Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox runs The World's language desk. He reports and edits stories about the globalization of English, the bilingual brain, translation technology and more. He also hosts The World's podcast on language, The World in Words.

From Cicero to Lynne Truss with Robert Lane Greene

April 14, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment
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As soon as I saw the new book by Robert Lane Greene You Are What You Speak, I know he and needed to speak. Not just because we both speak Danish (we didn’t even talk about that). It’s mainly because the book takes on so many of the same issues that I do in The World in Words podcast. It’s like the pod on steroids, done with proper research.

Underlying You Are What You Speak is a love of the relative chaos of language. We can’t predict, let alone control how language evolves, Greene argues, so why try? Well, it seems we can’t help ourselves.

Sometimes it’s governments that issue linguistic admonishments: France and Turkey have been especially active. Sometimes it’s individual armchair stylists: Cicero (“At some point…I relinquished to the people the custom of speaking, I reserved the knowledge [of correct grammar and pronunciation] to myself”); Strunk and White (“Do not join independent choices by a comma”); and Lynn Truss (“Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”). Of that lot, Turkey’s switch from Arabic to Roman script appears to have been the most successful. In France, the Académie française is admired but largely ignored. And most of the armchair stylists lose out to common usage. The more free, open and democratic a society is, the less it is likely to follow anyone else’s language rules.

Here in the United States, the Tea Party has embraced the English Only movement. This video, uploaded in 2007, has more than 14 million hits on YouTube, and the musicians have performed it at numerous Tea Party events:

This is just one way in which language is bound up in identity. Another is via the power of our mother tongue: how much does our first language set and restrict how we think, and how we perceive the world? Think of all those people who write in a second or third language.Lijia Zhang, who grew up in China, but writes in English, is convinced that her English self is different from her Chinese self. For one thing, Zhang says, she’s ruder in Chinese (the Big Show’s science podcaster Rhitu Chatterjee says the same of her native Bengali self).

Not only does English have words that don’t exist in Chinese, says Zhang. Also, writing in English frees her to say things that in her native tongue are taboo. She recalls a time in the 1980s when she met a young Chinese man “who I rather fancied.” She said to him, in English, “you look cool.” It was somehow OK to say that in English; had she said it in Chinese, it would have meant instant rejection and humiliation.

Now, that may have as much to do with memory and custom as it does with the instrinsic nature of English vs. Chinese. The words in Chinese were available to Zhang. They were just freighted with expectation and fear. In English, Zhang could be irresonsible, and blame it on the language.

Greene deals with this question of language and personality by citing a number of recent studies, some of which we’ve talked about in previous pods (here and here). In linguistic circles, the pendulum has swung back and forth between those who believe that language shapes thought, and those who argue that thought forms language.

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Discussion

6 comments for “From Cicero to Lynne Truss with Robert Lane Greene”

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QXVRJJPHWKO2GXSE2CKQ6X7UVE M

    What were the books Greene mentioned as encouraging everyone to read? I honestly could not catch the author(s?) or title(s?) he said. It was right at starting to talk about using cardinal directions in language.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for a very interesting podcast with topics close to my heart – as a native Belgian (Flemish, with French as a first foreign language), married to a German, living in Norway, learning Russian, Polish and Italian, I know what it feels like to “act” in several languages. I roughly agree with everything you discussed in this podcast. Just one remark as to the topic of “taking on another identity” when speaking a different language – I certainly don’t feel more logic when speaking German or more romantic when speaking French and so on, but I do adapt to the various cultures in non-verbal ways: I’ll make other – and more – gestures when speaking Italian or French, the body language in general will differ in some aspects, the pitch of my voice may change, the pace of speech will vary – e.g. Norwegian has a very high tolerance for breaks in the middle of sentences, whereas you would never be allowed to take a break in a German sentence without somebody else taking over the conversation, and so on. So those are aspects of the language and the culture that you start taking on when you’re getting more fluent in a language and which may make you feel a bit like “a different person” when switching between languages.And, actually, the more fluent you get, and certainly when your vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation have reached a level where native speakers start thinking you’re a native as well, you are not just allowed, but even forced to adapt in these ways as well, because otherwise you may be considered rude – a Norwegian would never think of an interruption mid-sentence as a language mistake: it will be considered rough and impolite.
    Kind regards,
    Marleen Laschet

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001668754073 Adin Eichler

    I guess I tend to lean in the Whorfian direction. Not only have I myself felt differently when speaking one of my other languages but others have also commented on that difference. I share Lijia Zhang’s experience relishing the capacity to express certain things in my other languages that I cannot express in my mother tongue, English; for example, the joy of intimacy that occurs when switching from Sie to Du in German, or dubbing a helpful friend a 菩萨 (púsà) in Chinese. Our experiences shape who we are and, if a language doesn’t allow certain experiences, then we are necessarily a “different person” when speaking that language. That’s my 2¢ worth right now. :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=542823611 Connie McClellan

    What bugs me about the Tea Party activists is that it seems like they have absolutely no idea how hard it can be to learn another language, especially if you’re not so young anymore. I tutor English conversation and often encounter older people who would like to learn English to become citizens. They really need an intensive English course conducted in their native language (or else an English-only course that is very skillfully designed) in order to start learning from a good foundation. There are schools and other resources around, but these are very expensive.

    Sometimes it seems that the people I am trying to tutor don’t really understand what a “foreign” language is in the first place – like little kids, they seem to believe they just need to learn a set of English words to swap with their native words: they have no idea that they are actually encountering a different grammar, syntax system, way of thinking about time, forms of address, etc. I truly respect their efforts, but wish there was some more help out there for them!

  • Miriam V.

    Hello, I am a student enrolled in an Intercultural Communications, course and here are a few of my thoughts on the topic. English can be the official language but people will still speak their own language. It seems that the people that want to make English the official language in every single state are scared that the minorities will take over in those states. It’s like they want to discourage people that come from other countries from living there. This does not seem right but it is what the thought sounds like.
    To become a citizen, now, the test has to be taken in English, this is not a problem to me because if you want to be a citizen of a country then you should know the language in that country, at least enough to communicate. I know that if a person wants to be a naturalized citizen and take the test in Spanish, the person has to be over a certain age and have had their green card for about 15 years, this is reasonable because older people cannot learn a language as easily as younger people. The thing about not issuing driver’s tests in Spanish is something that i do not like, because the main thing a person needs to know when driving is how to read a sign and how to stay between the lines. Signs are pictures, pictures are not English or Spanish or French or German, the way you process them in your head is where language comes in, how to switch lanes or make right/left turns is all in your head, in your own language and that is the basics of what a person needs to learn to be able to drive without crashing. The ban on issuing official documents in a foreign language is not a huge problem in my opinion because they are official and the language in the United States is English. If an official document needs to be submitted to another country, then a notarized certified translation by a competent translator can be requested to accompany the document.
    For a person that knows more than one language there are more opportunities open to that person, he/she could become a translator in many different types of offices in different fields, it’s great.
    “Could you please speak English?” I didn’t have a very nice response to that comment but people need to accept that there are other languages growing in the United States besides English and that they are not going to go away because people will be immigrating to this country and other countries for many, many decades to come.
    I am lucky to know both English and Spanish because I learned English in school growing up and I learned Spanish from my parents at home. Some people that do not grow up with their language at home do learn it later in life and I think that is awesome.