Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

LIFE & LANGUAGE: THE TYPEWRITERS MANIFESTO by Max Treinen Undergraduate Philosophy & English, UAA 1 March 2011 Faculty Advisors: Dr Widdicombe (English) & Dr Kelly (Philosophy) INTRODUCTION The worlds languages are dying at an alarming rate. Of the roughly 5,000 distinct languages spoken around the globe today, fewer than half are expected to survive the next century (7 Nettle & Romaine). This quote from the Mission Statement of UAFs Alaska Native Language Center tragically corroborates this statistic, and demonstrates that even such happy isolationists as Alaskans are not immune to this epic trend: [o]f the states twenty Native languages, only two (Siberian Yupik in two villages on St. Lawrence Island, and Central Yupik in seventeen villages in southwestern Alaska) are spoken by children as the first language of the home. Not so long ago, all of these languages were first languages. Soon, none of them will be. The extinction of languages occurs by orders of magnitude. It is taking place everywhere and is an inescapable fact of modern civilisation. The loss of linguistic diversity is but one manifestation of a world-wide trend towards homogenisation. In all aspects of human life, we are experiencing an unprecedented move towards uniformity. Globalisation, and the spread of American culture threatens the diversity that is native to all aspects of life on earth. A standard of monotony has leveled erstwhile undulant processes from fashion to food-production. O.K. has penetrated languages from Choctaw to Polish, from Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog (Bryson 165), Coca Cola is sold in virtually every country on the planet,* and Inupiat teenagers in Togiak on the far west coast of Alaska now wear the same hoodies and washed-out denim as their counterparts in Los Angeles. Where once was to be found a multiplicity of customs and mores, one is confronted instead today with a vast monolith of global culture; the dappled miscellany now blanched by a global uniform. Given its unprecedented nature, the ultimate effects of such vast homogenisation are far from certain. Despite a fundamental uncertainty, however, the wealth of evidence suggests that it were in our best interests to mitigate the loss of diversity that globalisation is effecting. With a focus on linguistic homogenisation, I intend to demonstrate that this process, even viewed in the very best light, is neutral; the irrevocable loss to expression
*

See http://www.virtualvender.coca-cola.com/ft/index.jsp for a list of countries with licensed Coca Cola vendorsit begins with Afghanistan and ends with Zimbabwe.

Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

and diversity balanced by advantages to efficiency and simplicity. I hope to convince the reader, however, that the outcome of language death and loss of diversity is likely to be an unhappy one with painful consequences for the future of or society. The Typewriters Manifesto will synthesise relevant information from a diversity of disciplines. Officially, it is the offspring of a peculiar union; a marriage between the arts of English & Philosophy (my two majors), with the Honors College administering the nuptial rites. But its essence is broad and omni-disciplinary. Loss of diversity is pervasive. The forces that are responsible for it know no boundaries nor counterbalance. The agribusinesses that foster monocultures need no more voice than that wherewith they are already endowed, and neither does BBC English. The voices that cry out against such titans, however, often lack advancement. For while the benefits of uniformity are often quantifiable and immediate clearly manifest in gains in efficiency, simplicity, or productivitythe benefits of diversity can be amorphous. Yet I maintain that they retain immense value. My intent is that The Typewriters Manifesto might serve as a reminder of these forsaken interests so that they might yet be heard amid the raging currents of modern discourse. I hope to inspire readers to question the direction of our society. I hope to slow the relentless wheel of progress just enough that we might make inquiry into its singular bearing, and that if we are to allow it to proceed, it will be an examined turning; a conscientious revolution. Protection of such an asset as diversity in the giants face of globalisation will require a fundamental shift in consciousnessa reformation of our cultural valuesas well as a course of positive action. As a symbol of this broader reformation and as an initial step towards a new consciousness, I present The Typewriters Manifestoa call to liberalise spelling within the Pangaeac tongue of English. As one grafting a tiny sprig of fig-blossom onto the arboreal colossus, I mean to impart a new strain of diversity into the megalith itself. Initiating a slow-language movement of sorts, The Manifesto will encourage communicators to divorce themselves from the drive for efficiency that has either codified language into an all but mathematical standard, or, as has more recently been the case with the rise of the text-message, reduced it into terse snippets and sentence-fragments; full of slang and fury, signifying nothing. It is my hope that by the end of The Typewriters Manifesto, the reader will find herself affected in several ways. First, I hope that she will be reminded of the too oft-forgotten value of diversity, and that she will feel a keen sense of the threat that globalisation poses to this wonderful condition. I hope that she will feel a new appreciation for diversity in language, both within and without of her mother tongue. Furthermore, I hope that she will come to evaluate language in new and fuller termsnot simply as a vehicle of verbal commerce, but also as an interminable palimpsest of historys peculiar engrams; as both a canvas of past impressions and a means of original expression. I hope that she will perceive the artistry behind the
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unfeeling sutures of syntax and propriety, and look on language as a thing of beauty in itself. Finally, I hope that The Typewriters Manifesto will inspire the reader to express her sentiments by joining my movement to (tastefully) disregard the standards of English orthography. PART I: LANGUAGE HUMAN MIND (AND LOSS THEREOF)

AND THE

THE

Why should one care about loss of linguistic diversity? What does it matter if language becomes standardised? An attempt at response requires that one address the fundamental nature of language itself. Such metaphysical inquiries demand gymnastics of intellect that far surpass my capacities, which are no greater than those of your typical undergraduate. Fortunately for my purposes, however, many well-known philosophers have extensively considered this very subject, and have left posterity with a wealth of relevant writings and schemata. To peruse these works is to encounter a glittering hoard of useful syllogisms for our project of defending linguistic diversity. The most fundamental task that confronts the defendant of linguistic diversity is to establish that language is not identical with verbal communication; that the scope of the former is broader than the simple conveyance of memes between individuals. We find express support for such an assertion in the writings of dead philosophers. Perhaps the most famous demonstration of languages radical significance came in 1921 with Ludwig Wittgensteins publication of Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. In this work, Wittgenstein puts forth an argument that the limits of my language are the limits of my world (151). Beginning with the proposition The world is everything that is the case, Tractatus describes a metaphysic whereof the most atomic constituents are not objects, as one would generally expect. Instead, the most fundamental componenets of Wittgensteins universe are facts: The world is the totality of facts, not of things (31), he writes in the first section of Tractatus. A Tractarian thing is secondary; contingent on its potential to serve as a constituent part of an atomic fact (31). The human being relates to this world of atomic facts by forming pictures: We make to ourselves pictures of facts, he writes, explaining that pictures are facts in logical space (39). Wittgenstein presents the relationship between the world and language through metaphor: the gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in the same pictorial internal relation which holds between lanugage and the world (65). The force that connects these various concepts abides entirely within the mind. This pictorial internal relation, as a system of representation, is bounded by the limits of that which can be represented. Just as ones field of sight (153) has no clear boundaries, but there are boundaries nonetheless, so the world, and our corresponding means of representing it languageis not infinite. It only seems so in that its fringes transcend our ken. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darber muss man schweigen:
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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent (188); with this cryptic conclusion, Wittgenstein suggests that an individuals language and the world that it describes exhaust one another in their symbolic correspondencethat which lies beyond language falls beyond the world as well. For this reason, such things are unknowable. The contents of Wittgensteins claim may smack of pretense and esotericity; the same bitter juices that the hemlock-wielding cave-dwellers find so contemptible in all of Philosophy. But this taste would be misleading. Rather, the utility of Wittgensteins words are simply lost in translation to these folk; unrenderable by the rude relief that characterises the general shadow-show. The everyday implications of Wittgensteins argument are profound. To perceive the evidence of its relevance with more clarity, one might best traverse the disciplines. In his 1956 work Language, Thought, and Reality, linguist Bejamin Lee Whorf echoes Wittgensteins Tractatus when he writes that Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about (17). Such views led Whorf, together with fellow linguist Edward Sapir, to propose what has become known as Linguistic Relativity or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This is the theory that an individuals language dictates his experience at the most fundamental level. Not all of Whorfs work has weathered times abrasive proving. The inclemency of critics in the decades since his death has blunted the whetter edges of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. That we use what to an Eskimo [would be the same] all-inclusive wordfor falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow(4)does not mean that we as English-speakers cannot conceptually distinguish between these various forms of frozen precipitate, as Whorf argued in Language, Thought, and Reality. Critics have cited this as evidence for the falsity of the Whorfian hypothesis. Likewise, a language such as Hopithe indigenous language of the Southern Plains Indianswhich in its vocabulary includes no notion of external time, does not preclude this people from mentally apprehending the phenomenon (or noumenon, as it were). Indeed, as Ekkehart Malotki observes in Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts of the Hopi Language, the Hopi people developed detailed lunar calendarsan act which by its very nature demands a distinct perception of external time. This would seem to suggest a flaw in the Whorfian argument. As Guy Deutscher observes in Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, as loftily as it had once soared, so precipitously did the [Sapir-Whorf] theory then crash (131) when faced with such criticisms. In the past several years, however, linguists have returned to the works of Sapir and Whorf as new evidence corroborates the original thesis. Very recently, Linguistic Relativity and the question of what relationship language holds to reality, once energetically refuted (The New York Times, 2 March 2009), has experienced a resurgence of popularity, particularly with the work of Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky. Boroditskys experiments have sparked articles in print-media including Newsweek, The Economist,
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and The New York Times. The prevalent interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis today emphasises not the way in which ones mother tongue constrains her thought, but rather that in which it conditions one to think about certain things. In Does Language Shape How You Think? published in The New York Times on 26 August 2010, linguist and author Guy Deutscher explains that the current consensus is that if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. Perhaps it is a moot point, and I ought to be content with this

generous appraisal of languages worth. But like the proverbial fellow at the Blackjack table, this winning only makes me hungry and I feel therefore obliged to argue that Deutschers distinction is not as clear as his dichotomous diction would suggest. Instead, in this context the terms are nearly equivalent. Just as a trapeze-artist hones his skill by perpetual practice and in doing so achieves a peculiar ability that eludes that of your average cognitive linguist, for example, likewise does the
practice of language-usage endow the subject of this activity with certain capacities. The constant conditioning to notice certain things at the expense of othersa process in which language obliges us to engagenecessarily develops particular abilities while neglecting others. The triage of these abilities is determined by the language in question. Whorf and Boroditsky both cite the example of Guugu Yimithirr, a native language of the Australian aboriginals, to illustrate the relationship between mother tongue and thought. Guugu Yimithirr is remarkable, though not unique*, for its directional vocabulary. Where an English-speaker might remark on the tarantula creeping up his companions right trouser-leg, a Guugu Yimithirr-speakers warning would distinguish between the south-west and the north-east appendage, given a hale individual in this hypothetical alignment. That Guugu Yimithirr and other languages that employ only cardinal directions oblige their speakers to pay constant attention to their geographical orientation has a measurable effect: Guugu Yimithirr speakers rarely get lost. The Guugu Yimithirr language cultivates in its speakers a geographical savvy far surpassing that of any Englishman. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought to exceed human capabilities, explains Boroditsky in How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think? published on Edge.org (6 December 2009). Through obliging its speakers to heed the cardinal directions, Guugu Yimithirr allows them to stay oriented and keep track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings
*

As Guy Deutscher notes, languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali (The New York Times; 26 August, 2010)

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(Boroditsky; Edge.org, 6 December 2009). Put another way, an Englishmans reliance on relative reference-frames precludes such featsit limits his world in a determinate way. At the same time, to imagine an Guugu Yimithirrspeaker attempting to abide even the most basic traffic-laws is a conceit that traces a limit of his world as well. The disoriented Westerner and the aboriginal traffic-hazard both instantiate the proof of the Wittgensteins claim and illustrate the wonderful workings of Whorfianism. As I proofread this paper between intermittent sips of Columbian coffee, I hear on the radio a report on cognitive linguistics that further conveys the intimacy of the bond between language an thought. On the daily NPR news-program Morning Edition, reporter Jon Hamilton describes an experiment published in the December issue of Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences. The findings of this experiment suggest that language is absolutely essential to the brains ability to comprehend higher-level mathnumbers greater than three. A study of people in Nicaragua has concluded that humans need language in order to understand large numbers Hamilton reports, and then explains: Members of the group were born deaf and never learned Spanish or a formal sign language, but they have developed a gesture system to communicate with people around them. The gestures let them express approximate amountsa little as opposed to a lotbut not exact numbers. Up to three, theyre fine, says Elizabet Spaepen, a researcher at the University of Chicago and an author of the study. But past three, they start to fall apart. Spaepen and her colleagues learned this through a series of experiments with people who hold jobs, use money and are surrounded by friends and family who use exact numbers all the time. In one test, Spaepen would knock her fist against a study participants fist a certain number of times and then ask them to respond with the same number of knocks. If I were to knock four times on their fist, they might knock my fist five times, she says. According to Spaepen, the results of this study confirm the findings of a prior one: on two tribes in the Amazon whose members also lack precise words for big numbers. What they have are words that sort of mean one and two, Spaepen says, and then they have a word to mean many.Members of the Amazonian tribes also had trouble matching numbers larger than three or four. (NPR: Morning Edition, 9 February 2011) Though many would argue that math is more fundamental than language, these studies suggest that the contrary might actually be the case. Daniel Casasanto, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands explains that:
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The human brain is very good at assessing approximate values, like the difference between 10 and 20 cookies, Casasanto says. But he says the brain needs some sort of counting system to tell the difference between 10 cookies and 11. What language does is give you a means of linking up our small, exact number abilities with our large, approximate number abilities. (NPR: Morning Edition, 9 February 2011) While there are those who would dismissively call language a soft discipline, new research is corroborating what Teutonic philosophers and rogue linguists have already told us: that all our intellectual ornature, the towering conceptual cathedrals of Mathematics and the sciencesour very conception of Truth itselfis builded on the spongy stuff of [w]ords, words, words. This is an astonishing assertion given its express contradiction of Sir Isaac Newtons professed belief that God created everything by number, weight and measure (Ryan 12), or John Lockes assertion that Logic is the anatomy of thought (Shabo 29). Johannes Kepler declared in a similar mind that Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God; that share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that Man is the image of God (154), and Roger Bacon famously claimed that There are four great sciences...Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics, which the saints discovered at the beginning of the world (97). And most primordially, in cryptic paean to mathematical mysticism, Pythagoras enunciated this ultimate truth: All is number (Padamsee 29). It is fascinating to compare these sentiments to those of the Septuagint, which the The Gospel According to John conveys in its opening line: , , .In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (829). For Pythagoras and his disciples, mathematics was the fabric of the universe; logic was king. But conveniently, (and indeed so much so that it may seem an etymological legerdemain), we see this argument self-cannibalise: logic itself derives from the Greek logosin English, the Word. Logic may inform everything, but language informeth logic. Such an interpretation reveals a new layers of meaning in the declarations by each of the eminent thinkers quoted earlier in this paragraph. PART II: THE DECLINE
OF

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

Given the fundamental importance of language to human life, it is clear that to allow a language to go extinct means to forever relinquish the particular window into reality that that language represents. Unfortunately, language loss is occurring around the globe and it is occurring quickly. One
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might counter that language is naturally dynamic, and that language has been lost ever since language began. But Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of Linguisitcs Ken Hale argues that the current state of affairs is decidedly different than that of any prior period in history. In his article titled Endangered Languages, Hale contrasts historical language loss with that process as it is presently occurring: [T]he process of language loss throughout most of human history, i.e., the period prior to the development of large states and empires, has been attended by a period of grammatical merger in situations of multilingualism, in geographically confined areas, and among quite small communities [...]. By contrast, language loss in the modern period is of a different character, in its extent and implications. It is part of a much larger process of loss of cultural and intellectual diversity in which politically dominant languages and cultures simply overwhelm indigenous local languages and cultures, placing them in a condition which can only be described as embattled. (3) Language loss today is separated from any time in history by an order of magnitude. If Stalin was correct* and we might compare the indiscriminate death of language with that of kulaks in the 20th century, then the language death that was before a tragedy has become a statistic. In Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future, Andrew Dalby quantifies the situation when he writes that [a]bout 5,000 languages are now spoken as the first language or mother tongue of someone, somewhere. According the the best recent estimates, in the present century 2,500 languages are likely to be lost...an average of one language every two weeks (ix). University of Alaska Fairbanks Professor of Linguistics Michael Krauss approximates the worlds languages at 6,000 but writes, I consider it a plausible calculation thatat the rate things are going the coming century will see the death or doom of 90 percent of them (7). In either case, the loss is staggering. Furthermore, as when one surveys an iceberg, the bulk of the loss when a language dies is intangible; hidden beneath the ocean of our unconscious. For this reason, the effects of this process often elude efforts of quantification. An example from the South Pacific will help to limn the situation: in Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages, Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine write of a tribe of Pacific Islanders who accumulated knowledge about the behavior of hundreds of varieties of fishCenturies before there were marine biologists and scientific methods of classifying...marine life (56) these Pacific Islanders had recorded their surroundings with remarkable thoroughnessnot upon the scrolls of Darwin and Linnaeus, but in their collective lexicon. Nettle and
*

Death of one man is a tragedy. Death of a million is a statistic. Julia Solovyova, writing for The Moscow Times in the article Mustering Most Memorable Quips (28 October 1997) notes that Russian historians have no record of the lines.

Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

Romaine cite a similar phenomenon observed in Tahiti and then explain that island languages are rich in words, proverbs, and metaphorical expressions relating to marine life (56). These aspects of their languages are oral engrams that chronicle their environments. As languages descend into oblivion, so too do these rich reliefs. One might argue that these languages having been forgotten were no great tragedy given that the preliminary knowledge that they once contained has simply been supplanted by modern taxonomies. Nettle and Romaine refute this assertion, however: Hawaiians probably know more about the fish of their islands when Captain Cook first arrived in 1778 than scientists know today...many Hawaiians have now forgotten more of that local knowledge accumulated and handed down over the past 2,000 years than western scientists will ever know. (56) Vocabulary is a veritable veneer; the verbal semblance of cultural knowledge. MIT Professor of Linguistics Ken Hale corroborates this sentiment when he writes that it is the simple truth that language...embodies the intellectual wealth of the people who use it (36). It is impossible to accurately measure the loss of wealth that the decline of a language heralds, for, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so succinctly put it: [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns the ones we dont know we dont know. (Statement to the press, 12 February 2002) Though Rumsfelds ramblings ring of non-sense and political circumlocution, fortunately, authorial intent has no bearing on the relevance of his statements as they apply to our purposes. With the death of language, there is much that we know is lost (Rumsfelds second category). But there is undoubtedly even more that is forfeit without our slightest awareness of it. These unknown unknowns escape our consciousness altogether. Even in very limited terms, therefore, (i.e. adopting taxonomical sophistication as the sole measure of progress) the loss of a language is deleterious. But to evaluate the situation on these terms alone would be to content oneself with the survey of an iceberg by a single face. This were horribly superficial as the thing itself is both multifaceted and profound; the truth is that language loss is far more problematic than any single metric could suggest. Nettle and Romaine note that Many such expressions have little or no meaning to todays younger generation who have grown up eating canned fish at the supermarket (56). It were no wild conjecture to suggest that as ones everyday language become more estranged from her
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natural environment, likewise should her actions. According to the University of New Mexicos summary of Hawaiis biodiversity laws, 240 Hawaiian species are now recognised as endangered. It is no coincidence that a rising threat to biodiversity has attended the growing trend towards linguistic homogeneity on the Hawaiian Islands. Nettle and Romaine recognise this concurrent decline and its global application when they write: Overall, the commonalities between biological and linguistic diversity are striking. The richness is concentrated in similar places, and in both cases, the destabilizing activities of a few powerful groups have potentially catastrophic consequences. Much of the world is now being covered by a few species of Eurasian originwheat, barley, cattle, rice. These monocultures are replacing a profusion of endemic diversity whose functions we are only now beginning to understand and appreciate. The linguistic situation is uncannily similar.... (Nettle & Romaine 48) UAF professor Michael Krauss draws the same comparison between biological and linguistic diversity in The Worlds Languages in Crisis, published in the 1992 edition of Language. In this essay, he writes that [l]anguage endangerment is significantly comparable toand related to endangerment of biological species in the natural world and likens a language no longer being learned as a mother-tongue by children to a species lacking reproductive capacity (7). Today, the tragic truth is that the world is filled with such languages, impotent and moribund (4). The comparison between diversities linguistical and biologic reveals yet a further cause for concern; Language is like a California Condor is a simile that can do some work. Because the rate and scope of language loss today is unprecedented, we are engaged in an original experiment. The stakes of this experiment are immeasurable and the ultimate consequences far from certain. However, given the strong correlation between biological and linguistic diversity, the current condition of the former provides some insight into the future of the latter. That biological diversity, and the decline thereof, has been chronicled for centuries is a fact from which one might extrapolate the likely effects of such a process in the worlds languages. Homogenisation and its consequences are particularly evident in our modern system of food production. Over the twentieth century, many food-growers came to rely exclusively on massive crops of a single species. In the twentyfirst century, the uniformity has grown even more radical, the crops now often consisting of a single plant, cloned ad infinitum by biotechnology giants and then distributed to farmers across the globe. Unfortunately, this practice of monoculture is only economical if one ignores, as it were, the pachyderm in the room: the elephantine externalities. To communicate the harmful consequences of monoculture to human society, renowned journalist Michael Pollan cites the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its
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folly: (232) the Irish Potato Famine. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, Pollan writes, and then continues: ...[B]ut they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper. [Cultivated p]otatoes...are clones, which means that every Lumper was genetically identical to every other Lumper. All of them descended from a single plant that just happened to have no resistance to Phytophthora infestans. (232) Because of the lack of resistance, this single fungus was able to decimate the potato crop of the entire country. Pollan contrast the Gaelic monoculture with the agriculture of the Incas. Both had built a civilization atop the potato he explains, but [the Incas] cultivated such a variegated polyculture of potatoes that no one fungus could ever have toppled it (232). Pollans example is a compelling anecdote, but monoculture presents a darker threat than even mass starvation in an impoverished island-nation can suggest. A report by the University of California Berkely on the harmful effects of monculture lists dramatically-increased susceptibility to disease (as the Irish Potato Famine demonstrates), as well as: ...erosion, loss of soil fertility, depletion of nutrient reserves, salinization and alkalinization, pollution of water systems, loss of fertile croplands to urban development, and diseases of the biocoenosis, which include loss of crop, wild plant, and animal genetic resources, elimination of natural enemies, pest resurgence and genetic resistance to pesticides, chemical contamination, and destruction of natural control mechanisms. The report suggests that The loss of yields due to pests in many crops (reaching about 20-30% in most crops), despite the substantial increase in the use of pesticides (about 500 million kg of active ingredient worldwide) is a symptom of the environmental crisis affecting agriculture. These pesticides are known to be toxic to humans and have been linked to an unhappy multitude of health disorderscancer, for instance. Not only does monoculture necessitate the application of prodigious amounts of pesticides (and even then is by no means disease-free) but it also requires incredible quantities of fertilizer. According the the UC Berkeley report: In the US, it is estimated that more than 25% of the drinking water wells contain nitrate levels above the 45 parts per million safety standard. Such nitrate levels are hazardous to human health and studies have linked nitrate uptake to methaemoglobinemia in children and to gastric, bladder and esophageal cancers in adults.

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These fertilizers harm the ecosystem with the same pernicious efficacy as they do humans. The report explains that fertilizers induce eutrophication in lakes and deltas in which a brief proliferation of photosynthetic algae erupts onto the surface of the lake, turning the the water bright green, [and] prevent[ing] light from penetrating beneath surface layers and therefore killing the plants living at the bottom. The report continues: Such dead vegetation serves as food for other aquatic microorganisms which soon deplete the water of its oxygen, inhibiting the decomposition of organic residues, which accumulate on the bottom. Eventually, such nutrient enrichment of freshwater ecosystems leads to the destruction of all animal life in the water systems. And this litany of disastrous consequences includes only the first wave of environmental problems. The report proceeds to enumerate a whole host of further environmental concerns including genetic-modification and Roundupresistant weeds. I feel, however, that the first wave of environmental consequences is sufficient evidence of the destructiveness of monoculture that should an inidividual remain unconvinced by the antecedent catalogue of nightmares, there may be external factors influencing his opinion. The wealth of evidence suggests that loss of biological diversity has horrible consequencesthis is why we do not marry our cousins. Unfortunately, the solution is not as easy as simply promoting polyculture. It is not without reason that monoculture has become the dominant form of agriculture since the Industrial Revolution: in limited terms, it is extremely productive. A United States Department of Agriculture report from 2003 reveals that over the seventy years from 1930 to 2000, agriculture output in the United States increased four-fold while the number of farms decreased from 7 to 2 million. Food has also become cheaper: the percentage of the average households disposable income spent on food fell from 25 to 7 percent during the same period. Uniformity has its advantages in agriculture as in all spheres. Indeed the condition of agriculture is a microcosm of society in general. In all cases, the advantages of homogenisation come at a horrible cost. The problem of monoculture may be itself as much a problem of culture as it is of agriculture (240), Pollan observes. Invoking the Nietzschian dichotomy between Apollothe god of harmony, beauty, light, order, and individuationand Dionysusthe deity of chaos, revelry, wine, and primal unityPollan explains that in the West, Apollo has been the idol of choice. Remarking on the product-uniformity of chain restaurants, Pollan writes that: Here, then, is a whole other meaning of the word monoculture. Like the agricultural practice that goes by that name, this one toothe monoculture of global tasteis about uniformity and control. The two are complexly intertwined expressions of the same Apollonian desire,
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our impulse, I mean, to elevate the universal over the particular or local, the abstract over the concrete, the ideal over the real, the made over the natural. (238) Unfortunately, Nature operates upon other principles: The spirit of Apollo celebrates the One, Plutarch wrote, denying the many and abjuring multiplicity. Against Dionysus variability and wantonness he poses the power of uniformity [and] orderliness. Apollo is the god, then, of monoculture...and though Apollo has surely had many more exalted manifestations than this one, he is here, too, in every bag of McDonald's french fries. (238) Pollans juxtaposition of Greeks gods with french fries is funny. But, humor often encapsulates the most potent verity: as George Bernard Shaw advises, when a thing is funny, search in it carefully for a hidden truth. Pollans conclusion conveys the brute fact that in celebrating the One and abjuring the multiplicity, we are imposing an artificial ideal on Nature; an ideal to which the latter does not happily conform. Though she may seem docile tractable beneath the yoke of our designsshe retaliates in ways that we can scarcely image. And she always has the last word. Though promoting polyculture were doubtless an effective palliative, this alone will not solve the problems that presently face us. This were a remedy and not a cure generic sudafed against an elixir of honey and garlicrememdium bone fide. As Pollan observes, monoculture is a creature whose tentacles transcend his native sphere to penetrate all aspects of life. Pollans identification of the monoculture of global taste suggests that the current problems spring from a far deeper source than farmsubsidies and desire for efficient corn-production, and will require not just a shift in practice, but in attitude. In Exploring Farmers Cultural Resistance to Voluntary Agri-Environmental Schemes, published in the journal Sociologia Ruralis, scientists Rob Burton, Carmen Kuczera, and Gerald Schwarz conclude that to ensure that improvements [in agriculture] are widespread and permanent, it is essential...[that the changes in policy] are accompanied by a major attitudinal shift (26 February 2008, 18). It is crucial, they argue that this shiftand accompanying environmental behaviourbecome embedded in the farming community at a cultural level (18). The authors conclude that the solution of this problem requires politicians and academics alike to re-examine their singular focus on economic-based incentives for agri-environmental delivery....farmers must become landscape stewards...[and] preserve a way of life...sense and a value in their professions (32). The attitudinal shift then, must include expanding our appreciation to include the act of farming itself rather than just the cornsoybean permutations that populate the supermarket shelves and that Americans so voraciously devour. In short, we must come to value the process and not just the product of farming, as of all things.
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The inter-disciplinary breadth of our problems may seem daunting the prospect of an attitudinal shift particularly so. And yet, in one sense, we are fortunate that the problem is so profound: the proliferation of monoculture and the decline of linguistic diversity, though vastly different in form, are truly manifestations of a single problem. If we might adopt the poplar as a symbol of worldly evil, then these two particular vices are as saplings within a vast aspen-grove. In this sylvan tract of myriad suckershoots, all are linked in one subterranean rhizome lattice; each tree an iteration of a single substance. This substance goes by many names but its essence is pure: imbalance. Neither monoculture nor linguistic uniformity is categorically vicious. Rather, like the Apollonian impulse, the relentless pursuit of productivity, and the quest for efficiency, these processes are harmful only when they are allowed plenary determination of human practices. If a physician could prescribe some verbal medicine for our ailing (im)patient society, it would most certainly be the famous Greek maxim: Everything in moderation. We must embrace the diversity along with efficiency, process with product. If the temple at Delphi could house both Apollo and Dionysus, the infinity of human conceit can reconcile these opposing impulses. With this shift in attitude, our particular problems will melt away like icebergs in the Aegean sun. PART III: ENGLISH
AS THE

COLOSSUS

THAT

BESTRODE

THE

GLOBE

A deep shift in consciousness is difficult to achieve. A substantial part of this challenge stems from the fact that consciousness is hard to quantify and is itself a thing imperceptible. Instead of attempting to measure the consciousness itself, therefore, we perceive it by indirect means, for like the rhizome-lattice, super-terranean signals burst forth to announce its presence. When our society is repopulated by a garden of diversity, every flower will be a herald of our victory. Yet attainment of this condition will come only gradually, and only as a reward for deliberacy and perseverance. We must be deliberate in our cultivation and we must remain dedicated to it. In this project, we will be counter-navigating the normative current of Western history, which in its essence has been one extended celebration of efficiency at any cost. To escape this trajectory will represent no easy feat. Here the old apothegm that The secret to getting ahead is getting started provides some guidance. A proposition for the first step towards changed consciousness is this: to liberalise spelling conventions of the English language. The reasonable reader may think this were madness. And yet it is my hope that there [be] method int. Of all the world's languages, English indeed is the ideal target for this initial advance. Never before has any language been spoken in so many countries. For some, English is, and has been, the standard fare for centuries England and her offspring have always employed this language for their
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Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

mother tongue. But today, estimates claim that over a third of the worlds population speaks English; a number that has doubled in the last decade (BBC; 9 December 2004). An article in The New York Times titled Across Cultures, English is the Word, corroborates this statistic and adds that [b]y the most common estimates, 400 million people speak English as a first language, another 300 million to 500 million as a fluent second language, and perhaps 750 million as a foreign language (14 May 2007). Interestingly, according to the same article: The largest English-speaking nation in the world, the United States, has only about 20 percent of the worlds English speakers. In Asia alone, an estimated 350 million people speak English, about the same as the combined English-speaking populations of Britain, the United States and Canada...It has consolidated its dominance as the language of the Internet, where 80 percent of the worlds electronically stored information is in English, according to David Graddol, a linguist and researcher. There may be more native speakers of Chinese, Spanish or Hindi, but it is English they speak when they talk across cultures, and English they teach their children to help them become citizens of an increasingly intertwined world. (14 May 2007) The Manhattan Institute linguist John McWhorter articulates the crux of these statistics: English is dominant in a way that no language has ever been before (The New York Times; 14 May 2007). In short, in the motley court of global languages, English is king. A Hammurabi among languages, this monarchs code of laws is writ in stone. Though this has not always been the case, a pivotal event in the eighteenth century helped to ensure that future generations of English spellers would be held to a singlular orthographic standard. Since Samuel Johnsons publication of A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, the conventions of our language have ossified into standards of all but sacrosantical weight (I am conscientiously reminded of this fact by my wordprocessor, which conveys to me with an offensive red underline that sacrosantical is not a proper word). Johnson was an odd candidate for such fame, according to Bill Bryson, author of The Mother Tongue. Englishs most famous lexicographer was [blind] in one eye, corpulent, incompletely educated, by all accounts coarse in manner, and an obscure scribbler from an impoverished provincial background. But through nine years of singular dedication in his garret room off Fleet Street, Johnson succeeded in providing spellings and definitions for some 43,000 words, which he supported with over 114,000 quotations from hundreds of sources in literature (Bryson 154). All of this he compiled into a single lexicon that Bryson identifies as one of the landmarks of world literature (154). This remarkable undertaking began a process of codification and standardisation that continues to this day. Though Johnson was by no means
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Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

the first in the long line of English lexicographers, of all the latters products, his masterpiece (Bryson 154) was by far the most prolific. For many of the spelling standards that we use today, we are indebted to Johnsons Dictionary. While the Dictionary was extremely significant for its particular contents, it was perhaps even more so for its symbolic effect; the broad influence that Johnsons Dictionary had on the course of linguistic history can hardly be overestimated. The Dictionary encouraged a lexical dialectic of sortsto which Noah Webster provided an antithesis from across the Atlantic in the form of The American Spelling Bookwhose ultimate synthesis would be the global standardisation of English orthography. Achieving standardisation was a remarkable transformation for the language. Before 1400, Bryson writes, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings (126). In his day, Shakespeares name was spelled in over eighty different ways and the genius himself did not spell [his] name the same way twice on any of his known signatures, according to Bryson. Curiously, he adds, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was the one upon which we have settled today (125). He seemed to prefer Shakspeare and Shakspere (and even Shakestaffe) to our modern standard, and used two of the spellings in a single document: his will. Most tellingly, in 1604, in what is considered the first dictionary of the English language, A Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Robert Cawdrey spelled words in two different ways on the title pagewords and wordes (Bryson 125). Johnsons dictionary silenced this orthographical cacophony. Together with such factors as Gutenbergs invention of the printing press, Johnsons dictionary conspired to squelch the typewriters of randomness. Today, it may be possible to approximate which continent an English speaker should come from. Orthographical preference for programme over of program, for example would indicate that she were Britishor from any other Englishspeaking country besides Australia. Clearly this method of geographical placement is not particularly accurate since spellings became standardised, especially given that, by some vicious mole of nature in [me], I personally hold a decided preference for several key British spellings but remain a cardcarrying American. These discrepancies between American and British spelling represent the final remains of an erstwhile orthographical diversity, and given the clear trend towards standardisation, one can imagine a time in the future at which these rebellious remnants will be flattened by the rolling monolith of globalisation. Today, English is both standardised and ubiquitous. Both of these features are characteristics of our globalised, post-industrial world. What better candidate for change therefore? One does not solicit a page for patronage but, with courage, approaches the king himself. The ceaseless pillaging by the Vikings from the North, the Norman invasion from the continent, and the Teutonic origins of the Anglo-Saxon tribes that displaced the Celts to colonise the British Isles during our languages formative centuries, ensured that English etymology
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Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

would be one of the most diverse cases in the discipline. That an English speaker can chose between craft, skill, ability, capacity, etcto describe a proficiency at a given task intimates at the rich and ragged history of our language; a palimpsest of diversity. English is a language in which the same vowel-consonant cluster can be pronounced in any of eight waysthrough, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough, and lough (Bryson 85). Might not there be some latent impulse for linguistic creativity that one could reawaken in the right conditions? THE TYPEWRITERS MANIFESTO Language is fundamental to thought. The arguments of Wittgenstein and Whorf establish this fact. Today, modern linguists warn of an unprecedented decline in both inter-language and intra-language diversity. Given the lack of precedent, the collusion of these factors creates what might well be understood as global experiment whereof each of us is a subject. The wealth of evidence suggests that the consequences could be disastrous. I am no proponent of animal-testing, but I would feel more comfortable were we to first conduct this experiment on cloned rodents under the flourescent lights of an hermetic laboratory. Despite the likely consequences, however, the process is ubiquitous and continual; facets of diversity in life and language are lost every day. With each such loss, the blinds are drawnone window in our worldly estate goes dark. It is boarded up, the frame filled with unalterable concrete. Our shared manor, once shining and bedight with all the twinkling lights of linguistic diversity, is growing a little bit darker every day. Bound in the midnight of monoculture, English is become a prisoner of standards. She is a spunky tongue, but the chains of convention go far to staunch her native spirit. With this project, I hope to launch a crusade to free our mother tongue from the shackles of orthographic monotony; the tedious fetters that have come to bind her in the anteceding centuries. Diversity need not be at efficiencys expense. Bryson tells us that when the Dean of Windsor wrote a letter to Henry IV the language drifted unselfconsciously between English and French (57) . If the Dean of Windsors correspondence with the King of England was not obstructed by linguistic liberality of so gross a scope, surely today we might conscientiously spell orthography in whichever way we please. And doing so might even be an act of virtue. Today it is diversity, and not efficiency, that is the more-besieged. A movement to liberalise spelling standards might be the spark that ignites that revolution which we require; the hundredth-monkey that broadcasts a new collective consciousness. This is not to say that the global community is a Balkan power-keg or that western culture is a collection of dusty South-Asian sweet potatoes in need of a-washing. Nor is it even to hint that an attitudinal shift towards embracing diversity need
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Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

express any of the qualities that generally attend a revolution. It is simply a knell to dispel the resident complacency; a call to take some small amount of action towards a better world. When UAF Professor of Linguistics Michael Krauss writes that, [o]bviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated (Language 1992; 4), he offers a perspective on the situation that ought to spur us to action. Given the situation, Krauss conclusion does seem rather obvious. Words may not be worth their weight in gold. Neither can they compete with crude-oil futures in the global marketplace. But perhaps our hierarchy of resources deserves some re-evalution. To consider language as no more than a method of communication is to neglect an entire country; to wander through the Apostolic Palace without lifting ones eyes. When one stumbles on a Botticelli, will this break the spell of selfabsorption? Might not the frescoes of the vaulted heights be reflected in the marbled mosaic at ones feet? When we come to look upon language not as linguists but as philologistsword-lovers the page becomes a canvas, our language a palette. We sit at the typewriter and, as Michaelangelo entering into the Sistine Chapel, we gaze upwards at the bare ceiling and come to the see the potential for artistic infinity contained within every phrase. Let us then, within this sterile promontory of global monoculture, sow the seed of diversity; upon the linguistic colossus, graft the sprig of variety. Let us stand firm before the romping Goliath, who seeks to level all the downy wordscape to a single plane. The Dionysian impulse yet dwells within the history of English orthography; let us recall this dormant drive. Let us flaunt our freedom as we flout the orthographic standards. The world of wordcraft now flickers with the fires of potential inextinguishable. An interminable line of lexiconsedited, re-edited, and abridged all ad infinitum but no more. The onetime pallid lode bespeckled now by myriad jewelettes, all a-shimmer in the starlight of inspired thought.* I hope that my cry to bring back the liberal attitude towards spelling that English once enjoyed will serve as a symbol to inspire wider revolution, and usher in a renaissance of diversity in all spheres of human life. [F]ellow Spellers of all Nations...UNITE!

A pound of gold or a pound of crudethe balance is indifferent. But a nautical dithyramb delivered by Ishmael in the South Seas is master of the scale; it might be as light as feathers, or as weighty as gravity itself
*

My only admonition this (though like a father, I know now that this child is beyond my hands): that in our rebellion we take care not to oerstep the bounds of Modestie and let discretion be [our] tutor. Let our disregard be in good taste lest we become ourselves the monsters we are fighting, decimating the lexical woods like the loggers that level the rainforests for super-highways.

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Life & LanguageMax Trynyn

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