![]() ![]() In my job as a technical editor, I am continually confronted by sentences that make no sense, written by people with advanced degrees. For the sake of his pidgin-speaking students, I hope he succeeds. Tonouchi may be pidgin’s Dante, trying to lift the stigma off a non-standard vernacular. It took the Roman Catholic Church until 1965 to abandon Latin and require that Mass be conducted in the local vernacular. Dante’s argument was validated, of course, by his creation of one of the glories of Western Civilization, The Divine Comedy-in Italian.ĭante’s argument echoes down the centuries to our own time. In the 13th century, the Italian poet Dante wrote a defense of his Italian vernacular over Latin as a medium for serious literature. Tonouchi is not the first to try to destigmatize a non-standard language. Trying fo’ write ‘english’ but end up writing stuff dat no even make sense.” ![]() You kinda wondah how kids come out li’dis. “das da voice dat comes most natural to dem. Not so when they are free to write in pidgin without worrying that their work is being graded. Tonouchi goes on to describe how his “pidgin” students often make no sense when they try to write standard English. Get studies dat show dis kine speech biases and discriminations, but I no need really look da studies, cuz I can see dis happening insai my classrooms…” “da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking. I wish I had space here to quote extensively from his piece because Tonouchi’s argument is compelling. ![]() Tonouchi’s pidgin seems humorous, but it’s an honest and serious attempt to break through “the hegemony of English.” In destigmatizing pidgin, Tonouchi hopes to end the prejudice against those who speak it. Tonouchi, an English teacher who has committed himself to writing entirely in pidgin. The essay, called “Da state of pidgin address,” is by Lee A. And it hasn’t replaced the Native Hawaiian, which is making a comeback, but is a language all its own, largely oral, and, as the author of the essay argues, one that has the virtue of being the way many of his students think and talk. Hawaiian Pidgin isn’t just a blend of Hawaiian and English it developed during the middle to late 19th century when laborers from countries including China, Portugal, Japan and the Philippines arrived to work on plantations and needed a common language. I’ve been thinking a lot about linguistic change since my son Harry, a linguistics student at the University of Hawaii, sent me a copy of an essay published in an academic journal and written entirely in Hawaiian Pidgin.Ī pidgin is a simplified form of a language such as English that emerges between peoples who don’t both speak it and which is characterized by simplified grammar and spelling, a simplified lexicon, and other irregularities. The songs change, but not the reason for singing. Older whales sang a different song, but as Chaucer would say, they fared in love as well as whales do now. After five years they’re all singing a whole new song. Over time the song changes as some phrases gets dropped and others added. Biologist Roger Payne’s famous study of humpback whale songs tells the same story: in one mating season the males all sing versions of a single song. (When it got tired of sounding like English, it moved to New Jersey.)īut Chaucer’s point is that, even though language changes, its function is always the same: to attract a mate, fall in love, and generally involve ourselves with one another, romantically and otherwise. In the century following Chaucer, the transition from Middle to Modern English was accompanied by The Great Vowel Shift, when English got tired of sounding like French and German and decided to sound like English. Chaucer’s words may look familiar, but they’re pronounced differently from ours. In Chaucer’s hands, the Middle English is as sonorous and lyrical as can be, its soft French vowels and precise German consonants shaped in the music of Chaucer’s poetry.īut listening to Middle English is even harder than reading it. The above lines are translated from Chaucer’s 14th-century Middle English, but I wish I could read you the original lines aloud. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |