The Mother Tongue Read Free

other languages. For one thing its pronouns are largely, and mer-cifully, uninflected. In German, if you wish to say you, you must choose between seven words: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr, and euch. This can cause immense social anxiety. The composer Rich-ard Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were part-ners for twenty-five years and apparently adored each other and yet never quite found the nerve to address each other as anything but the stiff "Sie." In English we avoid these problems by relying on just one form: you.
    In other languages, questions of familiarity can become even more agonizing. A Korean has to choose between one of six verb suffixes to accord with the status of the person addressed. A speaker of Japanese must equally wend his way through a series of linguis-tic levels appropriate to the social position of the participants.
    When he says thank you he must choose between a range of meanings running from the perfunctory arigato ("thanks") to the decidedly more humble makotoni go shinsetsu de gozaimasu, which means "what you have done or proposed to do is a truly and genuinely kind and generous deed." Above all, English is mercifully free of gender. Anyone who spent much of his or her adolescence miserably trying to remember whether it is "la plume" or "le plume" will appreciate just what a pointless bur-den masculine and feminine nouns are to any language. In this regard English is a godsend to students everywhere. Not only have we discarded problems of gender with definite and indefi-nite articles, we have often discarded the articles themselves. We say in English, "It's time to go to bed," where in most other European languages they must say, "It's the time to go to the bed."
    We possess countless examples of pithy phrases—"life is short,"
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    THE WORLD ' S LANGUAGE
    "between heaven and earth," "to go to work"—which in other languages require articles.
    English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages. German is full of jaw-crunching words like Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust com-pany), Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee), and Kriegsgefangenenentschadigungsgesetz (a law per-taining to war reparations), while in Holland companies commonly have names of forty letters or more, such as Douwe Egberts Kon-inlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal Naamloze Vennootschap (literally Douwe Egberts Royal Tobacco Factory- Coffee Roasters-Tea Traders Incorporated; they must use fold-out business cards). English, in happy contrast, favors crisp trunca-tions: IBM, laser, NATO. Against this, however, there is an occa-sional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon. At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concern-ing reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance."
    That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.
    But perhaps the single most notable characteristic of English—for better and worse—is its deceptive complexity. Nothing in En-glish is ever quite what it seems. Take the simple word what. We use it every day—indeed, every few sentences. But imagine trying to explain to a foreigner what what means. It takes the Oxford English Dictionary five pages and almost 15,000 words to manage the task. As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated and illogical English is. Every day we use countless words and expressions without thinking about them—often with-out having the faintest idea what they really describe or signify.
    What, for instance, is the hem in hem and haw, the shrift in short shrift, the fell in one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is