Watch your language
Dear Jean,
In your Reith lectures on BBC radio last year, and in several of your books, you have eloquently taken sides in the debate between purists and liberals in the vexed matter of language change. By "purists" I mean those who deprecate what they see as falling standards in the use of English, by "liberals" those who see language change as natural and benign. You lend your academic authority to the latter, so conferring respectability on split infinitives, terminal prepositions and other features of usage disliked by the former. Your argument is that such change is a natural and inevitable feature of the evolution of language.
I am unpersuaded by your evolutionary model, and do not agree that language change is invariably benign; I therefore invite your comments on the following points.
You acknowledge that we know nothing of the origins of language, but argue that we understand much about its evolution, because we are able to draw on empirical evidence provided by pidgins (languages developed as a communicative convenience between speakers of different languages) and creoles (pidgins that have become the first languages of pidgin-speakers' children). An example of Tok Pisin ("talk pidgin") is: lukaut: planti switpela kaikai i save bagarapim tit hariap means "look out: lots of sweet food will ruin your teeth quickly"-saying the words rapidly makes their sense clear.
Relying on pidgins to illuminate linguistic evolution might, however, be a mistake. They do not clarify linguistic evolution because they do not recapitulate it. Instead, they provide examples of a different process, one that can only begin from an already evolved language, namely, linguistic degeneration. For pidgins are corruptions-in the sense of simplifying adaptations-of existing languages.
In the notable poverty of their expressive capacity, therefore, pidgins should trouble those who, like you, take the liberal view of language change. Liberals, remember, do not mind the disappearance of distinctions and the simplification of grammatical forms, even those that mark logical differences. This tendency is what, in the extreme, produces pidgins: simple clumsy languages with reduced capacity for nuance, detail, abstraction and precision. For these features, a pidgin has to become a creole, and begin the evolutionary ascent to greater expressive power. Perhaps the fullest realisation of the latter occurs only when a creole yields a literature.
The moral you draw from your account of linguistic evolution-that language change is natural and inevitable-should not therefore obscure what is at stake in this other debate. For, as the example of pidgin shows, not all change is benign.
Let it be agreed that language change is natural. This unexceptionable fact does not entail that we can, still less should, be unreflective about language use. Consider an example. Some years ago cuts in London bus services were explained in notices whose text concluded: "So, the buses will run smoother, with less delays." In its context this sentence is perfectly clear. But it is a logical farrago, for the point concerned the smooth running not of the buses but of the bus services. For accuracy of the legal, philosophical and literary kinds, "more smoothly" is required in place of "smoother," and the elided noun "services" is needed, yielding "the bus services will run more smoothly." Moreover, since "delays" is a count noun, not a mass term, "fewer" is required in place of "less." With these corrections the chief threat to language's communicative capacity, namely ambiguity, can be avoided.
Linguistic evolution is not always what it seems. Spoken forms change constantly in unstable ways; written forms change more stably, and educated speech moves with it. An "Estuary" speaker of today would barely comprehend Victorian slang; a cockney in Wellington's army would not easily understand his predecessor in Marlborough's army. Yet because there is more continuity in educated discourse, we read Dryden and Hazlitt with ease, and would converse freely with a resurrected Locke or Coleridge. The reason is that a mature language is one that carries its history with it, chiefly in its literature, and careful users are reluctant to lose the expressive power thus accumulated. This is not conservatism; it accepts that languages change, but argues that change need not be at the expense of accuracy and subtlety.
Endeavouring to use language well is like training for sporting achievement. It is one of the chief instruments of human intercourse, and merits care. Anything that enriches it is positive change. Negative change consists in the loss of distinctions, diminution of vocabulary and ossification of forms as exemplified by pidgins.
Yours sincerely,
AC Grayling
26th March 1997
Very best wishes,
With best wishes,
Dear Anthony,
I read your letter with astonishment. You made some fairly bizarre and intolerant comments about language, and also partially mispresented my own views. Is there any common ground? Yes, I applaud a sentence from your last paragraph: "Endeavouring to use language well is like training for sporting achievement." How true! Yet you and I disagree profoundly over what "using language well" entails.
But let us first get pidgins out of the way. Pidgins are not corruptions of an existing language. That is what people used to think. Pidgins arise when two groups who do not have a common language devise for themselves a novel, rule-governed hybrid. Pidgins demonstrate brilliantly the human ability to impose order on chaos, how speakers adapt words and combine them in new, orderly ways. The result is a set of rules which are different both from those in the main lexifier (vocabulary providing) language, and from the other linguistic source(s). Tok Pisin from Papua New Guinea takes much of its vocabulary from English, but it contains additional non-English niceties, such as a distinction between so-called "we inclusive" yumi "I and you who are present," and "we exclusive" mipela "I and others not present." English could be regarded as crude, in that it fails to register this useful nuance. So please stop thinking of pidgins as providing "evidence of degenerative linguistic change." That really is an outmoded viewpoint. True, pidgins are not yet full languages, but are capable of becoming so, when the next generation acquires the pidgin as a first language. At that stage, the system is technically a "creole," and gradually acquires the accoutrements of any full language, as is the case with creolised Tok Pisin, which now has complex linguistic constructions and a growing literature.
But now to your main argument, that we should accept "positive change" and reject "negative change." I find it impossible to distinguish between a change which is "benign," and one which is not. Languages change, just as whale songs change every year, and nobody can make reliable value judgements, although they can have personal preferences. For example, the novelist Kingsley Amis expressed a dislike for belly, kids and parameter(s)––the latter he found "repulsive," but he viewed f*** with equanimity (the asterisks are mine). And you have your own personal foibles. You dislike split infinitives, something which worries some people but not others. Even the great Henry Watson Fowler split the occasional infinitive in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926).
You say "careful users of a language are reluctant to lose the increments in expressive power that its evolution has given." Yet language is like a thermostat. It preserves its power and its patterns by sometimes adding, sometimes neatening. As you point out, less is slowly replacing fewer, although in the interim, both are used. Does this really affect expressive power? I suggest not. The meaning is clear either way.
For myself, I do not assume "anything goes." I distinguish between the language usages I study and those I personally use. As a professional linguist observing language, I am a non-judgemental onlooker. But when I use language myself, I employ words appropriate to the situation. I would not say "Shut up!" to the chairperson at an Oxford meeting, however aggravating or longwinded she or he may be, just as I would not arrive wearing a bikini.
Above all, I care about clarity, and sometimes revise chapters I write a dozen times or more. I aim at effective communication. That often means forgetting about some of those strange archaic prohibitions found in old grammar and etiquette books. Of course, it is amusing to sometimes explore where pedants got them all from. But let's have fewer grumbles, or less grumbles, or maybe a few less grumbles. We all want our buses, and our language, to run smoother, or more smoothly. We can understand each other well whichever of these wordings we choose.
Yours sincerely,
Jean Aitchison
29th March 1997
Dear Jean,
An example of positive change is vocabulary growth. Borrowings and neologisms, the appropriation into general use of technical terms and especially apt or colourful slang, all add to a language's range and power. Negative change is exemplified by diminution of vocabulary and loss of distinctions (as with "less" and "fewer," which matters because an important difference between mass and count concepts-between stuffs and things-is thereby blurred).
A good example of negative change is the fate of the adjective "nice." Once available to describe something fine, subtle or sharp-as in an acute observation, a barely discernible distinction, the cutting edges of a knife or a cold wind-it has collapsed into a generic positive adjective: "a nice man-a nice meal-a nice day." And this is where value judgements apply. Communication is one of language's primary functions; even for mundane purposes, a degree of clarity helps us communicate better than if the expressions we use are baggy and fuzzy. "A pleasant and conversable man-a tasty, satisfying meal-a sunny day" are more informative, and therefore more valuable than "nice." When the contentful expressions for which "nice" does portmanteau duty fall into disuse, the language is impoverished.
Loss of expressive power results when more semantically refined linguistic forms are displaced by cruder forms. This is well illustrated by the pidgin example you give in trying to prove the opposite. You cite the Tok Pisin distinction between yumi ("you-me") and mipela ("me-fellow") and say that English lacks such a distinction and therefore compares unfavourably. But of course the distinction can be made in English; which "we" is meant is distinguishable by context or paraphrase. Much more to the point, whereas Tok Pisin is limited to these two dedicated expressions, English has scores of alternatives. For yumi an English speaker can say "you and me; we two; the two of us; the pair of us; both of us; we as a couple" and so on; and for mipela English can tell us whether the plurality denoted is me and my colleagues, me and my countrymen, me and my ancestors, and so on again. The yumi example aligns pidgins to those languages restricted to "one, two three, many" counting systems and colour terminologies limited to "red, white and black."
Indeed you explicitly acknowledge as much. "True, pidgins are not yet full languages," you say. But remember, they are derived from full languages; they are diminutions of, and therefore derogations from, full languages; and as such-as yumi beautifully shows-they illustrate how language can change negatively. We agree that creoles represent an evolutionary return towards full languagehood; they, accordingly, are examples of positive change.
You quote my bus notice case and claim that "we can understand each other well whichever of these wordings we choose." My example illustrated that this is not always so; which is why, for the cases where (to adapt your image) one would not wear a linguistic bikini, one should keep the language's wardrobe well supplied with other garments.
We cannot make value judgements about language change, you say; which implies that there are no standards. But your bikini remark implies that there are indeed standards, at very least of appropriateness. My argument is that appropriateness includes clarity, accuracy and expressiveness. I am reminded of a pair of judgements I recently heard about a play; one person said: "It was gripping, startling, moving"; the other said: "It was, like, wow!" The contrast illustrates the moral. Some language change is positive, some negative; both imply that there are standards worth observing.
You say that you cannot distinguish between positive and negative linguistic change, and that no one can make reliable value judgements about which of these adjectives applies to a language's inevitable changes. Perhaps I can help you on the former point, and show that your latter point is incorrect. Both relate to our disagreement over pidgins.
AC Grayling
2nd April 1997
Dear Anthony,
I find your viewpoint extraordinary. You, as a philosopher, follow the tradition of John Locke, the 17th century thinker who regarded language as a water pipe, "the great conduit, whereby men convey their discoveries, reasoning and knowledge to one another." This metaphor was apparently inspired by London's recently installed water supply, and water pipes need to be leak-free.
But the water pipe image is a false one. Language is innately guided behaviour. Like birdsong, it is biologically based. Flexibility and open-endedness are inbuilt, so change is inevitable. It is as futile to condemn this as it is to complain that tadpoles change into frogs.
Anxiety about "negative changes" is unwarranted. Such linguachondria ("language hypochondria") is a hangover partly from Locke, and partly from 19th century pedants. In the last century, language change was a mysterious process. A widespread "for want of a nail" view existed: "for want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost," and so on. Fears were expressed that language (and morals!) would collapse unless linguistic minutiae were preserved. "With every impoverishing or debasing of personal or national life goes hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language," thundered the archbishop of Dublin, Richard Chevenix-Trench. Your comment that "loss of expressive power results when more semantically refined linguistic forms are replaced by cruder forms" is in line with this old tradition.
Language change of all types is normal and natural. Variants creep in. Fluctuation follows, then the new is likely to oust the old. But language never breaks down. It is homeostatic, it keeps itself in check, repairing its patterns. Value judgements are irrelevant.
But value judgements can be made about language users. Sensitive users are aware both of their audience and of their language's resources: they adjust their speech accordingly. You gave two responses to a play: one was pompous and fairly formal, an appropriate comment to an elderly colleague, or in a written review; the other was informal, spoken language, which might be used (even by me!) if I was chatting to a young nephew, and commenting, say, on a double back somersault performed on stage.
Sensitive users are also observant. They notice which words are changing their meaning. Nice has become wider in scope, as you say. A mature speaker is aware of this, and would use one of many alternatives: enchanting, fab, joyous, pleasurable, or even "Wow!". Laments about the change are pointless.
A desire for rigid meanings is backward-looking ignorance, or simple laziness: a refusal to explore the resources of the language. It is a characteristic of ageing, insensitive speakers. Judging from your own writing, I would not place you in that category. But then, people's views on language rarely correlate with their own usage.
With best wishes,
Jean Aitchison
4th April 1997
Dear Jean,
Languages indeed change over time; on this we agree. Do you agree that much change is beneficial-for example, enrichment of vocabulary? I ask because you appear to argue that all change is neutral because "natural." Are all things natural-for example, diseases-neutral in value? If you agree there can be beneficial changes, why not the reverse?
You say "language is innately guided behaviour." Does this mean we need not reflect on our uses of it? You implied that you do so reflect; and talk of "sensitive uses." To what end? Surely, to use language well. That implies better and worse uses. If the worse uses take root do we just shrug our shoulders?
Language is our chief instrument of thought and social intercourse. Instruments well kept perform their task better than if rusty and blunted. Language indeed changes, and as reflective users of it we often encourage that change to meet new needs. By the same token, we can, and should, resist the growth of sloppiness, imprecision and stunting. Can you seriously disagree?
Very best wishes,
AC Grayling
8th April 1997
Dear Anthony,
Language change, which includes vocabulary growth and decay, is a fact of life. Whether it can enrich a language, or detract from it, is a value judgement of a type I do not make. It is like asking me if a tadpole is "enriched" as it starts growing feet, or a tree is "impoverished" as it sheds its leaves.
Individual users differ in their ability to use language, partly because efficient, lucid communication takes time and thought. So pardon me if I cease this exchange in order to polish a lecture.
Jean Aitchison
