Book: The Power of Language

A 2023 book on how the language (or languages) we speak influence how we think, how we see the world, how we navigate life.

This subject fascinates me.  I have a book of aphorisms that cannot be translated. I have a book on the vagaries of translating poetry. I have several sci-fi short stories about trying to understand alien civilizations who evolved under totally alien conditions. "It's a cookbook!" "Solyent Green is people!" The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

This author, Viorica Marian (a Romanian by birth) starts out with the story of the Japanese premier Suzuki responding to the West's demand that he surrender unconditionally late in WWII.  His response, mokusatsu, was translated as "the request is not worth responding to." A more likely translation would have been "we remain silent while we ponder the request."  As a result Hiroshima was bombed.

Language matters.

Language is the currency of thinking.

Unfortunately, the author uses the whole first chapter to tell you she speaks three languages.  She grew up in Romanian, learned Russian out of necessity, and English out of convenience.

She is inordinately proud of this.

She spends the next four chapters detailing some rather dodgy science about how bilinguals and trilinguals have more gray matter than mere "monolinguals" (as she refers to them dismissively).  They live longer.  They age slower, they are more creative and their shit don't stink.

It gets a bit much.  Hopefully she'll stick to science in the last half of the book.

In chapter seven the author discusses dialects, how different regions can generate linguistically-distinct words, grammar and pronunciation. 

She talks about AAE, African American English, sometimes derogatorily referred to as Ebonics. Surprisingly AAE is remarkably consistent across many regions, and shares some grammatical features with West African languages, supposedly.

I've always had a problem with it myself.  People who speak AAE who are not Black are roundly criticized, which signals to me that it's not a real dialect. Many of the phrases and words signifying AAE are simple mispronunciations, like "axe" for "ask" or "libary" for "library" or "doze" and "dem" for "those" and "them."  Others are misuse of verb tenses, like "Frank be running" or "Tyrone work at the bar." Others are dropped articles, like "she my sister" or "he got game."

These strike me as less dialectical, and more propagated errors.  At what point does lack of education cross over into being a legitimate dialect?

Poor people in Appalachia (of any color) are often unintelligible to outsiders. If they wish to conduct business with the wider world however they quickly learn to modulate their speech.

Huckleberry Finn and Porgy and Bess parodied Negro speech patterns of the time, and it was widely recognized as evidence of the poor education of the descendants of slaves.  When did this become a valid dialect?

I suspect, without having researched it, that the purported ties to West African languages were created after the fact.  I somehow doubt that any vestiges of their native tongue remained ten generations later.

Mrs NoCo pointed out that highly educated African Americans, such as you see hosting nationwide television shows, can lapse in Ebonics quite easily when interviewing people from a lower educational bracket. Maybe learning to speak "the Queen's English" is a requirement for their job, but there should be no shame in lapsing into dialects when appropriate.

There are regional dialects in ASL, because, why wouldn't there be?

Quote :

There are some regional patterns in ASL syntax. For example, the ASL dialects spoken in the Northeastern United States tend to use more two-handed signs and involve more facial expressions, while the ASL dialects spoken in the Southern United States tend to use fewer facial expressions and rely more on body language.