Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
> At 5:42 pm -0700 14/10/98, Gerald Koenig wrote:
> >Ray said:
> >>
> >>I say that the notion that some natlangs are superior to others is just as
> >>flawed, meaningless and IMHO dangerous as holding that certain races are
> >>superior to others.  To me _both_ notions suck.
> >
> >Well that to me is a really strange identity.
>
> Hardly.  Is not, e.g., the Zulu language very much identified with the Zulu
> ethnic group.  Is not Welsh identied with a particular group of people?
> When I happened to mention to someone that both languages contained the
> velar fricative (Welsh 'll'), the response was "Well, they're both
> primitive languages?"  Was there no implication that ipso_facto the peoples
> who speak these languages are also primitive?
>
> I'm sorry - but it _has_ been my experience that it is a very short step
> from "Hebrew is a primitive language" (which I was once told by a
> schoolmaster) to "Jews are an inferior people".  I still say both notions
> suck.
>
Thank you Ray.

I have stayed out of this debate until now because I wasn't crazy about
the tone, and I was waiting for someone to say something that would
encapsulate what I feel. You just did so!!

I think part of the problem may be semantic-emotive, relating to the
word "superior." I think most of us are very nervous about applying that
to humans, or to human attributes or activities.  To me, even saying
"he's a superior tennis player" sounds kind of icky.

In Britain some 15-20 years ago a soup manufacturer ran an advertisement
where vegetables lined up to go in the soup; many were rejected off to
one side, while the "chosen" few happily jumped into the soup.  A comedy
program did a great parody of this where the scene turned into a Nazi
"selection." While engaging in comparison and allocating points is a
natural and essential human activity, I think it gets scary when it's
imbued with the (claimed) qualities of sicentific objectivism.

We all love languages here, and therefore (I hope) we all love people
and enjoy the diversity of both peoples and languages that the world has
to offer. I compare aspects of languages and think of them as
interesting, different, difficult to understand, amusing, challenging,
innovative - but I must honestly admit that in 30 years of learning
foreign languages and 22 years of conlanging, it had never occurred to
me to class languages as inferior/superior until this debate began.

        Shaul Vardi