BAD LANGUAGE

John Casey says the triumph

of English is a cause for national mourning

AT a hotel swimming-pool in Baghdad last year I found myself listening in to a con- versation between two women swimmers They spoke in English — the English in which 'No' is 'No way' and `Yes' is 'No problem'. It was plain that English was the native language of neither of them. This is something you come across more and more — English as a lingua franca, the most common means of communication among people on the planet.

It is certainly astonishing that from its small base English should have spread, first over the British Isles, then to North America, the old White Dominions, India and now throughout the world. For the first time in history a world language has become a genuine possibility. So I should perhaps have listened with pleasurable pride to the conversation in the swimming- pool. I found it excruciating.

You could call this snobbish and posses- sive — a curmudgeonly determination that English should be spoken in the style and spirit of native-English English. For what right have we to set limits on the spread of our language, or to claim it as our own peculiar possession?

In a way, none. American-English pro- duced Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ezra Pound. It has gone on producing brilliant writers even as it has become more distinct from English-English than it was in the 19th century. Some of the most successful contemporary writers in English are Indian. The mingling of Indian and English cultures over nearly three cen- turies means that they write as Indians, but write English as their native language.

These are not examples of English as a world language, but of English as an expression of culture. You can, of course, regard the English language purely as a set of rules for grammar and syntax. But you can also understand it as a cultural phe- nomenon, a means of expression as well as simple communication that takes in not only our literature, but also our traditions in politics, religion and law.

But world English will be not much more than a code, a sort of Esperanto or computer-speak. English is, indeed, the international language of computers. It does its job — but what a childish, jokey, primitive thing it is. Computer English is a closed system that simply meets certain technical requirements. It is a debased, reduced version of the language. Dialects — West Indian, creole, even (I suppose) pidgin — are rooted in history. They are nothing like the faceless, mechanised English of the computer manuals.

You can find examples from the past of quasi-universal languages. Latin in the Roman Empire was one (although it always had to compete with Greek, which became the official language of the Eastern Empire). And Latin carried excellent cul- tural baggage — not only the Roman poets, historians and orators, but also the concepts of Roman law and, later, of Latin Christian- ity. Seneca was a Spaniard and St Augus- tine a North African, but both were steeped in Roman-Latin culture. In the Church, Latin was no mere lingua franca — as the Vulgate version of the Bible, which influ- enced men as diverse as Wyclif, Luther, Donne and Lancelot Andrewes, testifies.

True, in Roman seminaries right up to the 1960s, philosophy and theology were taught, and the students from all over the Catholic world spoke an execrable dog- Latin. Latin was reduced simply to a code, a convenience — with the result that when the assault on Church Latin finally came there was hardly any convinced resistance.

Another quasi-world language has been Arabic in the Muslim world. Notoriously many children in the non-Arab Muslim world learn the Koran by rote whether or not they understand it, for there is a very strong tradition that the sacred language of the Koran should not be translated. In the great days of Arab culture — from about the seventh to 12th centuries Arabic was the language in which the most modern ideas in science, theology, philoso- phy and law were readily absorbed, and that bound together the Muslim world from China to southern Spain.

The more triumphantly English trans- forms itself into a world language, the less will the English have any incentive to study — let alone come to love — the languages of Europe. The day of the monoglot is at hand. In my own university — Cambridge — a proposal was recently made to relieve undergraduates of the last, vestigial pressure to learn at least one European language. The proposal was defeated, but it is aston- ishing that it ever saw the light of day.

Most of the classic European poets Chaucer, Dante, Petrarch, Milton, Racine, Dryden, Pope, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot wrote their own language with an intimate sense of other tongues. Homer was Virgil's chief inspiration. (Homer himself must have been a monoglot — but that just shows that literary theories admit of large exceptions.) We all have to read most for- eign writers in translation. But if the English finally lose the habit of reading for- eign writers in the original they will be imaginatively starved.

The more you think about it, the less attractive becomes the idea of world English. The French rightly hate it. In my own lifetime French was still the language of diplomacy. Even as the Cold War got going, respectable newspapers still referred to M. Molotov, M. Vishinsky and even M. Stalin. Why should not French have remained the diplomatic language, given that it was the French who virtually invented modern diplomacy? To have waged the Cold War in French might have introduced useful intel- lectual standards, a superior rationality. Instead we fell into the shrill language of moralistic abuse that the Americans have always found congenial, and that has now become normal for all of us.

Lord Haldane had to resign as minister of war after 1914 because years earlier he had said that Germany was 'my spiritual home'. He meant that he loved reading the German philosophers in the original. Imagine French for international relations, German as an essential tool for classical scholars and philosophers, Latin as the lan- guage of Western Christendom, and English as the international language of science, and you imagine a civilised, essen- tially European order.

The attempt to detach language from cul- ture is not new. An 18th-century bishop, John Wilkins, tried to devise a universal lan- guage based on a scientific description of the world. He translated the Lord's Prayer into this language. It did not catch on — any more than did his proposal for men to be transported to the moon by flocks of geese.

World English is the worst thing that could happen to us. It will mean that the English of England and the British Isles will come to be seen as just one dialect among many — with- out even the special status that Tuscan has in Italy. We will be engulfed by computer- speak, international science-speak, Unesco- speak and international-business lingo. We will be in an even worse position than the French in their struggle against Franglais for French is, at least, clearly a distinct lan- guage. Given our current insouciance towards our own high culture (so different from the robust self-pride of the French) we will have deprived ourselves of the chief bul- warks against the flood.