Monday, September 28, 2015

Another language barrier - the one to the past

This post owes its existence to yet another call for amending the German constitution with some blurb expressly making German the national language of the country.

As said in Let no good crisis go to waste: the German refugee influx version, the piece proclaimed that we are all "equal before the law of the language" and was all warm and fuzzy about this "bond". Needless to say, the author is a linguist, which implies added credibility, right?

What may seem like a nice, almost self evident demand, is - to the blogster - fundamentally useless at best and pathetically nationalist at worst.

Let's recall for the record that every immigrant to Germany is already required by law to learn the language. Being Germans, they test this knowledge, and if you happen to be from a developing country and apply for a visa to move to Germany with your freshly minted German spouse, that visa is routinely denied until you pass the test.

If you are a European Union citizen, you can move here and take your time to learn German. Incidentally, it is always easier to learn a language in country.

We assume to the credit of the "equal before the law of the language" author that he makes a distinction between the law of the language and the law regulating the acquisition of the language.

But there are other issues with the claimed equality: if you speak the wrong kind of German (social or geographical variant), there is no equality either. The expression of inequality in this case can take the form of benign jokes, of unexplained job loss, of careless ignorance, or of outright discrimination.

It can be so deep seated that we engage in discriminating behavior without noticing it at all. While questions around gender and language as well as "political correctness" have been hotly debated for some time, other areas do not normally get the same attention.

The blogster simply calls these issues of education and specialist expertise. We all know how important learning the specialized language of any field is in order to function reasonably well in this area. If you learn how to sail, you will have to use port and starboard instead of left and right, if you study chemistry, failure to use the correct nomenclature may result in a world changing discovery or another headline about some blown up lab, and so forth.

The specialist lingo also has an awful tradition of being used in hazing or bullying of rookies. For example, your motorpool sergeant sends you off on the first day to grab a "gut wrench" and you are met with laughter by the inventory PFC as well as on your return. 
Literature and the workplace are full of examples of impostors who do well by knowing the lingo without having the skills to match.

The inverse is true, too. You'll find plenty of software engineers who will be overlooked because of inadequate English until their skills show their expertise.

If you interact with any specialist outside of your area of expertise, you may not be given good information unless you know enough of the expert language. A perennial episode showing this is one by a German friend at a German university medical center. The German, accompanied by a French friend, tried to talk to a doctor about the prognosis of a patient after major cancer surgery.

The doctor made one dismissive comment and turned around to leave, when the French friend asked a follow up question. The doctor became friendly and provided an in depth explanation of the cancer, the surgery and the prognosis.

The German and the French person had both asked in German, so what was the difference?

The French friend used standard Latin terms, normal in French but considered part of the specialist medical lingo in German.

And, finally, there is the past. There is little doubt Mr. Goethe spoke German, but that's not the German they teach at the Goethe Institut language centers around the world. Go back another century or two, and what is still "German" is extremely hard to read and understand for most modern Germans.

If that difference is greater than the language barrier between, say, a modern American in Germany and a German, what does that tell us?

To the blogster, it says that we are looking at a set of constructs, a snapshot of a language at a given moment in time, a more or less well defined label of what is "German".

In fact, while much of modern man's widespread feeling of superiority over our ancestors is obviously rooted in progress in science and comfort of life, some of it stems from a largely unacknowledged effect of the linguistic distance reflected in strange grammatical rules and "odd" verbiage of our ancestors. It is the same effect you experience when encountering a person whose English exhibits all the characteristics of English as a second language.

So, fine, add something about German to the constitution if it makes you feel better.

But if you attach practical actions and consequences to it, the blogster will make you read Oswald von Wolkenstein's songs and poems to prove you understand German and appreciate the cultural bond it represents.

One more thing:
On top of all of that, there is the minor issue of "High German".

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