Being taught rules of your own language
take, say, Italy today or Germany today. I mean the difference is among the things that we call German are enormous, so enormous as to lead to non-mutual intelligibility. You have to learn the national language when you go to school. It’s a different language than the one you spoke at home. What happens is, between generations, there are usually small changes, having to do with other influences from the outside and so on. These things are cumulative, sometimes they lead to pretty dramatic changes. When we talk about language change, that’s very misleading, it’s like predicting the weather. There’s just too many things going on. Human life is a pretty complicated affair.
The closer i get to the border between France and Germany, would the closer the languages become?
Well, first of all, you’re assuming the French is so different from German. If you go from say, Paris to Rome as you go towards the Italian border it starts to sound more like Italian, and at some points it becomes Italian. By now there’s enough national unity and so on so you can really find the border, but if you go back a little ways, there was no border. it was just a– I wouldn’t say a continuum, it just constantly changes and fluctuations and variations. You started speaking one thing in one place and another thing in another place and they’re not mutually intelligible often. But along the way there all sorts of changes. In France, this position is kind of extreme. In fact, if you go back to its origins, it’s even probably comical. I don’t know if anybody has actually studied it, but if you go back to say the eighteenth century and you read say, Diderot, he says France is going to be the language of science, and German and English will be the language of literature. The reason for this is that French is very clear. In France, the words follow the order of the thoughts whereas, in German and English, the words don’t quite follow the words of the thoughts. French is good to telling the truth because of it later it came to be called it’s Gallic lucidity and clarity, whereas German and English, maybe Italian, they’re good languages for telling fantasies and falsehoods, so that’ll be the languages for literature. It’s a sought of naive point of view but you can what was going on in his head, for him, the words in French follow the order of thoughts. When you hear German it seems all confused. And I suspect that the mythology of the purity and lucidity and clarity of French goes back to ideas of that kind. After all, French culture had a certain dominance and appeal for a long time so these attitudes get established and some of them may have prestige associates with them. For example, some of them may be a speech of a conquering group, or a wealthy group, or a priestly caste, or one thing or another. And we may decide, ” OK, those are the good ones and some other ones are bad ones.” But if social and political relations were reversed, we’ll make the opposite conclusion.
But that raises an interesting question; Why does language have rules? Why were we taught these rules in grade school?
Well, when you’re taught rules of your own language in grade school, the chances are very strong that what you’re being taught is false. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have to be taught it.
I can see every grade school teacher about to throw you an orange jar on the screen.
Well, let me be a little new-ranch. One of the things you learn in grade school is the literary language. Now, in English, the literary standard is not so radically different from what, say, you and I grew up with, but it’s somewhat different. The literary standard is not what I learned in the streets. When i went to school, I was taught the literary standard. The literary standard has some principles associated with it, some of which are those of a real language. Some of which are completely artificial, they were made up by people who’ve had crazy ideas about language. The reason you have to teach them is because they are not the person’s language. Your actual language, nobody teaches you. You don’t learn it any more than you learn to see. The fact is that the system that grows in that brain is sometimes different from a system which is regarded for whatever reason as necessary or appropriate, or something, some prestige dialect, and it may be different from what grew in your brain and typically is. So what we call good English is a system which is partly artificial, I should say what is taught to people because it was legislated to be good English. You ask the question, “Why do you have to teach people?” Well, you have to teach them because it’s artificial, its’s not their language