by Bill Bryson
There is certainly a good case for adopting an international language, whether it be English or Malaysian or Thraco-Phrygian. Translating is an enormously costly and time-consuming business. An internal survey by the European Community in 1987 found that it was costing it $15 a word, $500 a page, to translate its documents. One in every three employees of the European Community is engaged in translating papers and speeches. A third of all administration costs—$700 million in 1987—was taken up with paying for translators and interpreters. Every time a member is added to the EC, as most recently with Greece, Spain, and Portugal, the translation problems multiply exponentially. Under the Treaty of Rome each member country’s language must be treated equally, and it is not easy even in multilingual Brussels to find linguists who can translate from Dutch into Portuguese or from Danish into Greek.
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 contrôler as synonyms when in fact the English form means “to dominate or hold power” while the French means simply “to inspect.” The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The Japanese 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 because 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, particularly 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 answer. 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 announce 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 stimulators” and tents as “frame-supported tension structures.” Here is an extract from the Pentagon’s Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 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 similarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages).
Although English is capable of waffle and obfuscation, it is nonetheless 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 først till møllem får først malet” [The Growth and Structure 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 language. At the end of the nineteenth century there arose a vogue for made-up languages. Between 1880 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 Volapük, invented in 1880 by a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer. For a decade and a half, Volapük enjoyed a large following. More than 280 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, Volapük 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 Volapük itself was supposed to come from two English roots, vola for world and pük 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 concocting 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 in the fire and the young Pole was forced to start again from scratch. Esperanto is considerably more polished and accessible than Volapük. It has just sixteen rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings, and no illogicalities of spelling. Esperantists claim to have eight million adherents in 110 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 million claimed speakers, it is not widely used. In normal circumstances, 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 linguistics authorities, particularly in this century, have taken the view that the best hope of a world language lies not in devising a synthetic 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 University in England
devised Basic English, which consisted of paring the English language down to just 850 essential words, including a mere 18 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 simplified, 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. Morphology, 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 nowhere.
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 English for most foreigners was its irregular spelling. He came up with a language that was essentially English but with more consistent spellings. Here is the start of the Gettysburg Address in Anglic: “Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue naeshon. . . .” Anglic won some influential endorsements, 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?” “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 be 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 during the dubbing or subtitling of American movies in Europe. In one movie where a policeman tells a motorist to pull over, the Italian translator 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 1970s, according to Time magazine, Russian diplomats were issued a Russian/English phrasebook that fell into Western 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 sitting 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 deficiency. 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 interpreters, who naturally “interpreted” his speeches and pronouncements 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.
We in the English-speaking world have often been highly complacent in expecting others to learn English without our making anything like the same effort in return. As of 1986, the number of American students studying Russian was 25,000. The number of Russian students studying English was four million—giving a ratio of 160 to one in the Soviet’s favor. In 1986, the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung investigated the studying of German as a foreign language around the world. In the United States, the number of college students taking a German course was 120,000, down from 216,000 in 1966. In the Soviet Union, the number was nine million. The problem is unlikely to get better. Between 1966 and 1986, 150 American colleges and universities canceled their German programs. In 1989, some 77 percent of all new college graduates had taken no foreign-language courses.
A presidential commission under Ronald Reagan called the situation scandalous. In 1987, in an effort to redress the balance Congress voted into law the Education for Economic Security Act, which provided an extra $2.45 million to promote the study of foreign languages—or a little over one cent per person in the country. That should really turn the tables. There is evidence to suggest that some members of Congress aren’t fully sympathetic with the necessity for a commercial nation to be multilingual. As one congressman quite seriously told Dr. David Edwards, head of the Joint National Committee on Languages, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me” [quoted in the Guardian, April 30, 1988].
Not only are we not doing terribly well at foreign languages, we’re not even doing terribly well at English. The problem was well voiced by Professor Randolph Quirk, president of the British Academy and one of that country’s leading linguistic scholars, when he wrote: “It would be ironic indeed if the millions of children in Germany, Japan and China who are diligently learning the language of Shakespeare and Eliot took more care in their use of English and showed more pride in their achievement than those for whom it is the native tongue.”
We might sometimes wonder if we are the most responsible custodians of our own tongue, especially when we reflect that Oxford University Press sells as many copies of the Oxford Engl
ish Dictionary in Japan as it does in America, and a third more than in Britain.
13.
Names
The English, it has always seemed to me, have a certain genius for names. A glance through the British edition of Who’s Who throws up a roll call that sounds disarmingly like the characters in a P. G. Wodehouse novel: Lord Fraser of Tullybelton, Captain Allwyne Arthur Compton Farquaharson of Invercauld, Professor Valentine Mayneord, Sir Helenus Milmo, Lord Keith of Kinkel. Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions, like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfulry Plunkett-Ernel-Erle-Drax. The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. The leading explorer in Britain today is Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Somewhere in Britain to this day there is an old family rejoicing in the name MacGillesheatheanaich. In the realms of nomenclature clearly we are dealing here with giants.
Often, presumably for reasons of private amusement, the British pronounce their names in ways that bear almost no resemblance to their spelling. Leveson-Gower is “looson gore,” Marjoribanks is “marchbanks,” Hiscox is “hizzko,” Howick is “hoyk,” Ruthven is “rivven,” Zuill is “yull,” Menzies is “mingiss.” They find particular pleasure in taking old Norman names and mashing them around until they become something altogether unique, so that Beaulieu becomes “bewley,” Beauchamp turns into “beecham,” Prideaux into “pridducks,” Devereux to “devrooks,” Cambois to “cammiss,” Hautbois to “hobbiss,” Belvoir somehow becomes “beaver,” and Beaudesert turns, unfathomably, into “belzer.”
