Language Prescription. Группа авторов
matter – neither trumps the other; hence my call for us to temper, without necessarily abandoning, our rejection of a prescriptivism that plays its role in ensuring a cohesive political discourse while inevitably leaving some by the wayside as collateral damage. Lord Monboddo quipped that Hume died confessing, not his sins, but his Scotticisms. Were those constitutive or regulative rules? Surely both, which is to say: hybrids. Sins and Scotticisms can be conceived of as weaknesses of the flesh, if one prescribes Southern English forms as uniquely standard. Both can carry positive value, if your desired identity is as a Scot, or a Satanist – although the term Scotticisms implies that you are speaking English with Scots indices. If it is Scots to whom you are speaking, the number of Scotticisms will be zero, although you may have Anglicisms to confess.
Also, talking about sins can lead us into another dimension of prescriptivism, that against taboo language – language that is bawdy, an adjective that derives from the noun body. Already in the 18th century we find complaints about ‘compulsive swearing’, which is attributed to ‘habit’, a naturalizing, physicalizing characterization of behaviour that an individual Subject should be able to overcome with an effort of mental will.13 Language standards are in general defined in opposition to ways of speaking too directly connected to the Nature of the body, as opposed to the mind (see Joseph, 2017b, 2018). Mind–body is another polarized dyad that will not prove sustainable. Recent approaches to the embodiment of mind and language give us a useful framework for understanding what it is that language standards aim to suppress.
Pullum (2004 [2006]) notes that prescriptive rules are ‘reminiscent of the vacillating motivations for old-fashioned sex advice to the young. Don’t touch yourself down there, it’s dirty, you’ll go blind, it saps your strength, it’ll ruin you for marriage, it’s unhealthy, it’s immature, it’s immoral, it’s forbidden in the Bible.’ This is an astute observation. Rather than expose the prescriptivist emperor in his nakedness, though, it helps us to understand the power of these hybrid rules through which society exerts its control over nature, control that is neither complete nor non-existent.
Proposition 6: Anti-Prescriptivism is Irreconcilable with Linguists’ Concern for Endangered Languages and Racial Equality
Your average Jo the Linguist pays lip service to vanishing linguistic diversity and may even set up programmes to teach minority languages in places where bilingualism is transitioning to monolingualism in a national or world language. Her concern is not consonant with the laissez-faire approach she takes when it comes to prescriptivism. Descriptivism means standing back, not getting involved; but concern for endangered languages involves value judgements about linguistic and cultural diversity, often combined with moral judgements about the forces thought to be behind the language shift.
Of course, diversity, even if reduced, is never wholly lost. The world language that is being shifted to can take on its own identity value in its local form. Its recognition as a new language may not require, but is certainly much propelled by, the publication of grammars and dictionaries that describe, and by implication prescribe, norms of usage (see Joseph, 2014).
In a conference at the University of York in June 2017, I spoke with a group of Hong Kong natives doing doctorates in various fields, for whom the Umbrella Movement of 2014 was their political awakening, entailing a questioning of who they are in terms of identity, Chinese or Hongkongese. The movement’s name signifies a disruption in the supposed unity of written Chinese. That unity is a cultural topos with particular power on the mainland, where there is less awareness of the use of traditional characters in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan instead of the simplified characters of the mainland. There is also less awareness of the fact that Hong Kongers sometimes deliberately write in ways that embody lexical and syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin.
The standard written Chinese word for umbrella is 伞 săn. This is the simplified character; its traditional equivalent is 傘 saan3, which one would expect to be used in Hong Kong Cantonese, but in fact the Hong Kong word for umbrella is 遮 ze1, which also means ‘cover’.14 When police launched a baton and tear gas charge against anti-government protesters in 2014, the protesters opened their umbrellas in defence. One of the locations of this conflict was 遮打 ze1 daa2 ‘Chater’ Road, named for Sir Catchick Paul Chater, a 19th century British philanthropist of Armenian descent. Following the usual practice, the Chinese name for the road was made up using two characters that sound like the two syllables of Chater’s name, without regard to their meaning. In this case, the literal meaning of 遮打 ze1 daa2 is ‘cover hit/beat’ or, in Hong Kong Cantonese, ‘umbrella for protection against a beating’ – but that is opaque to speakers of Mandarin. 遮打 ze1 daa2 was adopted as the name of what is called in English the Umbrella Movement or Revolution. It signifies the autonomy of Hong Kong culturally, and by extension politically, and it does this in the supposedly unified writing system which is invoked as a cultural justification for absorbing Hong Kong into the People’s Republic of China rather than granting it independence.
Talking with the postgraduate students at York was an occasion to witness people discussing the use of language prescriptivism to strengthen their national identity in pursuit of political freedom. One of them asked, ‘How can we ever achieve independence when we can’t even agree on a name for ourselves? Hongkongers? Hongkongese? Hong Kong something else?’ They considered how they might increase the distance between written Cantonese and standard written Chinese, to capture more fully the syntactic differences between Cantonese and Mandarin that generally get brought into line in writing. The linguists and non-linguists among them all recognized that performing linguistic difference, against the currently prescribed norm but in ways that will become the new prescription, is crucial to their future and their children’s.
In the ‘Black English trial’ (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District) that took place in my native Michigan in 1979, William Labov helped to persuade the court that Black English has a regular structure, rather than just being a cover term for haphazard errors in Standard English. And therefore, its speakers should have the same educational rights the US Supreme Court had granted to second language speakers five years earlier (see Joseph, 2017b; Labov, 1982). This liberation was achieved not by deconstructing prescriptivism, a strategy unlikely to have swayed the Court, but by extending the basic principle of prescriptivism to a nonstandard form of English. Treating its rules neither as thin constitutive ones nor thin regulative ones, but thick hybrid ones – showing that there are right and wrong ways of speaking it – made Black English a language in the legal sense.
Educational systems are bound up with languages. Population movements over centuries have led to a small number of languages carrying particular economic advantages and social and educational power. Linguists’ interventions in the choices made by minority language communities are important, and it is often the case that getting recognition and respect for their languages as being real languages means showing that they have norms of usage that are prescriptive in nature, that are teachable and testable. Our interventions need to be done with sensitivity and thought, not in a polarized way that denies the language community’s right to define its own well-being, its own basic values, and to not have these prescribed to them – even when what they seek from us is support for a prescriptivism that goes against our descriptivist grain.
To conclude: Hume’s Guillotine is based on the belief that descriptions should be value neutral. Yet Hume’s own argument shows how deceptive this is – how descriptions can in fact contain value judgements, and perhaps cannot escape doing so when it is human behavioural norms that are being described. I have tried to show how our linguistic descriptions tend to involve a selection or hierarchization with an evaluative dimension that means we are dealing with thick concepts. We are not, in other words, the polar opposite of prescriptivists. In our thickness, we and they overlap. Anti-prescriptivism is a relic of purifying tendencies that we think we have generally moved beyond. I call upon my fellow linguists to recognize our own covert prescriptivism; to ponder the significance of languages being Saussurean systems of value; and to embrace our hybridity. Hopefully.
Notes
(1)I am very grateful to the editors of this volume and to other colleagues for comments and discussion which helped to clarify issues raised in the following pages, both at the 2017 Prescriptivism Conference