Allan Metcalf of the American Dialect Society has an amusing piece on Lingua Franca in which he points out that such diverse people as Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Neil Diamond, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Joseph Mascis Jr. have all been described as having a nasal drawl, whatever that is. Geoff Pullum has picked this up on the Language Log and refers to Mark Liberman's remark:
"In my experience, 'nasal quality' almost always means 'low-frequency sound qualities that I don't expect, from people that I don't sympathize with'."
Geoff continues:
It's as if diseases from cirrhosis to appendicitis to colon cancer were being described by novelists as "the colick", and everyone just accepted that and imagined it was an accurate diagnosis.
All good stuff, but what really attracted my attention was this comment:
almost no one ever takes even an elementary course on linguistics or phonetics while they're in college, but everyone who writes a book thinks they know enough about language to give effective descriptions of it.
If any one book fired my teenage interest in language and languages it was Language Made Plain by Anthony Burgess. In its very first paragraph he laments:
In quarrels about words, people seem unwilling to see reason. Mercury, the rogue-god who presides over language, renders them blind to dictionaries and to experts. There is a general conviction that language is not a matter for experts. We all know about language because we all use language. No similar conclusion is drawn from the fact that we all use kidneys, nerves, and intestines.
Looking at that book again after many years, I find that it also contains the following trenchant comment:
The English, in their splendid isolation, used to regard foreigners as either a comic turn or a sexual menace. To learn a European language (other than the dead ones from which English had kindly borrowed) was, at best, to seek to acquire a sort of girl’s-finishing-school ornament, at worst, to capitulate to the enemy. Things are not very different now, but an uneasy awareness is dawning that linguistic isolation is no longer possible, that the tongues of these damned Europeans may have to be taken seriously if they persist in pretending not to understand English. Unfortunately, many educated Europeans do understand English and are very ready to speak it to English travellers and write it to English business firms, thus soothing that uneasy awareness back into island complacency. But, in their soberest moments, most English people will admit that the attitude of ‘Let them learn our language, blast them,’ will no longer do.
Those words are as true now as when they were written almost half a century ago.
Language Made Plain, Anthony Burgess, 1964 amazon.co.uk
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