Conference thebay::joyoflex

265.0. "William Patrick?" by ULTRA::ELFSTROM (Normalcy was never our goal.) Tue Oct 28 1986 16:02

[Prediction]
THE FUTURE OF LANGUAGE

[By Anthony Burgess.  From "2020: A Vision of the Future," in the June 17
"London Telegraph Sunday Magazine," a special issue devoted to the future.
Burgess is the author of "A Clockwork Orange," "Earthly Powers," "Napoleon
Symphony," "Ninteen Eighty-Five," "Re Joyce," and many other books.]

Prime ministers speaking to the nation still attempt, like Mrs. Thatcher, to
use "Standard English" and a supraregional or classless accent.  By 2020
they will not have to do that.  What they will have to do is speak a kind of
English that denies the fact of education, avoids allusion to Shakespear or
the Bible, and, where it rises above the level of conversational usage,
gains a pose of learning and authority from the use of technological terms.
At the same time, with a kind of ultimate authority seeming to be vested in
the hard but high-flown language of science, there will be more mendacity
and evasion dressed up as technology.  The Pentagon has already shown the
way with such expressions as "anticipatory retaliation," which does not
sound like striking the enemy without due declaration of war.

America's language is already far advanced in the direction of combining the
loose colloquial with the cant terms of the technical specialists -- who
include sociologists and psychologists, as well as cybernetics experts and
aerospace men.  When not being expertly evasive ("at this time the nuclear
capability of this nation is not anticipated to assume a role of preemptive
preparatory action"), it is slangy, unlearned, unwitty, inelegant.  At its
most disconcerting it combines two modes of discourse: "Now we zero in on
the nitty-gritty of the suprasegmental prosodic feature and find that we're
into a different ball game."  It is already, perhaps, the matrix of British
English of 2020.

As for the sound of the English of 2020, some of its characteristics are in
active preparation.  Assimilation -- a natural enough process, which,
however, must never be allowed to go too far -- is drawing a lot of vowels
to the middle of the mouth, where the phoneme called schwa (the second
syllable of "butter," "father;" the first a in "apart") waits like a spider
for flies.  The "a" of "man" is already a muzzy, neuter sound with the
young.  Assimilation of consonants is giving us "corm beef: and "tim
peaches" and "vogka" (Kingsly Amis spotted these in the early seventies).
Grammar has been simplified, so that most sentences are constructed to the
"and...and...and..." Biblical formula (hypotactic, to be technical).  Losing
Latin in our schools, we are finding it hard to understand Milton and to
appreciate the beauties of the periodic sentence.

This will get worse.  The English of 2020 will combine structural
infantilism with hard-nosed technology.  It will be harsh, and it will lack
both modesty and humor.

The written word is only a ghost without the solidity of the spoken word to
give it substance, but to many it seems to be the primary reality.  After
all, the voices of dead poets and novelists survive only as black marks on
white paper.  Still, writers write well only when they listen to what they
are writing -- either on magnetic tape or in the auditorium set silently in
their skulls.  But more and more writers -- not only of pseudoliterature but
of political speeches -- ignore the claims of the voice and ear.

I think that, with the increasing use of the word processor, the separation
of the word as sound from the word as visual symbol is likely to grow.  The
magical reality has become the set of signs glowing on a screen: this takes
precedence over any possible auditory significance.  The speed with which
words can be set down with such an apparatus (as also with the electric
typewriter), the total lack of muscular effort involved -- these turn
writing into a curiously nonphysical activity, in which there is no manual
analogue to the process of breathing out, using the tongue, lips, and teeth,
and accepting language as a bodily exercise that expends energy.

What is wrong with most writing today is its flaccidity, its lack of
pleasure in the manipulation of sounds and pauses.  The written word is
becoming inert.  One dreads to think what is will be like in 2020.

I have never yet ventured a prophecy that came true.  In my lttle novel
"Ninteen Eighty-Five" I get nothing except the name of the son of the Prince
of Wales.  It is altogether possible that, rejecting the easy way of pop
music, drugs, and television, the youthy of the near future will stage a
reactionary revolution and go back to Latin, Shakespear, and the Bible and
insist on school courses in rhetoric.  But I do not think it likely.

[It should be noted, perhaps, that the Boston Globe recently published an
article that stated the offering of Latin in public high schools has increased
markedly in the last five years.]

    I expect this sort of pessimism from the man who wrote "A Clockwork
    Orange" and "1985."
    
	Jon

    Interesting ... there has been quite a number of letters in the
    (London) Times lately about the desirability of teaching Latin in
    schools. Having done two years of Latin at school (also four of
    French and one of Spanish) and acquiring a smattering of other
    languages, I disagree about the desirability of teaching Latin.
    I recall that the first year of it was quite pleasant, but the second
    year brought in all the irregularities. Instead, what I believe
    should be taught is language structure and how to learn languages.
    Education in languages should not cease when one leaves school -
    it should continue in adult life.
    
    On another subject (see the top of .0), one thing I detest about
    American English is the re-invention of the noun from the adjective.
    I spotted the one that annoys me most (which I can never think of
    when I want to) "normalcy". The noun is "normality".
    
    Richard De Morgan.

    The story I heard about "normalcy" is that it was coined by U.S.
    President-elect Calvin Coolidge (or was it Warren Harding?  I always
    get the two confused) back in the 1920's.  He refered to his election
    as a "return to normalcy", not knowing that there was no such word.
    Supposedly, the word took off from there.
    
    --Mike

    Harding.