Reading And Viewing

Reading
The weather over the past couple of weeks has been quite good for January but often cold, even in the sun during the day. So it's been a time mostly for reading and viewing ; only a hardy few of us make it to boules and then only when the sun is out. However, I've received my invitation to the old folks lunch on the 29th and will look forward to that. Last year it was a five-hour event with superb cuisine, decent wines and lots of good company.

A book I have just ploughed through is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, a missionary who went to convert the Pirahã tribe in Brazil to Christianity and, instead, himself got converted to their culture. That's not the only intriguing aspect to the book. It defies what I had formerly thought necessarily happens to a primitive language when it comes into contact with a more developed society. Admittedly I have, in global terms, little personal experience of this but the the normal outcome seems to be that the primitive language collapses and becomes a kind of patois or creole, borrowing as necessary from the language of the more developed society.

When I was in Senegal the predominant tribal language, Ouolof, had fallen apart through contact with French. As an example from experience, Ouolof had eight verbs to pour, with the verb including what was poured and into what. In linguistic terms, that's a very synthetic language (many units of meaning – morphemes – per word). It works when there are few nouns associated with the verb; so when the Oulof had only water, camels' milk and calabashes, there was no problem. Bring tea, coffee, wine, scotch, tea cups, mugs and glasses of various kinds into the picture and the structure of the language cannot cope; you'd need a couple of hundred synthetic verbs. The Oulof had reduced their eight verbs to pour to one and borrowed the French nouns, thus reducing the language to a kind of creole.

All this is in line with my perceptions on culture and semantics. You don't necessarily have to look in prisons, as Churchill and Dostoyevsky before him suggested, to understand what kind of society you are dealing with; the semantics of the society's language can often tell you a lot. It reflects the culture. What astonished me was that the Pirahãs' language seems to have survived. It has no counting semantics for example; only the concepts of one or many, which also serve for small and large. The tribe pays a price for this semantic omission, it seems, when they are short-changed for the produce they collect and sell. But they apparently don't care much about that, not enough to change their culture.

The reason the language has survived is that the tribe has rejected all outside cultures and more sophisticated concepts; with the exception, it seems, of plastic cups. No doubt even a very primitive language can accommodate those. The lesson is clear: to retain a language you have to retain the culture it reflects. The more the definitive concepts of a culture are blurred, the more the associated language is “corrupted”.

Of course, this is happening with the French language today. The admittedly miserable efforts of the Académie Française to safeguard the “purety” of French are bound to fail because French culture is changing faster than it can cope. Maybe the Canadians will do a better job. I found echoes of France also in the insularity and mores of the Pirahãs. Pirahã society is distinctly incestuous, a feature that goes hand in hand with insularity.

The book gets quite heavy on linguistics in places and exceeded my interest in that aspect sometimes. But the social aspects, and their link to linguistics, I found fascinating.

Viewing
One of the DVDs I obtained for Christmas was given to me by daughter: it's entitled Spiral. It's a crime series screened on BBC2 in the UK which I somehow missed, probably because I was often here in France at the time it was screened. The production was in conjunction with Canal+ in France and the DVD is in French with English subtitles. I needed those for the frequent use of police/underworld slang (though the swearing was familiar from boules). I found the whole 20+ hours viewing brilliant in very respect, not just the acting and Paris suburb locations but, above all, the characterisation. Everyone is (morally) grey. Even justice, when it is served, requires a little corruption to help it along and comes with a heavy penalty. The whole tale is totally believable, nauseating at times, tender at others, but, above all totally believable. I don't know either of the scriptwriters attributed but the scripts could well have been written by John Le Carré; it's definitely his territory.

Once again there were insights on France, not just on the French legal system, with which I am (fortunately) relatively unfamiliar, but also with respect to the somewhat easy familiarity the French seem to have with corruption in high places and easy acceptance also that power will be in one way or another corrupt. I find that unsettling.

There was also a linguistic aspect. The French title for the seies is “Engrenages”, which corresponds roughly to the English “gearing up”. I had to go to the dictionary for that. Vehicle gears, in French, are “changements de vitesse”, which shows no linguistic similarity to the English word. “Engrenages” does, though, and so do all the other words in French associated with gears. I wonder how “changements de vitesse” happened?