The Monoculture of English Menace
In Genesis 11, 1-9, the King James Bible reads:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
In his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, physicist Freeman Dyson (1923-2020), who was too young to be at Los Alamos but who knew Einstein, Von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Feynman, and Soviet spy Ted Hall after the war, suggests that God confounding the languages so that they sounded like babble to other nations was a good thing:
Naively, one would expect, when an intelligent species evolves the use of language, that there would be only one language. One would expect that the first speaking animals would evolve a fixed structure of words and meanings, as immutable as the genetic code that evolved three billion years earlier. The wise men who wrote the Bible understood that there was a problem here. They created the legend of the tower of Babel to explain why we have so many languages. Obviously they thought, and many people today think, life would be simpler and human relations easier if we all spoke the same language.
It is true that a world with a universal common language would be a simpler world for bureaucrats and administrators to manage. But there is strong evidence, in our own history and prehistory as well as in the history of contemporary primitive societies, to support the hypothesis that plasticity and diversity of languages played an essential role in human evolution. It is not just an inconvenient historical accident that we have a variety of languages. It was nature’s way to make it possible for us to evolve rapidly. Rapid evolution of human categories demanded that social and biological progress go hand in hand. Biological progress came from random genetic fluctuations that could be significant only in small and genetically isolated communities. To keep a small community genetically isolated and to enable it to evolve new social institutions, it was vitally important that the new members of the community could be quickly separated from their neighbors by barriers of language.
I’m not sure I totally believe Dyson’s evolutionary theory of the Tower of Babel, but it makes sense explaining cultural evolution: cultural diversity has its advantages.
So our emergence as an intelligent species may have depended crucially on the fact that we have this astonishing ability to switch from Proto-Indo-European to Hittite to Hebrew to Latin to English and back to Hebrew within a few generations. It is likely that in the future our survival and our further development will depend in an equally crucial way on the maintenance of cultural and biological diversity. In the future as in the past, we shall be healthier if we speak many languages and are quick to invent new ones as opportunities for cultural differentiation arise. We now have laws for the protection of endangered species. Why do we not have equally strong laws for the protection of endangered languages? …
Just as speciation gave life freedom to experiment with diversity of form and function, the differentiation of languages gave humanity freedom to experiment with diversity of social and cultural traditions.
In 1841, the population of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland was 8.18 million, up from 6.80 million in 1821. The typical Irish workingman ate ten to twenty pounds of potatoes per day: a monotonous diet, but one rich in calories. Then Ireland’s potato monoculture was hit by the blight. By 1851, despite a high birth rate, the population was, due to starvation and emigration, down to 6.55 million, a drop of 20%.
When Dyson wrote, English was becoming the world’s dominant language, but was far behind its current status as increasingly the second language of elites most everywhere. And now we have the Internet to spread English and artificial intelligence to translate.
Does the world have enough friction anymore to slow the spread of bad ideas?
Different languages shape the perceptions of the world of the people speaking them.
A trivial example:
In English, the "go" traffic light is described as green; in Japanese, it is described as "aoi." But a common term Japanese have for White people is "aoi me," translated as "blue eye." So it would seem that to a Japanese the colors blue and green are identical. That's not exactly true, but neither is it exactly false.
I could go through small dictionary of similar examples that would reinforce the impression that a Japanese and an American standing side-by-side are living in different worlds, maybe I could say "literally" living in different worlds.
When I was learning hyōjungo (標準語), commonly translated as "Tokyo dialect," as a child living in Japan, I would sometimes get lost in the Japanese understanding of reality and have a hard time returning to the American, English-speaking reality. They are not so much different as..."off," you might say, just slightly out of phase. I can imagine that all non-Indo-European language-speaking peoples are out of phase with Indo-European-speaking peoples.
Regarding the homogenizing effect of a dominant language, also consider the homogenizing and controlling effect of written language. As Claude Lévi-Strauss has written, "Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself. Writing is a strange thing.... The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system of a considerable number of individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes. It seems to favor the exploitation rather than the enlightenment of mankind."
And if that language is easy or hard to learn surely affects the way a society is organized and controlled.
James C. Scott would probably agree that a dominant language expressing itself in writing is a destroyer of freedom and independence. It facilitates empire and tyranny. He wrote:
“Not so very long ago, self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as living ancestors, what we were like before we discovered cultivation and civilization. But hill peoples — aborigines, savages, natives — are best understood as runaway fugitive communities that have, over the course of millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.”
"The Monoculture of English Menace" can be read to mean England is a dangerous world-actor but that this particular perfidious world-actor, England, has a boring one one-dimensional culture.
- The Menace of English-Monoculture
- The Menace of English-language Monoculture
- The Menace of the Monoculture of the English language
- The English-Monoculture Menace
- The Monoculture-of-English Menace
I think the liberal use of clarifying hyphens (or, "clarifying-hyphens," if you will, it being a noun phrase) is something useful, to be borrowed from other languages and used based on their example.
Everyone who's anyone knows that German coins new compound words (or, compound-words) all the time, and usefully so. Rendering these new phrases, ideas, turns-of-phrase as separate words or without hyphens can be confusing. Even the New York Times, in early years, called itself the "New-York Times," because strictly a hyphenless version COULD be read to be "York Times, new edition of" from some places called York.