Language & Freedom 1: Of English and Esperanto

tl;dr: Language researchers in academia have—over the past half a decade or so—pushed an 'egalitarian' view of language, emphasizing what is common among all languages. The idea that "all languages are (somehow) equal" has its strongest roots in interpretations of the work of Noam Chomksy. While academics have more-or-less moved beyond much of professor Chomsky's work in linguistics, political ideologies of equity and social justice tethered to the notion of 'Universal Grammar' retain considerable importance in conversations about language beginning in universities. This programming is counter-productive to the goals of promoting linguistic diversity and other forms of human flourishing.

Introduction

Language is something that most people have some ideas or opinions about. Yet, there are small, influential portions of the population of society that are especially vocal in pushing their conceptions of what is the right way to think about language.

For instance, if you ask a linguist "what's the difference between a language and a dialect?" you are very likely to get a canned response. As John McWhorter puts it in the Atlantic [1], 

Faced with the question, linguists like to repeat the grand old observation of the linguist and Yiddishist Max Weinreich, that 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'

Why not start with defining terms, stating what either a language or a dialect is before talking in rhetorical circles? [2]

Particular ideas about language have taken hold in higher education and have metastasized from (maybe) testable hypotheses into ideology and dogma. As the NPC meme suggests, there is little noggin' joggin' going on when prefabricated responses are reproduced. The program is already written and compiled.

Language is an innate human capacity. All languages are extraordinarily complex, some just happen to be more powerful because of socio-political reasons.

...and it follows: linguists must become Social Justice Warriors (SJWs).

All languages are equally wonderful, so promoting bilingual education, taking in all the immigrants all the time, etc. etc. basically is equated with not killing pandas (i.e. preserving bio-diversity) and the whole rest.

You, clever Minds reader, I trust can predict the dominant tenets of most language researcher's ideologies.

English and Hegemony

The usefulness of English requires no explanation in 2018.

Yet, English-bashing is a favorite past-time for new students of foreign languages, linguistics, and other language-related disciplines. English is the opposite of the underdog. Hipsters don't say that Starbucks is their favorite coffee. Likewise, they don't say English is the best language ever. They prefer more exotic options, like Lebanese Arabic [3].

How did this strange state of affairs come to be? Why are so many monolingual Americans desperate to have their children growing up speaking Chinese or Spanish? What is wrong with an Anglophone heritage?

Enter Chomsky

Noam Chomksy certainly deserves consideration for the Greatest Academic Side-gig of the Twentieth Century award. Considered by many to be something like "the founder of modern linguistics", Chomksy's work on language has attracted admiration, ire, and everything in between from thousands upon thousands of students around the globe.

One of the most influential ideas in linguistics attributed to Chomksy is that of Universal Grammar (UG). In a nutshell, UG is what is common among all languages. That's why it's 'universal'.

While individual languages may differ in where they put adjectives with respect to nouns, how many prepositions they have, and so on and so forth, all languages are supposed to share certain properties. For example, all language are supposed to exhibit recursion, have lexical categories (i.e. "parts of speech" like nouns, verbs, etc.) and so and so forth.

A corollary of the idea of Universal Grammar is that a person may explore any language to learn about the "nature of language". Conveniently, this means English for many academic researchers (because English is their first language), but in principle the investigation of any language should reveal UG, and ideally, studying many, many languages would offer the most robust insight into UG. It follows that to only study English is to neglect the (bio-)diversity of the linguistic world, and to project what is true of English onto other languages (insofar as we are discussing UG). 

English, the language of hate

Accepting the idea that all languages are 'equal' in the sense of all being instantiations of UG, we conclude that those who focus on English are interested in empowering (prototypical) white people while disenfranchising people of color.

English, you see, is the language of hegemons. English is to Swahili as Christopher Columbus is to the New World. Speaking English is dancing with Satan. Now, we all must make Faustian bargains from time to time (that's why even people that want to see English dwindle in popularity write and speak in English). But, these are simply means to an end. We must end hegemony by any means necessary.

Self-flagellation and virtue signalling ensues on the part of social science and humanities researchers into language in an effort to maybe, just possibly, make a start at repentance. 

The Paradox of Esperanto

If English is so bad, why don't we just all start over and build Utopia from scratch? [4] 

Esperanto is an 'artificial language', rather than a 'natural language' [4]. Whereas English is hard, full of difficult to pronounce words and inconsistent verb conjugations, Esperanto, is easy to pronounce and very, very consistent. That's the idea at least. Designed to be easily learned and used as an auxiliary language (supplement, rather than replace existing languages), Esperanto lives on from its 19th century origins into the 21st century. Esperanto is globalist lingo-LARPing.

Is it a real language?

Esperanto embodies many lefty ideas like top-down planning, diversity and equality. The right-think (lol ironic, isn't it?!) of the 21st century West. Can we use science to improve education, allow people of different ethnicities to mix and mingle in a cosmopolitan wonder land, and also hip hop?

According to the dogma of Universal Grammar (UG) described above, however, Esperanto doesn't count as a 'real' language. People that learn Esperanto as a second language aren't gifted with the innate gift of intuitions esperanta. 

Aha! But, if children learn Esperanto as a first language, then it becomes both a 'real language' and it retains its consistent structure. So, Esperanto is a real language insofar as it is installed 'natively' on children. Beep boop bop, QED.

Cognitive Dissonance

Esperanto is at once an expression of how wonderful the world could be as well as a 'fake language'. It is like using gene editing technology to make new species of animals that are cute.

If we can just create languages, why should we give valuable time and resources to preserve existing languages? How do we say how wonderful the languages of the Americas are when we can just make new languages for the people of the Americas to speak?

Communication before Coercion

Resourceful people that want to do things find tools to advance towards their goals. Tasks before tools saves us from fools. The many languages in the world today serve some function; they are useful for something, so people keep on using them. The same goes for other tools, including programming languages, software, and other things slightly less tangible.

Different tools allow us to look at the world in different ways. To see a diversity of tools available is a wonderful thing. Anyone who has ordered a tool of Amazon or wandered through a good hardware store has likely felt this. Freedom means having choices.

On the other hand, forcing tools (even well built ones) on people is no bueno. We can recommend best practices to each other, seek out advice from more experienced practitioners, or otherwise peacefully learn about how to use our tools better or how to get new tools.

Discussions of "language policy" or "what's to be done about English" are often implicitly framed in terms of what we should force people to do.

Should we force children to learn thousands of Chinese characters to be competitive in a global economy? Should we make everyone speak a national language? Should we require everyone to be able to read Arabic? 

Where do I point government guns to incentivize particular types of symbol shuffling?

Freedom from force

If you bemoan the fact that your Western country is primarily English-speaking, then go speak some other language. Make it useful to use another language.

Consider the role of governments in carving up the world's linguistic situation today. Maybe its not the problem of patriarchal cis-gender white males, but rather the problem of the institutions of force (i.e. governments). It wasn't whiteness that took away your tribe's language, it was collectivism and violations of The Silver Rule.

We see that when people are left to their own devices, they find ways to communicate with each other. As an Asian American, I speak English because its useful where I live (the United States). If I went to Japan, I'd speak Japanese and if I went to France I'd speak Arabic, ermm... I mean French.

The answer to preserving more linguistic diversity is to live and let live, and then find out what people want. There are many genres of music. There are many programming languages. There are many sorts of digital artwork. You don't have to command people to produce diversity, they will if you let them do their things.

Newspeak in 2018

Be very wary of people that ask you to speak in a particular way for no real practical reason, aside from acknowledging their authority. The be nice police hate it when their bad behavior is called by what it is. This doesn't mean we should be rude and go around everywhere saying fuckity-fuck-fuck-shit-damnit all the time. It often makes sense to foster civil, respectful dialogue by avoiding these words. We should be wary of authoritarians that try to prevent us from saying particular words to not wrong-think.

It is no surprise that governments typically like standardized, national languages. It is easier to monitor what people saying and tell them what things are okay and not okay to say this way. Likewise, it is easier to control what sort of information can and can't be accessed by speakers. What sorts of writings are only available in English? In Indonesian? In Hungarian? The East Asian nations are probably some of the best (digital) totalitarians in this respect.

We fight for linguistic freedom by keeping the languages we use to communicate as moving targets. You can't ban memes.

Notes and References

[1]: "What's a Language, Anyway?" John McWhorter (01/19/2016) 

[2]: What's recursion? See recursion. Sigh.

[3]: I'm glad that Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in English for the rest of us. 

[4]: This is actually kind of what people were thinking about in Mainland China as the People's Republic of China (PRC) was being founded. What we know as 'Mandarin Chinese' today was engineered in a spirit of nationalism, modeled on successes by European nation-states and Japan. In the 20th century, every nation wanted to have their own nation-unifying language. Language planners in pre-PRC China considered using existing languages including English, French, and Esperanto rather than standardize a new language, for practical reasons. Eventually, it was decided that China should speak 'Chinese', even if that meant inventing a new standard.

[5]: I think how 'artificial' a language is is not a binary YES/NO; insofar as humans make up languages, all languages are artificial. They differ in how much top-down planning ('engineering') they have, how liberal/conservative their speakers are in accepting changes and suggestions, etc. This is kind of like how programming languages work, just less well documented and without rules of grammar being 'enforced' by computers.