Re: CHAT: Scythes and Scythians (was: Re: CHAT: Re: Japanese English)

Lassailly@AOL.COM wrote:

> Dans un courrier daté du 23/03/00 18:24:20  , Tom a écrit :
>
> > Humorous, but not surprising.  Umberto Eco writes in his book _The
> >  Search for the Perfect Language about one Frenchman, the Count
> >  Antoine de Rivarol and that man's book _De la universitalité de la langue
> >  française_:
> >
> >  "According to de Rivarol, French possessed a phonetic system that
> >  guaranteed sweetness and harmony, as well as a literature incomperable
> >  in its richness and grandeur; it was spoken in that capital city which had
> >  become the 'foyer des étincelles répandues chez tous les peuples'.  In
> >  comparison with French, German was too gutteral, Italian too soft, Spanish
> >  too redundant, English too obscure.  Rivarol attributed the superiority of
> >  French to its word order: first subject, then verb, and last object.  The
> >  word order mirrored a natural logic which was in accordance with the
> >  requirements of common sense.... [D]e Rivarol asserts that if other people,
> >  speaking in other tongues, had abandoned the natural direct word order,
> >  it was because they had let their passions prevail over their intellect."
> >  (p. 300-1)
> >
> >  It sounds disturbingly similar to modern day members of the French Academy,
> >  or the editors of _Le Monde_.  :)
>
> i can't get what is "humorous" or "disturbing" above.
> of course french language is close to perfection thanks to the french people
> and their academie's genius.
(I'm not sure if that's sarcastic or not, so:)

Um, well, because it's entirely *arbitrary*, that's why.  Whether the French
Academy likes it or not, there is simply no theoretical way to prove that one
form of a language is better than another of that language, or whether one
entire language is better than another *internal to those languages*.  You have
to use outside criteria, such as prestige, which is by definition arbitrary, or
extent of use, which is linguistic only insofar as it measures a society's use of
a language.   Practically speaking, it's useful to know a variety of French when
living in France, Quebec, etc., or English in America, the UK, etc., but none
of those are decisions about the language itself, which is what de Rivarol was
saying, and what Eco was criticizing.

======================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
======================================