5:48 PM, Monday, January 24, 2005
I read Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue back in . . . mmm . . . not sure, high school maybe, maybe earlier; I would have been in sixth or seventh grade when it came out. (But maybe later, because some of my memories of reading it imply that I must have had more exposure to lingustics than I think I would have had back then, even in a house with a linguistics major in it.)
I found it depressing — well, no surprise there, it’s a dystopia, and a pretty nasty one at that. And also frustrating. Frustrating because the Linguists of the book (the capital L denotes linguists working with the State Department’s Alien Relations program, raised from birth to be native speakers of alien languages), the male ones anyway, were bad linguists. Case in point: There’s a scene where a non-Linguist who’s married into one of the Linguist families starts to say “See here—”, only to be cut off by the head of the clan, who pompously forces him to modify it to the allegedly more literal, and therefore more correct, “Perceive this.” You can’t even call that prescriptivist. Even as a shibboleth, it’s just plain wrong. Even if these guys are really only glorified interpreters (and the Linguists must maintain secret knowledge of linguistics to some extent, or the oppressed women of the Linguist families would have had a good deal of trouble inventing Láadan), they seem to be shockingly ignorant of both etymology and metaphor. (“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?” “A component, like a
capacitor?”)
But anyway. Through a series of clicks that would be tedious to relate and that I can no longer completely retrace, today I came across Ms. Elgin’s web site, which is full of interesting ideas — even if on some questions, like Sapir-Whorf, we don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye. Have a look.
