The Five Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov

Author:Dmitry Orlov [Orlov, Dmitry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781550925272
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2013-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

National language

The symbols and claims of nationalism are quite hollow—often little more than the banners, standards and myths of some conquering group—but they can be greatly amplified by adding a linguistic identity. As the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich is said to have put it, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” A typical ploy of the imperious nation-state is to design and impose an imperial language—the artificial language of government-run schools and official institutions, which serve the explicit purpose of drowning out local languages and dialects. The rise of the nation-state has been bad for linguistic diversity: half of the world’s remaining six thousand languages, many of which have been in existence for thousands of years, are not expected to survive this century.

By far the most ambitious project to build a national, and even a transnational language is the Chinese writing system, which largely decouples sound from written form, giving it considerable universality. It also gives it longevity; the sounds of any language shift over time, but the Chinese characters remain largely immutable. A speaker of a language that is written using Chinese characters can continue speaking that language, but is forced to think in Chinese characters. At one time the area that relied on Chinese writing, at least for keeping records, included Vietnam (whose old, Chinese character-based literature has been lost because no one can read it), Korea (which started its escape from the Chinese writing system in the fifteenth century by designing the Hangul national writing system, but completed the process only in the twentieth) and, to a limited and idiosyncratic extent, Japan, with its two thousand Chinese-derived kanji. For a brief moment in ad 1241 the Chinese writing system was in use on more than one quarter of the Earth’s dry surface. That was the year when the Mongol Empire’s wave of conquest rolled as far west as the gates of Vienna. (The Mongols were a non-literate culture and, to administer their vast empire, relied on the services of hundreds of Chinese scribes and accountants enslaved in the sacking of Yanjing in 1215, who, of course, wrote in Chinese.)

The other major national, and then transnational, linguistic success is English, which has solidified its position as the main language for international communication and is making more and more inroads around the world. Here too generality and longevity of the writing system has been achieved by largely decoupling sound from written form. The English spelling system makes very few, if any, claims to adequately represent how English is spoken, proudly remaining the haphazard, nonsensical, idiosyncratic waste of everyone’s time it has always been. More importantly, it forms a very large barrier to acquiring basic literacy. Having to separately memorize both the spelling and the sound for many thousands of common word is the price we all have to pay for using a living fossil as a medium of communication. The result is that functional illiteracy rates in English-speaking countries are many times those of other developed countries—as high as 50 percent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.