The Prodigal Tongue

Just finishing up the book The Prodigal Tongue by Mark Abley. It is a really good read, put together along themes built around the author's travels around the world. Indeed, the book is kind of put together like a travel memoir, with each chapter not only based in a place, but also based around a concept of the changing nature of the English language.

He travels not only the "English-speaking" world, but also large swaths of the geography of the English language itself, starting with dictionaries and the creation of new words, the amazing vibrancy of "Asian English" (i.e., English spoken in Singapore), the infusion of English into other languages, the "special case" of Japan, the interplay of English and Español in Los Angeles, the influence of rap and R&B on US and world English, possible future trends in English, the impact of cyberspace on English communication, and finally the "usability" of English. In all, it's quite a heavy-hitting trek through the world of spoken (and written) English of the early 2000s (and even then, only a small part of it).

Some interesting things that he writes come up as truisms to me, especially when I recall those days when I was in highschool in Taiwan and traveled to other countries in Southeast Asia. Listening to the clipped tones of spoken English - complete with borrowed words and grammar - brought those sounds vividly to my mind as I read thinks like this:

"Your mouth is your tiger" - so says a Malay proverb. Given the sheer number of people in the region and the tigerish leap of their economies, it's possible that far in the future, Standard English will reflect an Asian norm rather than an Anglo-American one. Think of how syllables are stressed. In Britain, Australia and North America, variations in verbal stress are crucial to how people speak - the rythm of songs and poems depends on it. To a Western ear, the result sounds oddly percussive. That doesn't mean wrong.

The absence of word-ending consonants can also disconcert. One day in Singapore I overheard a young man talking on his handphone to a past, present or future girlfriend. "You want me to repect you?" he asked. Except that it sounded closer to "Ya wa'me ta respe'ya?" In the unlikely event that an American were to ask "Got or not?" a Singaporean would probably hear "Gawd er nawd?" But an American listening to a Singaporean might hear "Gah'ah'nah?" If this sounds peculiar today, it may seem natural to our grandchildren. Beauty is in the ear of the listener.

Having grown up for part of my childhood in Japan, having Japanese family members, and having studied Japanese in school, the chapter on English in Japan (Chapter 5: "Hippu Hangu") held more than a few topics that confirmed many of the things that I had remembered, as well as gave me a new insight into the Japan that had developed since I left it. For example, in order to discuss some of the psychological setting in which Japanese finds itself - in a world replete with English - Abley needed to first describe the condition of the grammar:

For all the complications and elaborations of its script, spoken Japanese can be extremely concise. Pronouns are usually implied, not stated. Take the following brief exchange: "Did you go to the movie with Kazuki?" "Yes, I went." In Japanese, this might be rendered as "Kazuki to eiga e itta no?" "Un, itta yo." A literal translation would read: "Kazuki with movie to went that?" "Yes, went, final particle." Apart from its role as a name, kazuki can signify "pleasant peace" or, when written with different kanji, "shining one." Words look unseasy on their own. Conttext is everything.

All of which begins to explain why the Japanese can appear so opaque to outsiders. "Eloquence is not one of the virtues people have been encouraged to cultivate," Masayoshi Shibatani writes in his book The Languages of Japan. "In fact, persuasion of others by means of linguistic skills is largely discouraged as direct confrontation in general is avoided ... It is the person's ability to arrive at an intended conclusion rather than the persuader's logical presentation that is evaluated. Thus, one who does not get the point by merely hearing hints is considered a dull person." From Periclean Athens to Hide Park Corner, the European tradition of rhetoric has aimed at convincing a listener by force of logic and argument. Japan's tradition is one that cherishes nuance and tolerates ambiguity, inviting a listener to come up with an implied meaning. If a man says that a woman is kirei, is he praising her beauty, her purity or her cleanlisness - or some combination of those attributes?

...

Foreigners who strive to master Japanese are often baffled by its remarkable system of keigo, or polite speech. Its rules place vocabulary at the mercy of social context. "Will X come to Osaka tomorrow?" seems a simple question. But depending on the setting, the speaker, the person being addressed and the person being asked about, it could be posed in more than twenty ways. Identity in Japan is fluid, open-ended, almost shockingly changeable. A male teacher might call himself watakushi (I, formally), boku (I, informally), ore (I, intimately or vulgarly), otosan (I as a father, talking to my children), sensei (I as a teacher, talking to my class), ojisan (I as an uncle, talking to other children) or niisan (I as an older brother).

With regard to the (apparently) still-popular trend of using random English on Japanese items of clothing (kind of like how Westerners like to use random Chinese and Japanese on clothing and tattoos), Abley shares this piece of insight:

... Once you start reading other people's clothing, it's hard to stop. Hard for me, anyway. A young blood in the station sported a T-shirt with the slogan The Sea Roars a Lullaby. Another T-shirt mysteriously declared: Happy Endless Bivis. ... For decades, sentences like these went by the name Japlish; but .. another name has recently come to the fore: Engrish. Websites are devoted to it. Engrish, like Japlish, cna refer to gnarled gobbets of language from all across East Asia. ... Why do they make such blunders anyway?

There are, as it happens, three good reasons. The main one is that English often functions simply as a design element in Japanese products. The words are not intended to carry any precise meaning - or rather, the meaning they're out to convey is that the product in question is hip, cool, ultranew. If you're manufacturing a T-shirt, the sea may as well roar a lullaby as murmer a pandemonium. A second reason is that in matters of grammer and phonetics, as well as vocabulary and social context, the differences between English and Japanese are huge. ... And third, some apparently inexplicable errors can be traced back to mistranslation. Why would a Japanese package of coffee have the name Ease Your Bosoms? The answer, almost certainly, is an inept rendering of the English phrase "Take a load off your chest."

There are many more interesting chapters and insights, but I'm not going to type them out here. (After all, I have to finish the book!) But if you are interested in learning about the breadth of the usage of English in today's world, then check out this book.