Linguistics

This is a book about words that are on their way to the dictionary cemetery where they will be stamped with the labels ‘archaic’ or ‘obsolete’. Of course, unlike us, these dying words will achieve a kind of eternity through being permanently displayed in dictionaries, but the time will come when no living person possesses them as part of their actual speech. Ruth Wajnryb proposes that a hospice should be set up to provide sanctuary and comfort for these weary and largely forgotten lexical bits and pieces, a ‘hospice of fading words’.

Why does translation matter? Or does it? And who should care to know? The answers are more interesting than we might at first think. The filming of a novel, and a multinational company’s diverse advertising strategy for the one product in different countries, involve issues of translation just as much as an English version of a sonnet by Petrarch. These days, translation has outgrown its status as an illegitimate child of literature, to become a way of discussing any exchange between languages and cultures, and appropriately so, given that the word itself derives from the Latin translatio, which simply means ‘carried across’.

Sir James Murray, the famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, believed that the dictionary-maker’s job was to furnish each word with a biography.

Language shapes identity: everyone knows that, in theory. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that exact equivalents do not exist for every word. Translation cannot be perfect: something is always lost. So what happens when people, used to one linguistic identity, have to translate themselves into a new language? Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka have assembled twelve witnesses to give personal accounts. All are academics or writers who possess the intellectual resources to make sense of what they have encountered, while at the same time registering the dislocations they have experienced. All write English fluently: they are not concerned with the difficulties of learning English but of being themselves in Australian English. Some make the comment that they are perfectly comfortable writing academic English while still finding the small transactions of daily life a challenge.

At the heart of Anna Wierzbicka’s book is the argument that what people now call World English is not culturally neutral; that it has embedded in it the Anglo values of its origin. Wierzbicka points to many seemingly ordinary English words, words that we would never suspect of being culturally distinctive, that have no equivalents in other languages. Anglo speakers will be surprised to discover that the values these seemingly commonplace words carry are not universals. Good and bad are universals, but right and wrong are not; the concept of fairness is Anglo, and most other languages do not have words that correspond to fair, fairness and unfair. Even at the level of verbal phrases such as I think, I guess and I believe, and in English’s proliferation of adverbs such as probably, possibly, apparently and conceivably, English differs from all other languages.

David Crystal has written numerous books on language – ‘over 100’ proclaims the cover blurb. In the chapter titled ‘Wordbirths’, Crystal muses on how rare it is to know who created a new word. In this regard, at the Australian National Dictionary Centre we have been tracing the term barbecue stopper, which is first recorded in the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 2001: ‘That’s one reason he [John Howard] will talk about improving the balance between work and family, a topic he describes as a “barbecue stopper” because it engenders so much conversation whenever people get together.’ Did the prime minister invent the term, or was it the creation of his speechwriter?

While I was reading this book, news came that Peter Casserly, the last surviving digger who fought on the Western Front in World War I, had died, aged 107. Like Marcel Caux, who died in 2004, aged 105, Casserly always repudiated the Australian glorification of Gallipoli, refusing to participate in Anzac Day marches, join the RSL or even to talk about his wartime experiences. Yet after eighty-seven years of silence on the subject, Casserly had not forgotten the language that diggers used in 1917. The Sydney Morning Herald report of his death quoted from an interview he gave. ‘Another time Fritz derailed a train with English soldiers on board,’ he recollected, adding that, ‘Jerry was always trying to blow up the train with all its ammo.’ The soldiers’ terms to refer to their enemy, the Germans (or ‘the Hun’, as it pleased supporters of the conflict to say then), were Fritz, the pet-form of the common German given name Friedrich, and Jerry, an English pet-name that echoed the word German. Likewise, the Turks were called Abdul and Johnny Turk.

If anyone is qualified to speak authoritatively on the nature and role of community languages in Australia, it is Michael Clyne, who has spent much of his academic career researching these languages. His latest book is firmly rooted in research, but it differs from some of his earlier work in that it is clearly directed at the widest possible audience. It is a wake-up call, exploring the relationships between monoculturalism and multiculturalism and monolingualism and multilingualism in present-day Australian society; and showing how the present situation can be explained in part by Australia’s history, and in part by contemporary local and global pressures.