “brake fluid” in Kusaal really doesn’t arise: if you’re discussing car maintenance, you do it in English or Hausa. On the other hand, it would be weird to speak English or Hausa with your family, and there are more L1 Kusaal speakers now than ever before. The exclusion of the language from the domain of motor mechanics seems not to have impaired its vitality one bit.
The anonymous student of Sapir’s would be Leslie A. White. His paper, “Science is Sciencing”, starts,
I feel Lowie’s pain.
as though there were a verb “to nuance.”
Once upon a time I used to read history of science journals, for personal edification as well as professional reasons. I have a vague recollection of the abstract of one paper that said something like “we offer a new reading of Hooke’s laboratory journals*, nuanced by recent reanalysis of the rising public interest in botany in his lifetime**.”
Such desperate attempts to find something new to say squelched whatever modest interest I might have had in becoming an academic historian of science.
*or something of the sort, I really can’t remember
**ditto
madison grant
as well as having his quite extensive sphere of ideological influence, he has a certain lasting literary legacy. he’s understood to be a component (along with his friend lothrop stoddard) of the “goddard” who’s mentioned in The Great Gatsby as author of the white nationalist book tom buchanan is a fan of.
…The only explanation I can find for this claim is rather scary: the stereotypical German tourist’s attempt to discover ham (der Schinken) in a pancake* (die Palatschinke, -e replaced in dialect by the same syllabic [ŋ] Schinken has).
* About halfway between a proper American pancake and a proper crêpe or galette.
Skillet. 🙂
(But the two dialect words presented as ending in -et end, I bet – I don’t actually know them, FWTW –, in -[ɐd̥].)
That’s the word for “pension”, “Social Security check”, “retirement” in Germany. (In Austria that’s Pension.)
In the temporal sense: “it’s only Monday!”
For “committee” I get where he’s coming from; but “people” fulfills the roles of two different German words, Volk sg. and Leute pl.* – is this specifically about cases that look like the former but take plural agreement anyway, like “The American people have spoken, but it’s going to take some time to determine just what they’ve said”?
* Or Menschen pl. in places like Berlin.
The most dread confusion of “it’s an activity” with “it’s a verb”.
A most impressive name.
Skillet.
Fixed, thanks. The copy-and-paste from the pdf was full of OCR errors, and obviously I didn’t catch them all.
“Skilled” wasn’t an OCR error, that’s what it is in the original. Probably just a typo, but since he says the English word was less familiar to him than the German one, maybe he really didn’t know how to spell it?
There is some internet speculation about whether the historical Lothrop Stoddard influenced the name of Thos. Pynchon’s supposedly fictional character Tyrone Slothrop. Although it’s also claimed that TS’s monicker is an anagram for “entropy or sloth.” (Madison Grant makes for a more complicated villain than LS because he also did all sorts of nice progressive-sounding environmentalist things like run the New York Zoo for decades and found the Save the Redwoods League.)
D and T aren’t close enough on the keyboard for that, nor typed with the same finger on different hands, nor anything else I can come up with. I’ve never seen D/T typos.
Even so I’d be surprised if he couldn’t hear the difference (between -d and -t, never mind that the e in skilled is silent).
OK, since it’s in the original I’ve restored it but added a [sic].
Despite my sympathy with many peeves, I’ve never understood the one Lowie applies to “nuanced”. It has a long history, though.
—Samuel Johnson, Life of Gray
There has of late arisen a practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the termination of participles;
Which is, historically speaking, backwards – using -to to form adjectives meaning “having X”, like in bearded, Latin barbatus, Russian borodatyj, goes back to PIE and is rather the origin of the use of this ending in participles in those IE languages that use it as a participle.
(Very strictly speaking, the suffix in the case of the “bearded” words is an extended *-eH2-to-, but it goes back to the use of -*-to- forming adjectives, and the parallel formation of “bearded” in those three language families was to good to pass up.)