At the Tower of Babel They Knew What They Were After ... But I Don't

The sound from a television in the student union was turned up high this morning, so C-SPAN's story on state laws mandating English as an official language caught my attention as I passed by.  They were taking calls from viewers, and the one that started as I came along was from a guy in Michigan who cited the Tower of Babel.  Since I'd recently read Tim William Machan's Language Anxiety (Oxford, 2009), which uses the story of Babel as a unifying metaphor, I stayed to hear how the caller was going to use it.

Alas, the Holy Spirit wasn't helping the caller; he recounted (or probably read aloud) the story, and then lost momentum.  First he started to invoke the Christian-racist line that God had put different peoples in different countries for a reason (which would imply that he himself should go back to Anglo-Saxia, or wherever these people came from), but dropped it for another tack.   He said that he wasn't "afraid" of other languages, he'd studied Latin and German in high school, and, uh... The host cut him off at that point, saying that they wanted to talk to more callers from Michigan.

For your convenience, here's the story from Genesis 11 in the New King James Version:

1  Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Pretty short, isn't it?  The epithet often applied to the Biblical manner is laconic,  and it certainly applies here.  It's always a good idea to look at the canonical versions of famous Bible stories, since thousands of years of use have decorated them with details that are not in the originals, re-shaping them according to official agendas and laypeople's fancies.  Even Machan did this, mixing in post-biblical revisions of the story throughout his book, and I was never sure he knew he was doing it.

When I first took a serious look at Genesis 11 a couple of decades ago, I noticed that Yahweh seemed really to worry that the Tower would reach Heaven.  I found that funny, since a tower of baked clay bricks with tar for mortar wouldn't even get close.  (Those of my generation will recall that many people in the Fifties and Sixties warned that the US space program was analogous in its sinful pride to the Tower, an attempt to usurp God's prerogatives.)   In this, the story resembles Genesis 3, where Yahweh says that Adam and Eve, having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, have become "as gods," just as the serpent had promised them they would, and he drives them out of Eden to keep them from eating from the Tree of Eternal Life and living forever.  This version is very different from the standard Christian interpretation, and it raises interesting questions for Christianity.  For example, the Jesus of the gospels promises eternal life to his followers -- isn't that just what Yahweh didn't want us to have?

Machan recounted how the Babel story has been used by people who were anxious about English from the Middle Ages to present-day America:

From the very different perspective of a native Anglophone, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., protests what he calls the ‘cult of ethnicity’ in modern America but likewise uses the Babel model for non-linguistic purposes.  Mixing literary and biblical allusions with emotive metaphors, he bluntly warns of what will happen if variation is allowed to proceed unchecked: ‘Will the center hold?  Or will the melting pot give way to the Tower of Babel?’  [quoting The Disuniting of America, rev. edn. Norton, 1998, 22]

While I listened to the caller on C-SPAN today, it occurred to me that Babel might not be the most comforting model for English-only cranks, since it implies that having just one language makes Yahweh nervous, and you don't want to see him when he's nervous.  Maybe the influx of foreigners with their foreign languages is Yahweh's way of keeping America from becoming too proud and powerful, just as he did in Shinar a few generations after the Deluge?  It's odd how people who invoke Babel in this context see linguistic confusion as something to be resisted, instead of humbly accepted as the will and chastisement of the Lord.

Post-Pre-Colonial Theory; or, Going for Tongue

I'm still reading Tim William Machan's Language Anxiety, and it's full of goodies.  Like this one from pages 72-3, where he quotes a New York Times op-ed by a Hispanic writer denouncing Spanglish:

… for Roberto González Echevarría, ‘Spanglish, the composite language of Spanish and English that has crossed over from the street to Hispanic talk shows and advertising campaigns, poses a grave danger to Hispanic culture and to the advancement of Hispanics in mainstream America.  Those who condone and even promote it as a harmless commingling to do not realize that this is hardly a relationship based on equality. Spanglish is an invasion of Spanish by English.’

Machan is nicer in discussing this rant than I intend to be: it's nonsense.  I wonder if Echevarría knew that he was in accord with Anglophone racists who see the presence of brown-skinned Hispanics as an invasion of American by Meskins, despite the fact that contemporary American English contains quite a few Spanish words that it acquired from contact between the US and Mexicans.

But more than that, he overlooks the fact that modern European Spanish could analogously be called Sparabic, since it contains borrowings from Arabic courtesy of the Moorish invasion and occupation of Iberia a millennium ago, hardly a relationship based on equality.  Western-Hemisphere Spanish has been infiltrated by indigenous languages, though more to the point here is the effect that Spanish had on indigenous language and peoples, which was a literal invasion of the Americas by Spaniards and by Spanish.  That was hardly a relationship based on equality either.  None of this excuses or is meant to ignore the malign influence of the United States on Latin America, but I always want to jeer and make rude noises when Latino creoles try to cast themselves as indigenes victimized by yanqui imperialism.  Now that the real American indigenes are rising up against the Hispanic colonizers all over Latin America, this sort of talk should be on the way out.  A lot has changed since Echevarría wrote this piece in 1997, though I still encounter the same tropes in the writings of self-styled post-colonial theorists.

Machan points out that English has been the subject or beneficiary of such invasions itself:

For English, the third person singular indicative verbal inflection –s as well as the third person plural pronouns they, them, and their are not native Anglo-Saxon forms but derive directly from Old Norse, the language spoken by the descendants of Viking raiders and colonizers in the Midlands and northern parts of England; a kind of Norslish gave rise to them, as surely as Franglais has qu’est-ce que tu veux pour lunch [73].

And in America:  

In the colonial era of North America, the principles of North America, the principles of grammatical and pragmatic regularity motivated the production of pidgins not only between Europeans and Native Americans but among the Europeans themselves.  In the Middle Ages England’s linguistic repertoire similarly came to include entire linguistic codes structured like Spanglish or Denglish [German-English, btw] in the forms of a Latin-English macaronic variety utilized in sermons and a French-English-Latin interlanguage employed in late-medieval business, alongside of which Latin, French, and English each continued to exist.  At that time, code-switching among Latin, French, and English could also achieve significant rhetorical effects, much like the style-switching effected by modern novelists.  This is the case in William Langland’s fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, where switches from English to Latin both help foreground moments of thematic importance and portend, perhaps overly optimistically, the eventual emergence as England’s dominant language in all domains of business, education, and government [74].

This reminds me of immigrants in America: each wave of immigrants comes to regard itself as native, and then attacks the next wave as a bunch of dirty invaders who will destroy civilization.  Machan's study focuses on English, but he makes it clear that most if not all languages are hybrids, mongrels, victims of invasion by dirty foreign tongues, though contemporary speakers are of course unaware that what they regard as proper English (or whatever) is what their grandparents would have regarded as corrupt, degenerate gibberish.

What Is Language? And Why Won't It Hold Still?

Dang!  Where does the time go?  Well, I know where it goes, actually, and I'm not telling.  I have a good post in mind, but I'm not going to get to it today.  I'm reading one of those books that just demands to be quoted at length, however, so I'll quote what I think is an interesting passage.

The book is Tim William Machan's Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (Oxford, 2009).  I enjoyed and learned a great deal from Machan's more recent book What Is English? And Why Should We Care? (Oxford, 2013), so I decided to see what else he'd written.  So far Language Anxiety looks very good.  Here's an example:

Indeed, as Labov has noted, language actually points to conclusions that oppose natural selection: ‘the major agent of linguistic change – sound change – is actually maladaptive, in that it leads to the loss of the information that the original forms were designed to carry’.  More generally, change and variation are responsible for a great many socially debilitating situations.  They produce mutually unintelligible languages and their attendant barriers to communication, the communication, the communicative obstacles that even regional variation can present, and the sociolinguistic drive to instruct generation after generation of students in the details of spelling, punctuation, and usage, which are never internalized and transmitted to subsequent generations in some Lamarckian fashion.  In view of the tumult of history and the blame placed on inadequate communication, I would venture that if there truly is a general drive to optimal communication, it has failed miserably.

Machan has already explained why none of the existing theories about language change (why it happens, how it happens) works, but then nobody knows what language itself is.  Whatever else may be true of language change, it is not a Darwinian process of evolution, nor a Spencerian process with a direction in which it is headed.  That language is for communication, and indeed evolved for the purpose of enabling its users to communicate, is a widespread belief, but as Machan indicates, it's not a plausible one.  (Which doesn't mean that people don't use it to communicate -- the point is that like wings, which are thought to have evolved first as a means of body-temperature management but came to be used for flight, language may have evolved for one use and then been adapted for others.)