austraLasia
1515
When is language
not a language?
ROME: 2nd April 2006 --
Have you ever wondered what 'the new languages of the media' really means?
Let me tell you that as a linguist raised in the Chomskyan tradition, but also
as a native speaker, I have wondered and am still wondering. Most native
speakers of English with or without a trained linguistic background, have this
inborn sense that language is a human faculty and that its application to
anything else is at best metaphorical and at worst
deceiving.
Over time I have made a study of this term in
the context of Salesian documents. It produced very interesting
results. It suggested on the one hand that English readers often have to
engage in mental gymnastics to understand what our documents are really saying
(and I am referring only to a single term here,
'languages'), and on the other hand, that we might give a little more thought to
a debate that has been raging for fifty years now.
Part of
the difficulty comes from the fact that there are quite different schools of
linguistic thought on the Continent (think of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, the Prague
School...) from those in Britain, US, Australia - think Chomsky, Halliday,
Dixon...). But what is commonly agreed upon is that where Latin-based
languages have three words (linguaggio, lingua, parola to go straight to
the point), English has but one, language. And in English,
language is normally applied to a human faculty or something at least a
recognisable extension of the human as in 'body language' - but even here, it is
immediately seen to be metaphorical. We are becoming used to 'computer
language', but are able to recognise a finite grammar, rules and so forth.
Further extension of the term becomes nice poetry, but unhelpful
prose.
Instead, linguaggio in Italian is a more
abstract term, but when we move to the point of abstraction at which human
language and cinema, or young people's subcultural styles fall together, then we
are at a point where all kinds of behaviour fall under the mantle of
language. St. Paul's Publications have published a Dizionario di
scienze e techniche della comunicazione (1996) where they point this out -
saying that even in Italian a term like linguaggio audiovisivo "is at
best a working hypothesis;...after thirty years of research it has not been
possible, despite notable effort, to demonstrate the existence of cinematic or
television languages".
Now with regard to our own
documents. A corpus of all official documentation from 1960 to 2006 produces the
following statistics: 91 uses of the term linguaggi and 213 of the
singular form linguaggio, virtually all of them in the context of phrases
like 'language of catechesis', 'new language of media' and so on. What is
fascinating is that the use and extension of the terms reflects a debate going
on in the world around us but without ever referring to that debate. In the '60s
(GC19) but a single mention of the singular linguaggio, with 'scolastico'
attached, a concern about catechesis. In 1971 (GC20) it still appears in the
singular but with nuovo attached for the first time and a semi-definition
that it is to do with the 'characteristic style' of young people's system of
communication while recognising that there is language 'in senso stretto'.
This is just after Chomsky's well known lecture (1968) where he made it clear
that for him language was a 'specific type of mental organisation'. That is his
'senso stretto'. Our usage began to diverge from that to 'style', and it follows
along that track thereafter to linguaggi audiovisivi, esspressioni
drammatiche, creativtà (GC21) and so on, broadening all the time. The
broader understanding of language was acceptable in the context of the European
'schools' I referred to earlier, but there is little doubt that it left English
readers bemused. Nor has there been a real effort to define the way we are
using these two terms, (the one word in singular and plural form) though there
have been some part definitions.
My final point is
this. When the Vatican translator went to work on John Paul II's last
Apostolic Letter, Rapid Development, he came across linguaggi
inediti in n. 3 of that letter. He translated it as
vocabulary. Full marks in my book. Linguaggio and
linguaggi appear to invite the gloss languages and language
in English, but especially in the context of communications, I would suggest
these are false friends. Vocabulary, expressions are two of a range
of possible terms according to context. It is not only nor primarily a
translation issue as the St. Paul's Dictionary cited above indicates. We
could benefit from some further definition of certain terms we are using with
considerable frequency now. Linguaggi(o) is one of them It
appears 25 times in AGC 390!
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