Whose English is it anyway?

This post, from Marco Rossi continues the discussion about elites in the Anglo-sphere, with particular reference to language. He asks whether syntactical standards matter any more, and whether media, or indeed computer spell checkers, may be exercising a pernicious and inevitable influence on how we speak, what we say and even what we think we should be saying. At least, that's what I think he's saying. Discuss. What do you you think, particularly with reference to defining what we do and how Prospect projects and expresses itself? . . .

When an email is sent out some choose to spell check it for better understanding. The machine goes through the eventual syntactic errors and corrects them accordingly; thus if I write "I went home, than had dinner" rather than "I went home, then had dinner", the machine does not recognizes that "than" as a semantically intended (in the phrase in question) error and keeps it, in other words does not accept the semantics into the system.
So, given that now we accept as a given the fact that the neural interaction being implemented multilaterally by our own cerebral system is what we mirror into the message being carried forth, nevertheless the interlocutor perceives that the message is written incorrectly and so the template being put in place is not mirrored according to our own intentions.

Same as we would speak with a different accent and being identified as foreign regardless of how hard we try to achieve a semblance of "standard accent" and "elitist" eliciting sundry requests for clarifications or stonewalling the flow of communication: thus Christopher Tayler on LBR in reviewing "The Mission Song by John le Carré" states that "...In Tinker Tailor, we’re told that a minor character, a strong-arm specialist called Ricki Tarr, was recruited to help suppress ‘the Malayan emergency’ before being ‘called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya – or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty’. The main implication is that Tarr is an unsavoury, potentially dangerous person, not that the Circus plays a nasty role in putting down insurgencies. Confronted with the practicalities of Tarr’s work, Smiley would probably have taken some leave and been spotted ‘sitting rigidly before an old volume of German poetry’, as happens in one of the books, ‘while he silently wept’. But the need to fight Communism always overrides his fretting about British moral credentials, however dubious those might be and however much of a hash the Cousins might be making of things in Vietnam.

‘I do find I become a great deal more radical in my old age,’ Smiley announces during his final appearance in The Secret Pilgrim (1991), an inquest into the Cold War that also offers some pointers for the future. The right people have lost but the wrong people have won. Capitalism must stage its own glasnost, which perhaps it can now that anti-Communism won’t provide ideological cover for low deeds. Unhappily, this isn’t the view taken by the likes of Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, an arms dealer who once did the Circus some favours and can’t see why he should stop shipping his ‘toys’ to African warlords just because the government’s gone soft. Bradshaw comes out with a long rant on this theme (‘my advice is step aside, let them slug it out, and bloody good luck to ’em’), which the narrator dutifully transcribes, though not before giving a disconcertingly extended disquisition on Sir Anthony’s barbarous dialect and ‘sawing nasal tones’:

He spoke English as if it were his second language, but it was the only one he had. He spoke in what my son Adrian tells me is called ‘slur’, which is a slack-mouthed Belgravia cockney that contrives to make mice out of mouse and dispenses almost entirely with the formality of pronouns. It has a vocabulary, naturally: nothing rises but it escalates, no opportunity is without a window, no minor event occurs that is not sensational. It also has a pedantic inaccuracy which is supposed to distinguish it from the unwashed, and explains gems like ‘as for you and I’.

And since the early 1990s, le Carré’s novels have registered his growing dismay at, on the one hand, the bungling or ignoring of opportunities for the great powers to act less thoughtlessly, particularly in the developing world, and, on the other, the strange accents and linguistic abuses of the rapacious new elite. Perhaps the idea, as Cyril Connolly writes of Eminent Victorians, is to make his points in ‘the language through which the bourgeois ear’ might be ‘lulled and beguiled’. But the results are jarring..."

To what extent then interpreting what is being written and read affects for better or for worse "the least intentionally meant message" yet expected but "filtered" as it were by our own voice?
Certainly not by any computer that does not scan for accent or even less so for semantics, only cold and impersonal syntax good for general knowledge.

Marco Rossi

Comments

[Aniruddha G. Kulkarni]

In India, if you wish to be understood correctly while communicating in English, you have to be sensitive to Hinglish.

Most times we speak and understand correctly only Hinglish.

In coming years and decades, Indian native tongues will profoundly impact British English far more than what they have so far.

Within India, Hindi, thanks to Bollywood, has already affected India's other native tongues and some experts predict death of some of them- as full fledged languages- at the hands of Hindi.

[Colin McNeill]

In response to Daniel Taghioff's comment there is a lot going on here. Syntax is interesting and worth exploring for its own sake but I am not sure that Prospect has anything to gain.

The additional semantic content contributed by choice of syntax normally exists as a sort of aura around the core meaning of the word or phrase. But the core meaning can be less clear the greater the ‘social distance’ in syntactic style between agent and recipient. Broader context too affects meaning. But I find the corporate ethos that shines through the pages of Prospect fine for the purpose of communication and it need not, should not, be tampered with. Use argot by all means to communicate with those who speak and think in that way. If syntax ‘ain’t broke’ don’t fix it. On second thoughts you might employ what you learn to address readership sub-groups.

So much for the means. What about ends, perhaps long running Prospect themes. Perceived identity can be a matter of life and death when people feel threatened in some way – we are reminded of this every day on the media. So if Prospect through its readership and social reach were to encourage research into how this seemingly intractable ‘hated out-group’ problem might be better managed there could be a global payoff.

[Daniel Taghioff]

One of the great problematics in the social sciences is where to locate the core of meaning and interpretation.

Media studies has mostly settled on texts, many Marxists on social structure leading to ideology and so on...(and on...)

Syntax is one level to look at in the fixation of meaning, but if one goes to see a comedian in action, it becomes clear that timing can be used to transform meanings that may or may not be fixed my syntax, and ambiguity has an important role in that.

There is no easy relatonship between structures and interpretations of any sort. Most people learn how to read 'texts' or structures in relation to fairly specific sets of social practices.

Reading the Prospect is subtly different from reading the Guardian or the Sun, and different again from reading television or the instructions on a packet of antibiotics.

The ways that we learn to read are even more varied when you consider spatial, national or cultural variations.

When massages are produced, audiences are imagined, and when messages are read, authors are imagined, and these imaginings are set in various imagined contexts of producing and reading texts.

What this means is that communication fundamentally cannot be guarunteed by any core set of princples: Commonality of mind is something always partially achieved in a context of shifting and historically specific social practices.

Just think about the people closest to you, how long you have been communicating with them, and how often have they surprise you in how they understand you, or vice versa.

There are no guarantees that our minds are one with one another.

It would be very nice if we were to achieve some sense of living as a species on a planet , which we are all responsible for, and all had an (equal!) right to, but that is not something easily achieved, this is not something we will all naturally converge on through rational debate.

Which leads me to a question: Where are the global spaces of public debate? Where does opinion formation go on at a Global scale? And how does the "syntax" of these types of practices form, support and constrain the ways in which we can see ourselves as a collective?

[Colin McNeill]

Semantics is more important than syntax. People seem to be reasonably adept at understanding, for example, the shorthand of text messages. The greater the need for clarity and precision of meaning the more important it is that all involved use a common standardised syntax. But the real difficulty lies in an agent getting across, particularly by means of the written word, with the minimum of ambiguity, what he meant, what was in his mind. Each word and phrase will be personalised carrying meaning the agent has given it, fine tuned by education, coloured by personal experience and weighted by emotional tone. That is the meaning that the agent is attempting to transfer to the other emerges from the way the relevant subject matter is construed by the agent. That is what his take is on it given his worldview.

The meaning taken by the other will be filtered through her worldview and the length of the exchange necessary to achieve a 'meeting of minds' will be determined by a number of factors including the sharpness of wit of those involved, a shared language and facility in its use, patience, motivation to understand, time pressure and access to body language.

None of this is rocket science though I can be certain consensus on the matter is unlikely amongst Prospect readers. If this exposition is anywhere near the truth of the matter the challenge for John Kelly in honing the core purpose of the magazine is great indeed. Much has been achieved. Can we realistically expect further refinement? Given the success of his team so far in educating and entertaining open minded and eternally curious intellectuals he has whetted our appetite for an even more serious challenge.

Perhaps we could raise the standing of the intellectual damaged in the fall from grace of the academic by collaborating with the (intellectual?) mandarins and doers of this world to address some key problems facing the world today.

Personally as a veteran of some thirty years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland I would like to know if there is a better way of managing the pure hatred and awful bloody murder that can arise from ethnic self interest and culturally different values and beliefs than by resorting to terrorism and political fudgery. We can begin by recognising as Weinreich et al. (2003) puts it that "Primordialist sentiments have primacy as the basic lay perspective on nationality or ethnicity deriving from unquestioned primary identifications with one's kith and kin. People may subsequently develop situationalist perspectives when on reflection and experience they modify their basic primordialist experience."

In situations of great social uncertainty, stress and anxiety, people will be prone to retreat to the developmentally primary perspectives of primordialism. Great emotional intensity can be shown in the pursuit of the national or ethnic interest and unbelievable carnage result.

I, like Weinreich et al., would like to see the development of an inter-disciplinary conceptual framework addressing psychological, sociological and social anthropological concerns regarding ethnic phenomena in the socio-historical context. Established concepts might be reviewed and refined, new concepts developed. That task has begun.

Who better than Prospect to support and encourage such a task, to facilitate the birth of fresh ideas about managing our affairs on this planet. The evolution of primary identification with the Earth as home by all of the citizens of this world might be a start.

Reference; Weinreich,P., Bacova, V. and Rougier, N. (2003) 'Basic primordialism in ethnic and national identity' in Weinreich, P. and Saunderson,W. (Eds.) Analysing Identity, Cross Cultural, Societal and Clinical Contexts. Hove: Routledge.