Authors: Bill Bryson
A more compelling reason for an international language is the frequency and gravity of misunderstandings owing to difficulties of translation. The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English
control
and French
controler
as synonyms when in fact the English form means "to dominate or hold power" while the French means sim-ply "to inspect." The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The Jap-anese involvement in World War II may have been inadvertently prolonged when the Domei news agency, the official government information service, rendered the word
mokusatsu as
"ignore"
when the sense intended was that of "reserving a reply until we have had time to consider the matter more carefully."
That may seem a remarkably wide chasm between meanings, but Japanese is particularly susceptible to such discrepancy be-
ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
cause it is at once so dense and complex and yet so full of subtlety.
It has been suggested, in fact, that it is probably not possible to give accurate simultaneous Japanese-English translations because of the yawning disparity between how the two languages function.
To take just one instance, in Japanese it is considered impolite to end a sentence with an unexpected flourish; in English it is a sign of oratorical dexterity of the first order. English speakers, partic-ularly in the context of business or political negotiations, favor bluntness. The Japanese, by contrast, have a cultural aversion to directness and are often reluctant to give a simple yes or no an-swer. When a Japanese says "Kangae sasete kudasai" ("Let me think about it") or "Zensho shimasu" ("I will do my best") he actually means "no." This has led many business people, and on at least one occasion the president of the United States, to go away thinking they had an agreement or understanding that did not actually exist.
This problem of nuance and ambiguity can affect the Japanese themselves. According to John David Morley in
Pictures from the
Water Trade,
when Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to an-nounce the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, he used such vague and arcane language that most of his audience, although listening attentively, didn't have the first idea what he was talking about. In 1988, a member of parliament, Kazuhisa Inoue, began pressing the government to form a committee to come up with ways of making parliamentary debate less dense, suggesting that the Japanese habit of hiding behind rhetoric was heightening the reputation of the "sneaky Japanese. -
[New York
Times,
May 27, 1988]
Having said all that, we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the English-speaking world. According to
U.S. News & World
Report
[February 18, 1985], an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report to an "involuntary conversion of a 727 . - It meant that it had crashed. At least one hospital, according to the London
Times,
has taken to describing a death as "a negative patient-care outcome." The Pentagon is peerless at this sort of thing. It once described toothpicks as "wooden interdental stimu-lators" and tents as "frame-supported tension structures." Here is
THE MOTHER TONGUE
an extract from the Pentagon's Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type z sandwich cookie: "The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711. . . . The color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the objects held in such a way as to avoid specular refractance." And so it runs on for fifteen densely typed pages. Every single item the Pentagon buys is sim-ilarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages).
Although English is capable of waffle and obfuscation, it is none-theless generally more straightforward than eastern languages and less verbose than other western ones. As Jespersen notes, where we can say "first come, first served," the Danes must say "den der kommer first til mollem far forst malet."
[The Growth and Struc-
ture of the English Language,
page 6]
Because of the difficulties inherent in translation, people have been trying for over a century to devise a neutral, artificial lan-guage. At the end of the nineteenth century there arose a vogue for made-up languages. Between 188o and 1907 [Baugh and Cable A
History of the English Language,
page 7], fifty-three universal languages were proposed. Most were enthusiastically ignored, but one or two managed to seize the public's attention. One of the more improbable of these successes was Volapuk, invented in 1880
by a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer. For a decade and a half, Volapuk enjoyed a large following. More than 28o clubs sprang up all over Europe to promote it. Journals were established and three international congresses were held. At its peak it boasted almost a million followers. And yet the language was both eccentric and abstruse. Schleyer shunned the letter r because he thought it was too difficult for children, the elderly, and the Chinese. Above all, Volapuk was obscure. Schleyer claimed that the vocabulary was based largely on English roots, which he said made it easy to learn for anyone already familiar with English, but these links were often nearly impossible to deduce. The word
Volapuk
itself was sup-
ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
posed to come from two English roots,
vole
for world and
puk
for speak, but I daresay it would take a linguistic scholar of the first mark to see the connection. Schleyer helped to doom the language by refusing to make any modifications to it, and it died with almost
as
much speed as it had arisen.
Rather more successful, and infinitely more sensible, has been Esperanto, devised in 1887 by a Pole named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhoff, who lived in an area of Russia where four languages were commonly spoken. Zamenhoff spent years diligently concoct-ing his language. Luckily he was a determined fellow because at an advanced stage in the work his father, fearing his son would be thought a spy working in code, threw all Ludovic's papers on the fire and the young Pole was forced to start again from scratch.
Esperanto is considerably more polished and accessible than Vol-apiik. It has just sixteen rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings, and no illogicalities of spelling. Esperantists claim to have eight million adherents in 1 10 countries and they say that with three hours of study a week it can be mastered in a year. As evidence of its success as a living language, its proponents point out that it has developed its own body of slang (for example,
luton
for hello, a devil-may-care shortening of the formal word
saluton)
and even its own swear words (such as
merdo,
derived from the French
merde).
Esperanto looks faintly like a cross between Spanish and Martian, as this brief extract, the first sentence from the
Book of
Genesis,
shows: "En la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la teron."
Esperanto has one inescapable shortcoming. For all its eight mil-lion claimed speakers, it is not widely used. In normal circum-stances, an Esperanto speaker has about as much chance of encountering another as a Norwegian has of stumbling on a fellow Norwegian in, say, Mexico.
As a result of these inevitable shortcomings, most other linguis-tics authorities, particularly in this century, have taken the view that the best hope of a world language lies not in devising a syn-thetic tongue, which would almost certainly be doomed to failure, but in making English less complex and idiosyncratic and more accessible. To that end, Professor C. K. Ogden of Cambridge Uni-versity in England devised Basic English, which consisted of par-191
THE MOTHER TONGUE
ing the English language down to just 85o essential words, including a mere i8 verbs—be,
come, do, get, give, go, have, keep,
let, make, may, put, say, see, seem, send, take,
and will—which Ogden claimed could describe every possible action. Thus simpli-fied, English could be learned by most foreigners with just thirty hours of tuition, Ogden claimed. It seemed ingenious, but the system had three flaws.
First, those who learned Basic English might be able to write simple messages, but they would scarcely be able to read anything in English—even comic books and greeting cards would contain words and expressions quite unknown to them. Second, in any language vocabulary is not the hardest part of learning. Morphol-ogy, syntax, and idiom are far more difficult, but Basic English did almost nothing to simplify these. Third, and most critically, the conciseness of the vocabulary of Basic English meant that it could become absurdly difficult to describe anything not covered by it, as seen in the word
watermelon,
which in Basic English would have to be defined as "a large green fruit with the form of an egg, which has a sweet red inside and a good taste. - Basic English got no-where.
At about the same time, a Professor
R.
E. Zachrisson of the University of Uppsala in Sweden devised a form of English that he called Anglic. Zachrisson believed that the stumbling block of En-glish for most foreigners was its irregular spelling. He came up with a language that was essentially English but with more consis-tent spellings. Here is the start of the Gettysburg Address in An-glic: "Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue naeshon. . . ." Anglic won some influential en-dorsements, but it too never caught on.
Perhaps the most promising of all such languages is Seaspeak, devised in Britain for the use of maritime authorities in busy sea lanes such as the English Channel. The idea of Seaspeak is to reduce to a minimum the possibilities of confusion by establishing set phrases for ideas that are normally expressed in English in a variety of ways. For instance, a partly garbled message might prompt any number of responses in English: "What did you say?"
"I
beg your pardon,
I
didn't catch that. Can you say it again?"
ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
"There's static on this channel. Can you repeat the message?"
and so on. In Seaspeak, only one expression is allowed: "Say again." Any error, for whatever reason, is announced simply as
"Mistake," and not as "Hold on a minute, I've given you the wrong bearings," and so on.
Computers, with their lack of passion and admirable ability to process great streams of information, would seem to he ideal for performing translations, but in fact they are pretty hopeless at it, largely on account of their inability to come to terms with idiom, irony, and other quirks of language. An oft-cited example is the computer that was instructed to translate the expression
out of
sight, out of mind
out of English and back in again and came up with
blind insanity.
It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between
time flies
like an arrow
and
fruit flies like a banana
or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one's face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things. Here at last Esperanto may be about to come into its own. A Dutch computer company is using Esperanto as a bridge language in an effort to build a workable translating system. The idea is that rather than, say, translate Danish directly into Dutch, the computer would first translate it into Esperanto, which could be used to smooth out any difficulties of syntax or idiom. Esperanto would in effect act as a kind of air filter, removing linguistic impurities and idiomatic specks that could clog the system.
Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement.
In an article in
Gentleman's Quarterly
in 1987, Kenneth Turan described some of the misunderstandings that have occurred dur-ing the dubbing or subtitling of American movies in Europe. In one movie where a policeman tells a motorist to pull over, the Italian translater has him asking for a sweater (i.e., a pullover). In another where a character asks if he can bring a date to the funeral, the Spanish subtitle has him asking if he can_ bring a fig to the funeral.
In the early 197os, according to
Time
magazine, Russian diplo-
THE MOTHER TONGUE
mats were issued a Russian/English phrasebook that fell into West-ern hands and was found to contain such model sentences as this instruction to a waiter: "Please give me curds, sower cream, fried chicks, pulled bread and one jellyfish." When shopping, the well-versed Soviet emissary was told to order "a ladies' worsted-nylon swimming pants."
But of course it works the other way. A Braniff Airlines ad that intended to tell Spanish-speaking fliers that they could enjoy sit-ting in leather
(en cuero)
seats, told them that they could fly encuero—without clothes on.
In 1977, President Carter, on a trip to Poland, wanted to tell the people, "I wish to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future," but his interpreter made it come out as "I desire the Poles carnally." The interpreter also had the president telling the Poles that he had "abandoned" the United States that day, instead of leaving it. After a couple of hours of such gaffes, the president wisely abandoned the interpreter.
All of this seems comical, but in fact it masks a serious defi-ciency. Because the richest and most powerful nation on earth could not come up with an interpreter who could speak modern Polish, President Carter had to rely on Polish government inter-preters, who naturally "interpreted" his speeches and pronounce-ments in a way that fit Polish political sensibilities. When, for instance, President Carter offered his condolences to dissident journalists who "wanted to attend but were not permitted to come," the interpreters translated it
as
"who wanted to come but couldn't" and thus the audience missed the point. In the same way, President Nixon in China had to rely on interpreters supplied by the Chinese government.