I’m still working my way through Douchet’s Nouvelle Vague (see this post), which is one of the best books I’ve read about movies and which I recommend to anyone interested in the change that took place in the late 1950s which we summarize as “New Wave” (there’s an English translation by Robert Bonnono); in the section on dialogue, he describes the passage from the stylized exchanges of the classic French cinema of the ’30s, when the screenwriter was considered the most important creative element, to the more naturalistic speech of movies like The 400 Blows and Breathless (“le discontinu, le ce qui passe par la tête, l’imprévu et l’impromptu, bref qui obéit à l’humeur de l’instant”) and gives this description of Rohmer’s attempt to find a middle way:
Rohmer, bien qu’appartenant à cette génération, participe, cinématographiquement parlant, de l’esprit de la suivante. Si ses dialogues sont un modèle du genre, considérés comme littéraires au point d’être publiés (ce qui est peu fréquent), il n’empêche qu’ils ont pour ambition première de saisir, quasi sociologiquement, le parler de notre temps. On sait comment il procède: fréquenter ses futurs interprètes, et ce de six mois à un an avant le tournage, et retenir des constantes conversations badines qu’il entretient avec eux les tournures de phrases et d’esprit, les tics et les mots propres aux actrices et acteurs. Il les injecte dans un dialogue très écrit qui prend, ainsi, un tour familier, procure l’illusion de l’instantané et du pris sur le vif. La rigueur grammaticale va de pair avec la ligne de conduite des personnages. Elle est nécessaire pour donner du jeu — un jeu pervers — à la rectitude de leur parcours, pour instiller, par un glissement libertin des mots et des phrases, une licence à leur morale. Rohmer fabrique ainsi un parler qui serait le français de notre époque si on savait garder encore, correctement et simplement, le bon usage de notre langue. Tentative de fusion entre le «parler écrit xᴠɪɪɪᵉ siècle» et le «parler parlé» de la fin xxᵉ. En résulte une impression d’étrangeté, fascination en forme de suspense qui attache à de longues discussions a priori anti-cinématographiques un public désormais captif et attentif.
My translation (I don’t have access to Bonnono’s):
Rohmer, although belonging to this [earlier] generation, participates, cinematically speaking, in the spirit of the following one. If his dialogues are a model of their kind, considered literary enough that they were published (which is rare), their primary ambition is nevertheless to capture, almost sociologically, the speech of our time. We know his working method: he spends time with his future actors, for six months to a year before filming, and from the constant light-hearted conversations he has with them he learns the turns of phrase and wit, the mannerisms and words specific to the actresses and actors. He injects these into a dialogue that is very much scripted but which thus acquires a familiar turn, providing the illusion of a snapshot, something caught in the moment. Grammatical rigor goes hand in hand with the characters’ line of conduct. This is necessary to introduce some play – a perverse play – into the straightness of their journey, to instill, by a libertine slippage of words and phrases, some license into their morality. Rohmer thus manufactures a way of speaking that would be the French of our time if we still knew how to maintain, correctly and simply, the proper use of our language: an attempt to fuse the “written speech of the 18th century” with the “spoken speech” of the late 20th century. The result is an impression of strangeness, a fascination in the form of suspense that binds a now captive and attentive audience to long discussions that one would assume would be anti-cinematic.
That’s extremely enlightening, and provides a clue as to why I always have a slight problem with Rohmer, even though I’ve greatly enjoyed many of his movies: there’s something excessively formal about them, something that contrasts with the spontaneous feel of films by Godard, Truffaut, and others of his cohort. Of course, Rohmer is trying to do something different and has a right to his method, but it leaves me feeling a tad dissatisfied.
And speaking of being dissatisfied, I recently watched a movie by Alexandre Astruc, who has the reputation of being a cold formalist (he invented the notion of the caméra-stylo, and cared more about the perfection of his images than the human impact of the whole); I liked it more than I expected (Annie Girardot’s acting is terrific), but the story is still a tedious rehash of the sad-adulteress plot (she leaves her domineering husband for a man who also proves unsatisfactory and winds up miserably alone). What really bothered me was going to the Wikipedia page and discovering that it was under the title Prey for the Shadows. As I indignantly explained in the note I left when moving it to be under its French title La Proie pour l’ombre, “‘Prey for the Shadows’ is never used in English and is based on a misunderstanding of the French title.” I added the following explanation to the article text: “the title is from the French expression lâcher la proie pour l’ombre, which literally means ‘to let go of the prey for the shadow’[5], referring to Aesop’s fable The Dog and Its Reflection.” We don’t really have an equivalent expression in English.
La rigueur grammaticale va de pair avec la ligne de conduite des personnages.
Sounds awfully like trying to have your gateau and eat it too.
Though it is probably less oxymoronic in a French cultural context than an Anglophone one. Hard to imagine an English-speaking director trying this …
On the other hand … the Coen brothers. (True Grit, for example.)
The whole passage is very very French and I had a hard time rendering it into English that sounded even vaguely natural.
One impression that has remained with me after seeing every Rohmer work, is that although his films of the 1980s and 1990s seem to depict contemporary France by casting fashionably dressed young people and using contemporary pop music, it is nevertheless only that slice of French society that is compatible with his own background, and ideas for scripts that dated back as far as the 1940s. Everyone is so nearly invariably white and middle-class that in one film (Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, IIRC) when the camera shows a bustling street scene full of the Parisian proletariat, and black faces among them, it came as a shock. Later I discovered scholarship on specifically Rohmer and social class, and also the occasional comparisons to Woody Allen that make a lot of sense.
Yeah, there’s that too. He’s an odd duck, conservative and formal in spirit but determined to be down with The Youth.
«parler écrit xᴠɪɪɪᵉ siècle» – “written speech of the 19th century” (but perhaps this makes the English even more vaguely natural?:))
Whoops, thanks — fixed! I missed that through at least two reads…
‘that slice of French society that is compatible with his own background‘ – something like this always bothers me in the context of my friends. They speak very different languages and some are more than exotic for Russians (any Arab lady is a dragon or unicorn: no one knows no one who knows one). But all are very similar to me both in their personalities and social backgroud. So can a Chinese farmer and I find a common language, be understood by and interesting to each other?
But if he films what he understands, that is not a problem.
I always felt Rohmer was showing off-I can do incredible psychological realism without any overacted emotional confrontations and with ai-generated dialogue, I can do films that hold the interest of viewers who will be unable to summarise the plot….
‘Shadow for the substance’, but then ‘the substance’ sounds like something that the police would confiscate from you.
This is obviously because I’m not much of a French-movies guy, but I have trouble processing bare “Rohmer” as referring to anyone other than Sax Rohmer. Although that appears to have been what you might politely call a stage name for a fellow trying to sound more vaguely exotic than his birth name of Arthur Henry Ward would permit.
Wikipedia claims that the French-movie Rohmer was a monarchist, but the source it cites (a rather facile and soppy New Yorker article) doesn’t even specify legitimist-v-Orleanist, so it’s hard to take seriously. (The separate wiki article on Sax Rohmer, for its part, claims that the extent of his actual ties with the Rosicrucians is disputed.)
Although that appears to have been what you might politely call a stage name for a fellow trying to sound more vaguely exotic than his birth name of Arthur Henry Ward would permit.
Well, come to that, Éric Rohmer’s real name was Maurice Schérer (his friends called him Momo). And hey, what do you know — Wikipedia says “He fashioned his pseudonym from the names of two famous artists: actor and director Erich von Stroheim and writer Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu series.” So you and Momo are both Sax fans!
Hat:
The whole passage is very very French and I had a hard time rendering it into English that sounded even vaguely natural.
I think you did an excellent job. I chanced my own arm before looking at your rendering, and came up with this (only amended with regard to “de l’instantané et du pris sur le vif”, because I had carelessly missed the meaning of instantané):
Just a few substantive differences in interpretation, which could be ironed out as an exercise.
He fashioned his pseudonym from the names of two famous artists: actor and director Erich von Stroheim and writer Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu series.
So, an assumed name made out of two (well, one-and-a-half) assumed names.
Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu series
I managed to discombobulate both my Beautiful and Accomplished Daughter and her SOBAD when she first ventured to bring him to see us, by showing them the excellent movie The Mask of Fu Manchu. It has Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy. What’s not to like? (OK, there is a touch of racial stereotyping here and there – but hey, Art! *)
I felt that stress-testing was an important part of my role as Father of the Beloved. SOBAD passed, and also knows Latin. Naturally, I gave my blessing.
* Unfortunately, Boris Karloff fails to conquer the world, but he chews the scenery admirably, and really deserves to. Myrna Loy is excellent as his Beautiful and Accomplished Daughter, and even eviller than her dad. He is rightly proud of her. It is to the discredit of the insipid “hero” that he has to to hypnotised into becoming her sex slave.
One detects a distasteful anti-intellectualism in the source material, manifest in a quite unbalanced view of Dr Fu Manchu, who has a PhD from Edinburgh, a LLD from Christ’s College, Cambridge and an MD from Harvard. Edinburgh!
I think you did an excellent job.
Why, thank you, sir! Yours is more elegant, but that is to be expected.
FWIW, Danish has ligge/lå/ligget stative, and lægge/lagde/lagt causative, which are probably easy to derive from the same PG forms as the English and the Yiddish.
Apart from the sad fact that YPOT can’t produce or hear the difference between the present and infinitive forms of the verbs, most of them have no doubts about which past or participial form is which. One result of which is that learning what is what in English is easy. (But lain still comes over like “WTF sort of word is that?”. I had occasion to use it last week or so, but it feels like constructions needing it are non-preferred).
Cinematographic writing, nouvelle or no, is vague almost de rigueur.
About five years ago I was petitioned to assist in the translation (read “to translate”, since the draft English material was a scarcely believable farrago of misunderstandings and Dada-like quasi-utterances) of a Serbian film-maker’s musings. That man was not involved; my dialogue was with someone in Australia who thought it would be a good idea.
After a dismal tech-unsavvy series of fragmentary communiqués on the topic from the entrepreneur in question, and altogether too much preliminary effort on my part, I said I wanted nothing to do with it. Next I find that a translation is published, and available at Amazon. I acquired the Kindle version and saw that samples I had provided – including for some of the most turgid and difficult portions of the text – appeared in it almost verbatim. “Heh,” as they say. An attempt at confusion?
Oh but I do so intensely dislike sentiments like “si on savait garder encore, correctement et simplement, le bon usage de notre langue”, especially coming from the French. If they could only learn to jettison this kind of pompous conservative nonsense, they might be able to stop their written and spoken languages from drifting ever further into Arabic-level diglossia.
Quite so, but I think in this case Douchet is speaking from Rohmer’s point of view rather than his own, since that’s definitely how Momo would think.
‘into Arabic-level diglossia.’
Should I (as an Arabic learner and Ln user) feel disgusted by their diglossia? I thought it’s cool…
P.S. ‘written and spoken registers must be same’ is another form of prescriptivism.
You may argue about practicality of this or that arrangement, about its consequences (I think diglossia is more friendly to diversity of spoken forms) or about acceptability of the specific means used to maintain it – but the simple belief ‘diglossia is bad’ is same prescriptivism as everything.
Diglossia in Welsh has been used in the not very distant past to relentlessly disparage the actual spoken language* and maintain the cultural dominance of an elite. I think there’s a pretty good case that it has harmed the survival prospects of the language.
* The intro to the English version (published 1980) of Stephen Williams’ Elfennau Gramadeg Cymraeg talks about “drawing attention to debased colloquial usages.” A step up from simply ignoring them, I suppose.
Some divergence between written and spoken standard is probably inevitable, but IMO the degree we have in Arabic makes literacy more difficult; when people basically have to learn a different language in order to read or write, it reduces the number of people who are able to participate. I am reasonably convinced that the divergence between written and spoken language is one of the reasons why so little is published in Arabic relative to its nominal number of speakers. Too few people feel comfortable writing in MSA and writing in the language they feel comfortable in is deprecated.
I just discovered this very extensive thesis on Welsh as She is Actually Spoke:
https://pure.southwales.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/dawn-dweud-a-study-of-colloquial-and-idiomatic-welsh
What it says about the sociolinguistics is pretty solid, and its appendices are good on the divergences between registers (and dialects.)
The issue of hapless Arabic-speaking schoolchildren struggling with the literary language always reminds me of this:
https://languagehat.com/uppercase-alif/#comment-3561632
One key difference, it seems to me, is that the high-register MSA is functionally necessary to maintain the polite fiction that there is in fact a single “Arabic language” that is dominant all the way from Morocco to Oman, since there is so much “horizontal” variation among the regional vernaculars that it becomes harder not to admit they are separate languages if that’s the level you’re focused on. I suspect that the degree of variation in actually-spoken L1 vernaculars in Welsh and in French (once French-lexifier creoles are excluded from consideration) is not nearly so great.
@Hans, a sensible argument. But it needs serious (scientific) analysis, without it it’s a hypothesis.
Opinions of people like me affect actual decisions by states, so I’d need such an analysis: it is as if space exploration depended on my opinion on whether space flight is possible (on which it does depend) and what spacecraft design is more efficient.
Note:
– we must distinguish between ease of promotion of education (ease of the transition from state A to the desired state of the society B) on the one hand and properties of that desired (stable) state B on the other.
– speaking of this desired state, Lebanon which you know well is a highly peculiar example. Many schoolchildren can more comfortably use French or English (foreing languages) than liteterary Arabic.
Which is not because of the distance between languages (so much greater for French!) but other factors, which factors must be very important. We must analyse them.
Tunisia and Algeria are in turn among the most proficient countries. A foreign student of literary Arabic will find there at least some people (university students) who can more or less comfortably chat in it with her.
– many countries are trying hard to make knowledge English (a foreign language) necessary for everyone who wants to study there.
@JWB;
Not nearly as great in Welsh as in Arabic, certainly, but still great enough that it has been seriously used as an argument in favour of the supradialectal Literary Welsh, and led to problems with earlier attempts to devise a modernised pan-Welsh written standard.
I gather the weird-but-excellent novel*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_Nos_Ola_Leuad
was taken off the A-Level syllabus because southern schoolchildren moaned that they couldn’t understand the northern dialect that it’s (mostly) written in. (Even the book’s title is identifiably northern.)
* WP says “Comparisons have been made with the world of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood“; must be pretty intellectually lazy comparers. Given that both deal with life in small Welsh communities, they’re about as different in their approaches and general atmosphere as can well be imagined. (Welsh WP, not to be outdone, claims that it’s influenced by Finnegans Wake. Can’t say I’d noticed. Moreover, I understood the Welsh novel …)
Opinions of people like me affect actual decisions by states
Do you mean that you are a bureaucrat?
JWB, it is not a fiction.
Tunisians (and everyone) watch Egyptian TV or Kuwaiti soap operas and sing Lebanese songs.
And they normally can communicate with a Egyptian in improvised mixed Arabic.
A Palestinian refugee in Algeria can talk to locals.
Slavs simply don’t do that even though the distance is same. And there’s no tradition of doing it.
@LH no, but they do take opinions of people into account. Not only them, but them too.
They are not FULLY disattached from the ‘reality’. But the ‘reality’ here is at best beliefs of teachers and at worst mine.
I want serious scientific study of the question so that at least experts (and everyone curious) could base their opinions on (complex) facts. If you think it won’t affect any decisions – maybe. But I don’t feel comfortable fantacising about facts when those are practically important, even if the fantasy makes some sense. I’m accustomed to testing such hypotheses.
And what I personally expect is not ‘no dependence between litereracy from diglossia’ but rather that this dependence will take unexpected forms and that there are many other factors we’re not taking into account. In other words, that Hans’s idea is oversimplified abd we need a more complex model for practical guidance.
DE, effects of diglossia are many.
It is not difficult to find a likeable or not likeable among them. But this is unscientific.
Also the ‘social’ argument can lead to monoculturalism.
I mean
1 elite culture must not be different from others because else it slows down lifts.
2.ergo the complexity of everything must not exceed the complexity of elites.
Either all Russians speak like our elites, or elites speak like everyone, but everyone must speak one dialect and there won’t be a place for other languages. They slow down social lifts.
(and that’s exactly how it is)
Yes, social structures can and do interact with other structures. There are caste socities. But we need a diverse world without caste rankings.
Also the ‘social’ argument can lead to monoculturalism
How does writing in a variety of diverse actual spoken forms of Welsh, as opposed to an artificial unified literary language that was never anyone’s L1, lead to monoculturism? I don’t quite follow the mechanism here …
How would greater use of Darja in writing in Algeria conduce to monoculturism?
Er. Of course darja levels everything (and fusha doesn’t. No one switches to L1 fusha).
Its use on TV and in school will of course increase its levelling effect.
Also ‘don’t speak like a villager’ is what Russians (who write and speak same dialect) tell each other.
The reaction to a dialect form in speech is same as an Arab’s reaction to clumsy Arabic writing. Teach them to speak darja, they’ll do it too. Because school.
This is redistribution of snobbery, not a fight agaist it. ‘Fix this parameter, not that one!’ and not ‘let’s don’t fix any of them’
People already speak Darja. When does this levelling take place? Who is going to be compelled to give up their native L1 fuṣḥā (given that there are no such people) and made to speak Darja? Would the language rights of Berbers be negatively impacted specifically by the fact that Arabic-speakers felt free to write in their own language? How would that work?
How would my writing gola instead of golau, while my Swansea-raised friend wrote gole, amount to levelling? (Personally, I’m entirely happy to write golau even though nobody actually pronounces it that way, but that is because I fear that unless we all write the word the same way, we will lose our diversity.)
Did the breakup of Latin into the Romance languages result in the imposition of a monoculture on Europe?
Is Zazie dans le Métro propaganda for a French monoculture? I seem to have missed the subtext …
I think the phrase “redistribution of snobbery” could catch on.
It is true that Irvine Welsh supports Scottish independence. I presume that his novels are an attempt to create a new standard language for an independent nation.
I take it that your idea, drasvi, is that a future Algerian government (say) might adopt a Western-European-style ethnonationalist ideology dedicated to eradicating ethnic diversity, in which Darja became the One Approved Speech, and that Algerian diversity is currently safeguarded by the fact that nobody speaks Standard Arabic as L1, which is also an inescapably transnational language?
I grant you that people of that mindset might elevate their own dialect to “official” status as part of a social steamrollering project.
The BJP’s Hindi-imposition strategy is rather like that – replacing a transnational language with no specific local ethnic associations with the language of a favoured client group (also a transnational language, in reality, though reality is not really an issue for such people.)
I can’t see that working in this particular case; but there is at least one Hatter who knows much more than either of us about that.
It’s certainly not an issue in Wales. However, after we have thrown off the yoke of the Saxon oppressor, I can just see those buggers in Cardiff trying to replace our pure Literary Welsh with their debased Gwenhwyseg, and forcing the rest of us to stop talking proper.
@Hans, a sensible argument. But it needs serious (scientific) analysis, without it it’s a hypothesis.
Sure. And on general principles I would assume that there are studies out there on this matter. But we’re in the comment section of a blog here, and if we would only post comments on matters wrt which we dispose of deep erudition and are caught up on the latest status of the scientific debate, the discussion here would mostly consist of DE and Lameen discussing West African languages and Xerîb sharing his encyclopedic knowledge.*) That would not necessarily be bad, but maybe it’s okay if people like me are allowed to bounce around some half-cooked ideas?
*) Apologies to anyone whose erudition in a specific field I forgot to mention 🙂
No. DE is an amateur. No one is paying him.
Either one of us will do it (pay money to him) – or he shouldn’t speak about African languages.
Slavs simply don’t do that even though the distance is same
i’m not so sure, though clearly far less well-informed. it may have to do with their/my u.s.-born context, but that kind of inter-slavic mutual adjustment seemed pretty unremarkable when i traveled in eastern europe with a polish cradle-tongue-speaker friend (in czechia, slovakia, and bulgaria, and i think with some stray russians and [ex-]yugoslavs), and seems pretty unremarkable when a russian cradle-tongue-speaker acquaintance talks about their time living in poland, their support work with ukrainian refugees, and their day-to-day life in chicago*.
Personally, I’m entirely happy to write golau even though nobody actually pronounces it that way, but that is because I fear that unless we all write the word the same way, we will lose our diversity.
this lens on the welsh situation resonates for me with yiddish. we get to have the added layer of dual “standard” spelling systems: YIVO’s formal standard (װוּ שרײַבט מען ייִדיש), which is part of a package that in practice suppresses spoken-language diversity, and the de facto contemporary hasidic standard (װאו שרײבט מען אידיש), which is part of a package that in practice allows or encourages it to a degree (at the level of differences between communities or courts). different (re)distributions of snobbery!
lagniappe: i had to work out the english acronym being spelled here from the context: “איי-עי-אי-עי”. i’m not sure why it wasn’t given in galkhes, or as an acronym for the yiddish translation, but the hasidic spelling standard is what makes it possible, while also making it harder to parse.
the French of our time if we still knew how to maintain, correctly and simply, the proper use of our language: an attempt to fuse the “written speech of the 18th century” with the “spoken speech” of the late 20th century.
i wonder how much this language ideology (especially as a guiding principle for a not-really-collaborative process of filtering different people’s voices through a single writer) is behind the formalness that leaves hat dissatisfied?
.
* they talk about operating in “inter-slavic franken-surzhyk” as much as or more than within russian, polish, or ukrainian.
rozele, I think you’re better informed.
I was thinking about experiences of very monolingual Muscovites (abroad: I have friends who’ve moved to a Slavic country, at home: no one will watch a Polish film without translation) and also about perplexion of certain young [this variable is important!] Serbs at my friends’ attempts to improvise and use inter-slavic instead of, say, English. But I believe your Slavic-speaking acquitances are more diverse and I didn’t even think about areas of frequent slavic language contact!
I should have spoken about ‘Muscovites’, not ‘Slavs’.
To be scrupulously fair about the wimpy schoolkids who couldn’t cope with the dialect in Un Nos Ola Leuad, I suspect that part of the trouble is that it’s written pretty much exactly as spoken (except for the passages in Literary Welsh, the role of which only becomes clear, rather disturbingly, near the end. I wonder how the English translation manages with that? KJV-speak would do the trick, I think.)
Because ordinary Welsh spelling is considerably more rational than English (a low bar), this sort of thing is much less likely to confuse the reader than it would be in English, but it does tend to make it harder to recognise words that you actually do know. It also makes it more difficult to look up genuinely unfamiliar words in the dictionary.
The dialect-unifying thing is sometimes rolled out in support of the much more rococo English spelling system, too.
On the other hand, totalitarians just lurve spelling reform. Even more than calendar reform …
“People already speak Darja. When does this levelling take place?”
@DE, sorry of confusion. I was thinking about the koine rather than all dialects of Algeria.
(I only call so the koine, because I do not think of ALL dialects of Algeria as one form)
As for switching TO L1 fuṣḥā, I meant that there are not any groups of Algerians who will use fuṣḥā as their (as a group) L1.
@David E., I would say that busybodies and self-appointed social-improvers love spelling reform. Totalitarians are merely a subgroup of that larger group, albeit a disproportionately important/effective (not necessarily in a positive way) one.
It does seem true that any attempt to “rationalize” English orthography by making it fit pronunciation more tightly and transparently will necessarily need to pick *some* pronunciation as standard and an orthography tied to that pronunciation may be a worse fit for a range of other extant pronunciations.
Minor mistranscription, should be parler.
Good example of the “contrastive si”, perhaps an influence on the English “concessive if”, as suggested in the discussion here a few years ago. Both Languagehat and Noetica translated that with “if”, which is completely fine, in my opinion; it’s literary English.
@Hans, no, of course I don’t mean we should’t talk about it.
When people make factual claims about poorly understood and complex, but socially important issues, they usually believe their intuition is enough. In other words:
A question can, in principle be answered by scientific methods.
Is answering such questions already a science? Is the issue understood well enough?
If yes, people refer you to a specialist.
If no, they Preach.
But there is a third answer: ‘let’s study the problem! [and be careful until we have done that]’
I say it without any connection to you personally. Simply because people are so.
Depends rather on what you mean by “science”: many sorts of systematic enquiry by someone prepared to admit error can qualify, and numerical methods are not a sine qua non to qualify as a “science.”
The plural of “anecdote” is “data” (usually cited as the synonymous “the plural of anecdote is not data.”)
Minor mistranscription, should be parler.
Fixed, thanks!
future Algerian government (say) might adopt a Western-European-style ethnonationalist ideology dedicated to eradicating ethnic diversity, in which Darja became the One Approved Speech, and that Algerian diversity is currently safeguarded by the fact that nobody speaks Standard Arabic as L1, which is also an inescapably transnational language?
That’s pretty much what my dad would say: if we made Darja official then someone’s dialect would have to be standard, and then everyone else’s would be considered wrong, so better to stick with Fusha as the standard and let everyone keep doing their own thing. But if the current language policy is supposed to safeguard language diversity, it isn’t actually working very well. Regional dialects are already converging towards urban standards, and Berber speakers in some areas are already shifting towards Darja, without it having any kind of official status at all. It’s enough that it’s the language you need to speak to get anything done outside either the most refined or the most local circles. If Darja ever does become official, it will be in large measure the recognition of a fait accompli.
@JWB:
I would say that busybodies and self-appointed social-improvers love spelling reform.
George Bernard Shaw readily comes to mind …
While one would hardly call him “totalitarian” in his outlook, he does come across as a bit wobby on democracy (Exhibit A: Man and Superman. Not GBS at his most insightful …)
At first approximation, science is in English these days – not the teaching, even at universities, but the literature is, and once you reach the level where you need to read that literature (fairly soon) and contribute to it (earlier and earlier), you need to be pretty comfortable in English.
The one the Nazis had planned was actually very mild. Not as mild as the one that actually came to pass in 1998/2005, but nearly so – far from what could have been done by just taking the existing rules for how to spell certain sounds and extending them throughout the vocabulary, for example.
And the Russian spelling reform, while only implemented after the October Revolution, was actually a product of the February Revolution…
Up to a point, Minister.
@David E.: that’s IMHO an extremely unconvincing rebuttal. The argument made is that speakers with the accents that the system does not use as its norm can learn the necessary arbitrary correspondences between the sounds they do make and the glyphs used to represent other sounds in the reference/norm pronunciation. But they can already learn the necessarily arbitrary correspondences between the sounds they make and actually-existing orthographic conventions. There’s a reason that “eye dialect” in English (and ditto in German in my limited experience) involves spellings that deviate not just from current orthography but from some phonetic version of standard/prestige pronunciation. You might as well say that cockney-speakers already know (from listening to the BBC or whatever) what RP pronunciation of a given lexeme corresponds to their own pronunciation so they should have no trouble decoding a “phonetic” spelling of the RP pronunciation.
The October Revolution actually implementing a February Revolution proposal is an illustration of exactly the distinction I drew between busybody social-uplift reformists (February) and the totalitarian subset thereof (October).
Very often, in English, they don’t. I find that very striking.
Ah. Fairy nuff.
And of course orthographic variation plays into the vexed language-v-dialect question in a chicken-v-egg way. One reason (perhaps not the only one) we are generally convinced that there are multiple East Slavic languages is that e.g. Standard Ukrainian has despite political difficulties historically managed to get away with establishing, maintaining, and enforcing its own orthographic conventions that systematically vary from Standard Russian orthographic conventions, even though many of the differences look to an outsider rather like eye-dialect. And then there is sometimes even further magnification in transliteration conventions, where e.g. Ольга gets rendered as either “Olga” or “Olha,” depending. There are within the English-speaking world no doubt variations closely analogous to e.g. one group saying Kiev and another Kyiv or one group saying Vladimir and another Volodymyr, but with both generally content to use the same spellings as everyone else.
To take another Slavic example whose political baggage may not be lesser in an absolute sense but is at least not currently associated with active armed conflict, my recollection is that the ideologues who fixed the orthographic conventions of Standard Macedonian did so with some degree of self-conscious focus on maximizing the contrast with the orthography of Standard Bulgarian.
Bimoba and Moba are either dialects of the same language or, at the very least, extremely similar languages, a fact which is hardly clear from the Ghana-side Kusaal-like Bimoba orthography versus the Togolese oh-so-Gallically-logical Moba orthography.
Bimoba bakir “mud”, Moba bagd
Bimoba sɔrib “husbands”, Moba salb
Bimoba jatuk “fool”, Moba jadg …
@Lameen, true (and I say so not because I know enough about Algeria, but because it must be same as everywhere), but:
1. levelling is a function of several (or many, but several of them are more important) things.
One of them is restructuring of human contacts. Usually I mostly think about this.
Another one is which variety is used in what domain.
But when you say ‘recognition’, you, as I understand, mean not as much recognition of levelling as that of its status (the status of Darja). But I’m not sure if Darja has ‘expelled’ Fusha from many domains.
2. school is a powerful tool. Not as powerful as ‘restructuring of contacts’ (except that it too restructures them by gathering children and making them talk to each other and listen to teachers – in boarding schools in India with English as the language of instruction children shift to English) but still. And it is a different tool.
So first, if you will teach Darja in school, levelling will be not only a ‘function of several things’ but also a goal (which is unpleasant).
Second, as a different tool it will have different effect. There are, I think at least some forms of regional variation compatible with those ‘restructured human contacts’ but not with teaching Darja.
In other words, should we work harder on triggering climate change?
Though, maybe this question has to do with a different one, that of Berber schools.
(the answer to which based on Russian practice is that without Berber universities and Berber jobs demand for such schools can be low)
Well, I’m exaggerating maybe. Where a local language is still widely used there is demand for schools where it’s the language of instruction. Where it is not, people think that even 3 useless hours of native language lessons a week will somehow make children perform worse at exams.
But what we need is an environment where this language can thrive, not slowing down the shift.
DM, actually I simply don’t believe in widespread knowledge of a foreign language without dependence on it.
But more specifically,
– in the Netherlands, I think, some of university education is in English
– scientist or not, you will always need some knowledge of technologies and practices developed abroad, and one approach is translating everything, the other is expecting everyone to know English.
The list of professions where this or that approach is practiced depends on country, but (a) widespread knowledge of English makes the second approach possible (and the first one unnecessary) (b) I think jobs where English is expected are going to be better paid.
Apart of these two ways of dealing with objective dependencies, there are dependences which arise when everyone around you is already immersed in a foreign-language culture and media. Would be strange to call this all ‘beautiful multilingualism we all strive for’ (by means of compulsory lessons in school for others) and at the same time call Fusha ‘depriving children of an opportunities’.
Which is not to say Hans doesn’t have a point.
Rather to say: Fusha is a language (or a register), not even too foreign to Arabs.
(Sorry, not sure if DM personally needs this responce, but I wanted to explain what I meant. And needless to say, there is a plenty of examples of English and French in universities of ‘developing’ countries or the Arab world)
I wanted to ask DE, when arguing with him, how he is going to give Arabic speaker the opportunity to read in dialect. Everyone can translate anything (say, a programming textbook) into any dialect, say, that of bedouins from south Tunisia. If she wants. So is it by forcing children to read in dialect instead of forcing them to read in Fusha?
And I realised that technically you can keep teaching small children to read in Fusha (which makes on literate in dialect too), while having some of the textbooks in dialect (in order to promote translation of programming textbooks into it). You can even have different dialect texbooks for speakers of different varieties.
Of course it will lead to more levelling, but.
Why do you think I would advocate “forcing” children to read in dialect?
You seem to be engaging with some parallel-universe evil twin of mine. I have myself had trouble with those from time to time. They get in everywhere through those cracks in the walls of reality. (Poor maintainance, I have to say.)
DE, because education is compulsory.
If you are going to use school, then you will be forsing them to read dialect instead of forcing them to read fusha.
the number of hours when they are forced to deal with fusha
the number of hours when they are forced to deal with dialect text
are your only variables
(and note that Arabic speakers are fluent readers and writers in dialect)
Hey, Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
@DE, I think it IS important to control whether we’re doing good to people by removing a restriction, introducing a restriction or by changing it.
There is little demand for books in vernacular. Else the Internet would be full of dialect texts.
What you want is creating such demand.
So the absence of something on the internet proves that there is no potential demand for it?
This would explain why the idea of “social media” never really took off.
The Android Play Store (ugh) claims that the current Kusaal Bible apps have been downloaded something over 20,000 times. They didn’t exist at all before 2018; must we therefore conclude that there was no demand for such a thing until 2018? (I’ve never been able to find a dead-tree copy of the 2016 complete Bible translation, though I have the 1976 and 1996 New Testament versions.)
there is no
potentialdemand for itthere is
nolittle demand for it@rozele that kind of inter-slavic mutual adjustment seemed pretty unremarkable when i traveled in eastern europe
As English competencies continue to rise in Slavic countries, that sort of inter-slavic mutually adjusted communication is becoming increasingly rare, and I suspect even viewed as an embarassingly provincial thing to do in younger more overeducated circles or in the business world. Distance and context is also a factor – I don’t think you would ever see a Pole and a Serb trying to find mutual Slavic ground, unless it was a Serb stranded in a rural Polish village (or vice-versa). Certainly more likely between Czechs and Slovaks.
I used to see that sort of inter-slavic conversation a lot between Polish and Slovak colleagues, but that was more than 10 years ago now and those colleagues were all in their 40s or 50s at the time.
There is of course enormous potential demand for couscous in Russia. And for circumcision. Potentially.
…and I think to realise this potential you want to force everyone read books in dialect (instead of forcing them to read in Fusha – that is, the amount of forcing doesn’t change)
That’s what using school means.
If I’m mistaken and instead of dialect textbooks in (compulsory) schools you intend to – as was done with social media – publish something extremely useful and interesting, so everyone will rush to read it – do it.
@drasvi
Could be risky. I remember a Putin sound-bite where he said people who want to become fanatical Muslims are welcome in Russia–if they want to be circumcised we will take it right off. I don’t know what Putin thinks about couscous.
Can’t look for it right now, but I’ve mentioned before:
– “Yugo” long-distance bus drivers and Czech personnel at the international bus station in Prague each just talking their own language (I wouldn’t notice any minor adjustments). They clearly weren’t doing this the first time, though, and the range of topics was probably limited.
– Czechs, Slovaks and Poles coming to understand each other after a few days of round-the-clock exposure on a dig in Poland. All young enough that most were reasonably competent in English (and used it with me, except for a few who didn’t dare).
– A Croat and a Pole ending up with asymmetric mutual comprehension in that situation.
@drasvi: There are economies of scale in education and publishing, which you can only reap with standardization. Of course, economics are not everything, but there are trade-offs involved. As long as we don’t reach an AI nirvana where everything can be translated effortlessly and immediately without mistakes, the education and texts available for a language or dialect with few speakers will be less than for a language or dialect with many speakers (language prestige and purchasing power of speakers also play a role, but let’s not get sidetracked). So deciding whether to spend time and effort on learning a language or teaching children a language will always also involve economic considerations. The education system can make things easier for them by relying on a language that people easily understand, or it can make things easier for them by teaching them a language that comes with more prospects for studies and work. If those two are not the same (as is the cases with Standard English for Standard English L1 speakers), every decision disadvantages someone, but it costs money to try to avoid that decision.
There was a time, late 19th to early 20th centuries, when all academics were expected to read at least German, French, and English, even in the natural sciences, and publish in whichever of the three they preferred (or even another language, if their research was significant enough). Later on, when English became dominant, it was recognized in the West that it would be very profitable to read Russian, but also that it was hopeless to expect that any but a few Westerners would do so.
@Hans
1. have you tried to calculate costs?
To have some idea when the size of the language makes one approach cheaper than the other.
2. so what does this mean for literary Arabic?
Someone (from Algeria) said it is useless. I think he meant for finding a well-paid job in France…
A few did learn it – in the natural sciences. Few papers have actually been translated, and sometimes you have to use Soviet literature because there isn’t any other on a narrow topic (like certain fossils in my field).
@Hans
1. have you tried to calculate costs?
To have some idea when the size of the language makes one approach cheaper than the other.
No. As I said, I’m just airing ideas here; I am not interested or invested enough in this question to put actual work into this 🙂 Feel free to explore the idea and report back here if you’re interested.
2. so what does this mean for literary Arabic?
I can only come up with some general points :
1. In principle, it is a good idea to have a Standard language that is written and spoken by 100s of millions over a large area. The problem with MSA, AFAIK, is that it is only in limited actual use, and in relation to the number of its nominal speakers, too little literature is published in it. So to make it more useful would require investing in publishing and in improving and intensifying education in MSA.
2. The situation with regards to (a) the similarity of the spoken variety of Arabic to MSA and (b) the scope and distribution of use of MSA and the competition of 3rd languages like French or Arabic are different between the various Arab countries. In countries where the local dialect is close to MSA and MSA is widely used, it makes sense to concentrate education and publishing on MSA, in order to profit from the economies of scale of a widely used language. In other countries, like the Maghreb, where the difference is bigger, and higher education and lots of business are done in French already, it might make more sense to have basic and secondary education in Darja (and Berber), in order to make learning and writing easier, and switch to French for some parts of higher education. But I know too little about the exact demographics and how difficult it is for Darja speakers to learn Fusha to be sure.
You can’t do “Gur” linguistics without being able to read French. The unfortunate results of attempting to do so have infiltrated WP …
Arabic dialectology requires German, French, Spanish (for Morocco), English and Arabic, but that’s normal…
PS perhaps Hebrew?
Linguistics is unusual among the sciences in that (a) it is often done in the concerned language itself or in prestige (often ex- or still-colonial) languages from the area the language it’s spoken in and (b) works from a time when English wasn’t as hegemonic as today are still frequently consulted and cited. In IE Linguistics, works written 60 or even 100 years ago are still regularly cited; that would be very unusual in, say, Economics, except if you write about the history of a problem.
@Hans, German Orientalists never colonised Orientals:(
The sarcastic ‘:(‘ because by this they ruin so many wonderful (and not so much) theories.
Something else must be behind the enormous interest of German speakers (scholars, poets, you) in the East
German New Guinea
Brett, and also Hitler tried to colonise Slavs* (and Germans colonised them and not only them in the Middle Ages too). But that’s not the Orient I mean, when speaking of enormous interest.
P.S. As for personally Hans, I don’t mean interest, I mean that he has been working in Kazakhstan and Lebanon).
*has to do with European belief that progress IS colonisation, I think.
So deciding whether to spend time and effort on learning a language or teaching children a language will always also involve economic considerations
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has for many years been pursuing a successful strategy for promoting local languages at the expense of transnational lingua francas through changes to the school system, carried out in a way which is highly cost effective (at least in the short to medium term.)
From Michael Meeuwis’ A Grammatical Overview of Lingala, 2020:
*has to do with European belief that progress IS colonisation, I think.
The American belief is that progress is chopping trees down. Or destroying mountains.
‘I am not interested or invested enough in this question to put actual work into this‘
@Hans, I’m not talking about work! But you have spent a second to make the (qualitative) observation that feasibility of translation grows with the audience. We can imagine this curve. And a natural step, I bilieve for everyone who imagines such curves, and one taking a second as well, is to look at the scale to learn if we are talking about centimeters or thosusands kilometers…
Withiout it ‘economies of scale in education and publishing’ tell us nothing.
Imagine, you want to translate a monograph in Arabic.
Think, for what amount in euros you can find a translator with good Arabic and decent (enough for the translation to be usable) knowledge of the discipline.
Then think how much you will need to actually print it and distribute among readers (using commercial channels, that is shops and book markets or in some other way).
Are you still thinking that feasibility depends on the cost of translation? That it plays ANY role?
If you need 200 copies to be sold in one city and have a way of printing it cheap – it does.
Where did I say it depends on cost of translation? It depends on production and distribution cost (of which cost of translation is only a small part, and which generally go down per copy with increased print run) against the number of readers who actually will buy it – the more there are, the more publishing the book will be economically feasible. If enough people are able and ready to read a book in MSA, publishing makes sense; if they don’t because MSA is too difficult to read or more difficult than other languages they know, be it Darja, French, Berber or English, publishing the book in MSA is not worth it.
*) The difficulty may be just due to absence of habit.
You’re not going to get many sales for works in a language that hardly anybody has been taught to read or write.
The converse is that there is little incentive for individuals to expend the far from trivial effort to learn to read and write their L1 if there’s hardly anything in it to actually read (the more so if reading really isn’t a part of traditional culture anyway.)
The various bits of SIL and its spinoffs and successors are well aware of this: people probably won’t be particularly motivated to read and write their own language just to read the Bible in it. There’s a reason that the Ghanaian exemplar of these various organisations is the Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation – in that order. (Though I expect it was also for the acronym GILLBT.*)
It’s certainly possible to break out of the Catch-22. Trashy romance novels in Hausa apparently sell quite well enough to be a perfectly viable concern …
* I was just looking at their website: I actually hadn’t realised that the 1976 Kusaal New Testament was their very first published Bible translation. It seems an odd choice in some ways: Kusaal is one of the larger north Ghanaian languages, but there are at least twice as many Dagbani speakers, probably more. I expect it was to do with who was actually available at the time, as much as anything.
Hans, sorry for confusion. You didn’t specify in your comment (about ‘economies of scale in education and publishing’) which of my points you’re responding to.
But I re-read it and… I don’t understand what are you talking about if not translation;/
You of course can import books. But that’s hardly cheaper.
the number of readers who actually will buy it
I’m not sure if this is important for the education system. They neen students to read N books.
If students read it from screens and pay nothing – good.
If they print them (that’s what Tunisian students often do) – you pay for importing paper. Also 20 minutes of the guy or gal who prints everything for x millimes a sheet and 20 minutes of the waiting students.
If they buy books printed in your country, you still pay for importing paper.
If they buy books abroad, you pay for books.
Let’s keep it simple. The figures are made up, as I am not a publisher. But the relationship holds – the higher the print run, the lower the cost per book.
Assume I want to sell book. There are 1000 potential readers for it in language X, 10,000 in language Y, and 100,000 in language Z. Further assume that at a price of 5$ per copy, 50% of readers will buy it; at a price of 20$, 30% of readers, and at a price of 100$, 5% of readers.
To make money with a price of 5$, a minimum print run of 20,000 is needed. That means it’s only economic to print the book in language Z, because only that will give you a sufficient number of buyers (50,000). For a price of 20$, a minimum print run of 10,000 is needed. We still get the book only in language Z. For a price of 100$, a print run of 1,000 is needed. The book will still be published only in language Z, because it only gets 50 readers in X and 500 in Y. In every case, the market for each book is too small in the languages with less speakers. (This is for printed books; the logistics and economics of e-books are very different.)
You can play these scenarios with different prices, or you can talk to publishers to find out what the real relations between print runs and prices are.
@Hans, but we are talking about translations…
Book market and the two approaches to foreign languages have to do with each other, but there are many factors influencing each.
My understanding was we are talking about the link between using which language in education is best conducive to literacy and from there we went to the economics of publishing. I won’t go back through the whole thread to see if this ever was about translation, but I wasn’t aware that translation was supposed to be the topic. If yes, we seemed to have moved on from that. What is the question about translation you want to discuss?
Hans, I said that given that many technologies used in any profession are developed abroad, there are two approaches:
– we rely on that most of information a profesional needs is translated*
– we expect every professional to know a foreign language**
Which one is chosen depends on country and profession.
You then spoke about ‘economies of scale in education and publishing’ (and about translations too in the same paragraph!), I think (not sure) in responce to this comment.
What I don’t understand is how we combine these two, economies of scale on the one hand and the language of education on the other.
Of course for tiny languages (with, say 1 girl studying linguistics) you won’t have higher education in that language. You won’t have an university in the first place:)
__
*..or retold!!!
**..their reliance on it can be so overwhelming, that people can’t even think of talking about their job in nominal L1
Particularly, if you print in a European language, you have same economy.
If you order books from Europe, that’s too expensive.
Also printing (specifically) 1000 costs something around 1000 (varies depending on the country).
___
And needless to say ‘books which they bought’ is not what Tunsian students use in their studies, so I’m not sure their book prices have anything to do with their education or anything. It isn’t Russia, books there are expensive even for me.
Tunisians print them on their own, however cost-inefficient it is. Because their book market is @%$@& и у них полная жопа.
Though as for me, Western scientific publishing is an even worse жопа, so may be for Europeans Tunisia is normal.
So I’m old enough to remember when the child soldiers in the Freshly Democratic Republic of the Congo spoke French…
@drasvi: To be honest, I don’t have the time to continue this discussion. The economics change with electronic publishing, pirated content, automated translation… we would need someone to do the actual numbers for each country/language/education system, and I am not the right person for that.
@Hans, no problem.
Perhaps, it is not always easy to understand my tone and intends. Mostly I’m fooling arond here.
There are some things making me interested in both topics, both have nothing to do with you.
One of them is that ‘translating everything is too expensive’ is what I hear from people from several countries as an explanation for higher education in English. I don’t think they calculated the cost of translating 10 000 monographs. Given that the cost of translating a scientific monograph in many countries is below 1000 Euro (in some well below 1000) it is several million Euro. THE problim is not the cost, the problem is the number of specialists capable of doing it, but then for many languages this is not a problem either.
The other is that I thought about publishing something in Arabic and heard complaints of Tunisians. I haven’t figured out why prices are so high there, but it is not the cost of printing.
As for you, I simply don’t understand you. But that is not a problem:)