We were talking about the CVS pharmacy chain at dinner the other night, and my 15-year-old son was extolling the stores’ amazing virtues, not least of which was that they seem to be found anywhere with a population over 500: “They have everything a person needs,” my son gushed. “Shampoo, aspirin, food, candy, magazines, wall-to-wall carpeting, and prescription drugs. And anywhere you go, every CVS is exactly the same!”
The English language could already be the CVS of the linguistic world: It’s got Latin, Sanskrit, Old Germanic, vocabulary from all over the globe, volumes from Shakespeare, American musical songs from Rogers & Hammerstein, rock and roll words, technology terms, old words with new meanings, new expressions with old words; and you can find English spoken just about everywhere; English is the common language of India and the corporate world in general; it is the principal language link between all foreigners; and it even serves as a link to people who speak the same language but with different accents, as in:
A French student of mine was once standing in line at the post office in Paris, while a man from the south of France was asking the clerk for what sounded like, “Taym-bra,” (instead of the more nasal standard French pronunciation of the word, “timbre”); the clerk, flustered, barked out, “Tell me in English!” and the southern French man immediately barked back, “Stamps!”
So, yes, in some ways English, like CVS, is wonderful -- convenient, safe, and certainly fills many needs. Still, aren’t we all a little disappointed when a store closes and we imagine what we’d love to see take its place … only to find out it’s another CVS (or bank or real estate office)?
At this point, most of us Americans take it for granted that people from other countries will most likely speak English, or at least be acquainted with it. And who can blame us? Think back to the Mayflower pilgrims for a minute. As the story goes, those pilgrims who survived that first horrible winter in the bitter wilds of the New World, where for thousands of years only thousands of Native American tribes had been living and speaking their tribal languages, were greeted in the spring by the Wampanoag native, Squanto -- who actually spoke English! (He had been kidnapped some years before and had spent time as a slave in England.) As my kids would say, “How random is that?!” And yet I’ve never read of Miles Standish’s amazement at this coincidence – did he simply cluck, “Quite right!” to himself and then ask about proper farming techniques?
So … as we arrive at the annual celebration of the Irish, St. Patrick’s Day, it’s time to give some thought to this day from both a cultural and a linguistic point of view – if only as a small, temporary antidote to the CVS-ization of American-Anglo language and culture.
The Irish, as the saying goes, are lucky: Even as somewhat goofy as St. Patrick’s Day is (though I love men in kilts playing bagpipes; and also love cupcakes with dyed-green frosting and dark green sprinkles), I can’t think of any other group of hyphenated-Americans that gets a whole national day of celebration as the Irish do every March 17 – parades, green beer, a dyed-green Chicago River, even green bagels – from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. As for St. Patrick the man – who’s he?! St. Paddy’s Day in the U.S. is about being Irish – even if you’re not. And though I have never bought a green carnation or a “Pinch Me, I’m Irish!” button in my life, to the whole event I say, “Erin Go Bragh!” (Irish Gaelic for “Ireland Forever!”)
The reason for my enthusiasm is, Ireland might be forever (or until the predicted effects of global warming wash the island out), but their Gaelic language might vanish far sooner.
At the moment, Irish Gaelic is on the list of Endangered Languages (http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/europe_index.html) Figures vary:
According to the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages (last updated 1999) there are perhaps only 20,000 speakers of Irish Gaelic left; According to a 2005 book, “Beginner’s Irish” by Gary Rosenstock, there are 30,000 native speakers and 100,000 speakers who have learned it as a second language. This could mean renewed interest since the last UNESCO survey, or just … different figures. But one more thing: there are three Irish dialects (Ulster, Connaught, and Munster) of which most only speak one. Still, there is an Irish radio station catering to all three dialects and an Irish TV station (http://www.tg4.ie/).
In Scotland, according to the UNESCO report, more than 50,000 claimed to know the language, but less than half spoke it actively. Welsh, the healthiest of the Gaelic groups, might have up to 250,000 regular, active speakers. So though this doesn’t spell immediate doom for those Gaelic branches, either could die out in a generation or two if children do not learn the language. Though children are now being taught Welsh in school and more adults are interested in learning it, it’s too early to tell if this will stop the erosion completely -- but it’s a good sign. After centuries of being beaten back, Gaelic is finding some muscle.
Once upon a time the Gaelic language, culture and literature ranked just behind the Greeks and Romans. Though the Celtic tribes that spoke Gaelic were mainly fierce warriors and not too meticulous at writing everything down, they did have a strong oral tradition; and what they did manage to write down has been collected and treasured in their many Irish myths, as well as in the original legend of King Arthur, a 6th century Celt and Gaelic-speaking warrior himself.
Irish Gaelic’s fall began long, long ago with the English colonization of Ireland in 1169; Anglicization intensified in the 1500’s – King Henry VIII even issued an order to Ireland in 1537 entitled, “An Act for the English Order, Habit and Language,” which discouraged Gaelic. By the 20th century, children who slipped up and spoke Gaelic at school were punished. Even parents came to realize if their children were to succeed in the world, they had to speak English – not Gaelic. And once a language is no longer handed down to the next generation, its lifespan is severely limited.
David Crystal, a leading language authority, believes that of the world’s roughly 6,000 languages, a good half of them could vanish in the next century or so from the mere lack of speakers – some have fewer than 1000; those on the verge of extinction may have 100 or 10, or even just 1. And once those speakers are gone, the language is gone too. Two other forms of Gaelic, Cornish (from England’s Cornwall) and Manx (from the Isle of Man) have already died out.
What helps languages survive is having people believe that the language is important enough to speak regularly and properly and to pass on to their children. Cultural pride helps – and a national celebration like St. Patrick’s Day can nurture Irish pride, and interest in Gaelic might go along with that.
Gaelic, despite its strange spellings and difficult pronunciation, is an Indo-European language like English. Linguists more knowledgeable than I am can see a correlation in some of Gaelic’s words for words in Sanskrit, one of the bases of Western languages.
But Gaelic is different from other Western languages in many more ways than it’s similar. It only has 18 letters (no j, k, q, v, w, x, y, z); and most simple sentences go verb-subject-object: “Saw I a play last night.” Nor does the language have distinct words for “yes” and “no.” That’s why, in answer to a question like, “Are you going home for dinner now,” you might hear an Irish person say, “I am;” or, “I’m not.” Welsh Gaelic is said to be a particularly melodic language, and the influence can be heard in their English:
In the movie version of “My Fair Lady,” Professor of Phonetics Henry Higgins is astonished at the natural language ability that Eliza Doolittle’s boozing, panhandling father has; at one point, Mr. Doolittle, exasperated at not being able to explain why he wants a little money from the professor, exclaims, “I’m willing to tell you! I’m wanting to tell you! I’m waiting to tell you!” Higgins, moved by the rhythm and alliteration in “willing,” “wanting,” and “waiting,” says to his friend, Col. Pickering, “That would be the Welsh strain in him.”
But let’s go back to that prediction that of 6,000 languages in the world now only 3,000 will be spoken in a hundred years. I find it hard to even name more than 25 languages off the top of my head, you too might think that 3,000 languages are an absolute wealth of words. But language is not just about tourists or business people communicating with native speakers and other foreigners. It’s about diversity -- as much as is saving the snow leopard and blue whale. Animals have it over languages because you can see them – and when photographed by National Geographic, they’re often really cute. A language, on the other hand, particularly one down to its last dying speaker, leaves just an invisible breath; if that language is lucky, there might be a field worker’s notes on its grammar and vocabulary. Otherwise, a world simply evaporates.
So on this St. Paddy’s Day, consider treating yourself to a nice, green-frosted cupcake adorned with a small plastic shamrock, and take a moment to appreciate the Irish – or perhaps some other nationality or ethnic group – be they Laplanders, Outer Mongolians, or Cherokees. Every language reflects a unique spirit, history, even fashion sense. And imagine that every time a language is lost, a new CVS opens up in its place.
P.S. Three-quarters of what I know in Irish Gaelic has already been displayed with “Erin Go Bragh;” but walking up the Bowery the other day, I added one more word to my vocabulary -- thanks to an Irish bar by the name of “Slainte” (pronounced Slahn-tya, also in Scottish Gaelic), which means “Cheers!”
And in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here are some handy Irish Gaelic proverbs with English translations to keep in mind:
(Sorry, but the Gaelic pronunciation is anyone’s guess)
Is minic a bhris beal duine a shorn.
“A person’s mouth often broke his nose;”
Na diol do chearc la fliuch.
“Don’t sell your hen on a wet day;”
and
Maireann croi eadrom I bhad.
“The light heart lives long.”
A top o’ the morning to you all …. And Slainte!
Friday, March 16, 2007
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Greening Up
I’m feeling green. And that’s not just because St. Patrick’s Day is soon; or that spring is suddenly in the air after a few weeks of a long-delayed winter. That’s using “green” in the traditional sense – green as in the color of grass or the face of the Wicked Witch of the West. Green from the Old English word, “grene,” which is akin to the ancient Indo-European word for “grow,” in the sense of “the color of living things.”
The green I’m also feeling – the one that has officially gone Hollywood, and therefore mainstream -- is a newer meaning of “green” -- that of being environmentally sound or earth-friendly. (Dictionary.com gives 16 other definitions for this adjective;) If you saw last week’s Oscar Awards, then you know that the event producers tried to be as “carbon-neutral” as possible; and that Al Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” A few weeks earlier, Prince Charles and Camilla flew to New York on a commercial jet instead of a private one, in order to reduce their “carbon footprint;” and a recent picture of our Pro-Oil President George W. Bush smiling (albeit, uneasily) while – finally! -- holding up a vial of corn-grown ethanol (even though he held it as though it were urine).
Almost every day, I see something or read an article about our new “greenness”: on a recent trip to Boston, for example, I saw what looked like an oversized pine- colored garbage can that called itself a “solar-powered trash compactor.” And in my hotel room was “The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices” put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists – the first hotel literature I’ve ever seen to directly challenge the Gideon Bible for bedside table space. Personally, I find all this very heartening and long overdue.
Since the first Earth Day (April 22, 1972), anyone overtly environmentally conscious has been dubbed a “treehugger” or “a granola.” Though those terms still exist, they may start to fade, as concern for the environment becomes a part of everyday life and no longer a political statement. With that, I already hear a new vocabulary sprouting – with familiar words in new combinations or with new meanings to aid and abet our awakened awareness.
For instance, an environmental firm’s website uses “green” as a verb, describing how to: Green Your Home; Green Your Business; Green Your Event; Green Your Travel; and Green Your Building. I’m fine with making “green” a verb. The only thing I’ll add is that people will probably start to attach “up” to the verb because to green UP one’s home sounds more natural than to simply “green” one’s home.
In any case, the name of this green-as-verb company is the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and it is from the BEF that the Academy of Motion Pictures purchased “renewable energy credits” to offset the 250,000-pound “carbon footprint” that it took to produce the Oscar Award telecast and the week’s related pre-show events. This footprint was measured by a “carbon calculator” that took into account the amount of carbon dioxide spewed into the air from (I suppose) the gas and electricity used to bring people to the event; to produce and roll out the red carpet; spotlight the celebrities; beam the show into living rooms around the world; and afterward, to keep the stars’ champagne glasses both clean and filled.
A 250,000-pound carbon footprint, the BEF said, is like driving a car around the earth ten times – which is why the Academy purchased “carbon credits,” or “carbon offsets,” which go toward investing in renewable resources like wind, solar, biomass, and low-impact hydropower. (Wow: “Low-impact hydropower” – have you ever said that before? See what I mean about this new vocab?!)
In time, as “greening” becomes ever more integral to our lives, we may start hearing remarks that sound utterly pretentious now, but may lose that tone in the future. Remarks like:
“We considered buying a classic 90’s McMansion, but between the central air, tile floors*, and the cathedral ceilings, the green-up would have cost a fortune.” (*The newest thing in earth-conscious homes is to have hard-packed, dirt floors. See New York Times, Feb. 8, 2007, “Down and Dirty.”)
Or another: “Their wedding was totally green, but the carbon offset to honeymoon in Bali almost broke their budget.”
Savvy green consumers might start to see ads, say, from a garden store: “It’s our Happy Earth Day Sale-a-bration! Buy a solar-powered, all-natural diesel-enhanced lawn mower! 30% percent off and includes $100 in carbon credits.”
Restaurants might also get in on the act. Just as some restaurants now tout “heart-healthy” meals, we might start seeing numbers beside each dish detailing the number of “food miles” used to convey the food to your table. Or patrons might ask the waiter, “Could you tell me the carbon footprint of the house special cheeseburger?”
Packaging, from canned soup to staples, may have to carry carbon footprint details so that consumers can make more earth-conscious choices: locally distributed brands vs. national brands made in Sri Lanka, flown to California, and trucked to Des Moines, Chicago, or New York. Will “carbon footprint miles” become CFM, or “footprintage”? Keep watching.
Clothing stores may also one day reflect this new consciousness, since it takes 1800 gallons of water to produce the cotton in a pair of jeans, and 400 to make the cotton for a shirt (See ct.water.usgs.gov/EDUCATION/waterfacts.htm). Though I can hardly imagine any current stores, from the Gap to Ralph Lauren to Burberry saying this, perhaps stores of the future may brag, “These shirts are made from organically shade-grown hemp and produced with low-impact hydropower.” We laugh now – but didn’t we all laugh at Steve Martin in “L.A. Story” (1991) when he asked the waitress at a restaurant for a “half double decaffeinated half-caf with a twist of lemon.” Though his order sounded hilarious at the time, at this point, it sounds pretty reasonable.
Pretty much all of us can rattle off our cell phone numbers, email addresses, and/or cholesterol. So before too long, we’ll be calculating carbons as naturally as we count carbohydrates. And should your carbon footprint count be lower than mine, well … I’ll be “green” with envy.
Addendum:
After writing this posting, I discovered that this week’s Time magazine’s cover story is titled, “Forget Organic: Eat Local.” I know some of you word-watchers will want to know if “eat local” is grammatically correct, because it sounds at first like it should be “eat LOCALLY.” Normally, an adverb should describe a verb, and in a sentence like, “We rarely eat out and when we do, we eat locally,” locally is used correctly, as an adverb describing where they eat. But in Time’s case, “Eat Local” really means, “Eat Local (Produce),” with “produce” being the understood object; so “local” is an adjective describing the understood noun “produce,” which is fine. Phew! As Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog once sang, “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” – or grammatically correct.
The green I’m also feeling – the one that has officially gone Hollywood, and therefore mainstream -- is a newer meaning of “green” -- that of being environmentally sound or earth-friendly. (Dictionary.com gives 16 other definitions for this adjective;) If you saw last week’s Oscar Awards, then you know that the event producers tried to be as “carbon-neutral” as possible; and that Al Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” A few weeks earlier, Prince Charles and Camilla flew to New York on a commercial jet instead of a private one, in order to reduce their “carbon footprint;” and a recent picture of our Pro-Oil President George W. Bush smiling (albeit, uneasily) while – finally! -- holding up a vial of corn-grown ethanol (even though he held it as though it were urine).
Almost every day, I see something or read an article about our new “greenness”: on a recent trip to Boston, for example, I saw what looked like an oversized pine- colored garbage can that called itself a “solar-powered trash compactor.” And in my hotel room was “The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices” put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists – the first hotel literature I’ve ever seen to directly challenge the Gideon Bible for bedside table space. Personally, I find all this very heartening and long overdue.
Since the first Earth Day (April 22, 1972), anyone overtly environmentally conscious has been dubbed a “treehugger” or “a granola.” Though those terms still exist, they may start to fade, as concern for the environment becomes a part of everyday life and no longer a political statement. With that, I already hear a new vocabulary sprouting – with familiar words in new combinations or with new meanings to aid and abet our awakened awareness.
For instance, an environmental firm’s website uses “green” as a verb, describing how to: Green Your Home; Green Your Business; Green Your Event; Green Your Travel; and Green Your Building. I’m fine with making “green” a verb. The only thing I’ll add is that people will probably start to attach “up” to the verb because to green UP one’s home sounds more natural than to simply “green” one’s home.
In any case, the name of this green-as-verb company is the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and it is from the BEF that the Academy of Motion Pictures purchased “renewable energy credits” to offset the 250,000-pound “carbon footprint” that it took to produce the Oscar Award telecast and the week’s related pre-show events. This footprint was measured by a “carbon calculator” that took into account the amount of carbon dioxide spewed into the air from (I suppose) the gas and electricity used to bring people to the event; to produce and roll out the red carpet; spotlight the celebrities; beam the show into living rooms around the world; and afterward, to keep the stars’ champagne glasses both clean and filled.
A 250,000-pound carbon footprint, the BEF said, is like driving a car around the earth ten times – which is why the Academy purchased “carbon credits,” or “carbon offsets,” which go toward investing in renewable resources like wind, solar, biomass, and low-impact hydropower. (Wow: “Low-impact hydropower” – have you ever said that before? See what I mean about this new vocab?!)
In time, as “greening” becomes ever more integral to our lives, we may start hearing remarks that sound utterly pretentious now, but may lose that tone in the future. Remarks like:
“We considered buying a classic 90’s McMansion, but between the central air, tile floors*, and the cathedral ceilings, the green-up would have cost a fortune.” (*The newest thing in earth-conscious homes is to have hard-packed, dirt floors. See New York Times, Feb. 8, 2007, “Down and Dirty.”)
Or another: “Their wedding was totally green, but the carbon offset to honeymoon in Bali almost broke their budget.”
Savvy green consumers might start to see ads, say, from a garden store: “It’s our Happy Earth Day Sale-a-bration! Buy a solar-powered, all-natural diesel-enhanced lawn mower! 30% percent off and includes $100 in carbon credits.”
Restaurants might also get in on the act. Just as some restaurants now tout “heart-healthy” meals, we might start seeing numbers beside each dish detailing the number of “food miles” used to convey the food to your table. Or patrons might ask the waiter, “Could you tell me the carbon footprint of the house special cheeseburger?”
Packaging, from canned soup to staples, may have to carry carbon footprint details so that consumers can make more earth-conscious choices: locally distributed brands vs. national brands made in Sri Lanka, flown to California, and trucked to Des Moines, Chicago, or New York. Will “carbon footprint miles” become CFM, or “footprintage”? Keep watching.
Clothing stores may also one day reflect this new consciousness, since it takes 1800 gallons of water to produce the cotton in a pair of jeans, and 400 to make the cotton for a shirt (See ct.water.usgs.gov/EDUCATION/waterfacts.htm). Though I can hardly imagine any current stores, from the Gap to Ralph Lauren to Burberry saying this, perhaps stores of the future may brag, “These shirts are made from organically shade-grown hemp and produced with low-impact hydropower.” We laugh now – but didn’t we all laugh at Steve Martin in “L.A. Story” (1991) when he asked the waitress at a restaurant for a “half double decaffeinated half-caf with a twist of lemon.” Though his order sounded hilarious at the time, at this point, it sounds pretty reasonable.
Pretty much all of us can rattle off our cell phone numbers, email addresses, and/or cholesterol. So before too long, we’ll be calculating carbons as naturally as we count carbohydrates. And should your carbon footprint count be lower than mine, well … I’ll be “green” with envy.
Addendum:
After writing this posting, I discovered that this week’s Time magazine’s cover story is titled, “Forget Organic: Eat Local.” I know some of you word-watchers will want to know if “eat local” is grammatically correct, because it sounds at first like it should be “eat LOCALLY.” Normally, an adverb should describe a verb, and in a sentence like, “We rarely eat out and when we do, we eat locally,” locally is used correctly, as an adverb describing where they eat. But in Time’s case, “Eat Local” really means, “Eat Local (Produce),” with “produce” being the understood object; so “local” is an adjective describing the understood noun “produce,” which is fine. Phew! As Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog once sang, “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” – or grammatically correct.
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