Seeing Beyond the Words in Language

| January 26, 2009

No matter how widely and deeply the English language empire spreads, foreign language study will always be essential to Australia’s destiny, as much for that disposition as for the ability to communicate.

The Australian‘s Higher Education Supplement ran an article on January 21 by Luke Slattery ("Let’s get more competitive"), which looked at warnings by Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, that the market for education never stands still.

‘To the extent that he sees a continued role for tuition in English, the world’s lingua franca,’ Slattery wrote, ‘Davis is optimistic about Australia’s role in the export education industry. But he is wary about competitive pressure.’

No quibbles with that. But ponder Slattery’s own view that followed.

‘Davis’s evocation of the English language empire prompts a parenthetical point. We do not need, as sinophile Kevin Rudd resolutely believes, a boost to Asian language education, at least not for mercantile or strategic reasons. China, irrespective of America’s commercial fortunes, will do business in English. So will India and more or less every other nation. Australia needs more language education, not more Asian language education. The Asian language lobby, of which Rudd is a member, persistently confuses its private enthusiasms with good public policy.’

This is a most unfortunate statement, and for a number of reasons.

First, China and India and other countries only do business in English when they need to, which is generally when the other side doesn’t speak their language. English has become a lingua franca as a matter of mutual convenience, not preference. Those who learn to speak it are hardly, in the process, renouncing their mother tongue (of which a person may have two or three) and the thought patterns underpinning it.

Some 500 years ago, Frankish was used in the European world in a similar way. Latin was also used for centuries as a lingua franca in the church and for documentation, treaties, legal papers and academic works. Persian at one time played a key role on the Subcontinent and was for long the administrative language of the East India Company. When these languages – written or spoken – faded, the countries in which they had been used did not find themselves in an embarrassing state of linguistic nakedness. They weren’t confronted by a vast chasm of linguistic silence. Their mother tongues and traditions continued unabated.

The reason for placing emphasis on Asian languages in Australia is merely because that’s the part of the world we live in and with which we have a wide variety of exchanges – not just economic, though the importance of that dimension cannot be denied. To assert this, is not to claim that the study of other languages should be diminished or ignored.

The Asian language lobby isn’t confusing anything. It is simply able to prioritise within an increasingly mixed global community.

Generally speaking, it is likely that because of geographic proximity more young Australians will visit the Asian region to study, work and live for a while. Those of us who did that in our earlier years know the healthy linguistic disposition it gives you. Hence few, if any, of us would talk of the recent tragic events embroiling Palestinians and Israelis as occurring in "Gazza". That’s what one of SBS-TV’s key reporters refers to it as. He’s also one of the few TV or radio journalists in Australia who gets both of the new US President’s names wrong – and blatantly so. And yet words and pronunciation are the tools of his trade. They were too, for a former state premier, who has trouble with Obama’s first name. Both men display a laziness common across the Australian community. The mantra is an old one: near enough is good enough.

President Sarkozy of France has a name that we know isn’t pronounced the way we might read it in English. The emphasis, as most people appreciate, is on the ZY. Those who study languages from a very different cultural bailiwick to their own – as with Asian tongues for most Australians – are usually interested in handling these things correctly. Most do so with pride. Even without this background, the majority of Australian TV and radio journalists try to get it right, primarily because of their own personal pursuit of excellence. But that’s not always the case.

Here’s an experience I recently had that left me shocked as well as disappointed. While the events in Gaza were at their peak, I was with some visiting Korean businessmen. Because they had commercial interests in the Middle East, they were keen to listen to the news. I picked up the hourly bulletin for them on a national radio network and the lead item featured a call by Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary-General of the UN and a Korean, for a ceasefire. The newsreader pronounced Ban’s name like a prohibition in English. A barn on a farm would be closer to the mark.

One of the Koreans found this annoying, particularly because of Ban’s international status. He said he found Australians remarkably dismissive of such mistakes and said he might write a newspaper article on the subject when he returned to Seoul.

The other Koreans politely suggested to him that it might be better if he left it to me. Perhaps I could ring the station, so I did. The gentleman I spoke to was immediately indignant. ‘Roll on the newspaper article,’ he said. ‘Let him write what he wants.’ He went on to lecture me on the mechanism they had inside his network to handle correct pronunciation. I said I wasn’t ringing about that. I was just reporting one simple mistake, in the hope that it would be addressed. I wasn’t calling to engage in debate for the rest of the day.

‘Well, bugger off, then!’ he said, putting the phone down.

This was a first for me, though it mightn’t be for you if you have the same background in Asian languages that I do. Actually, I don’t bother making such calls to the media any more when these things happen. It rarely produces a positive result. I did on this occasion because it was the courteous thing to do. And I told the Koreans that the station was going to fix the problem – which it didn’t.

So, no matter how widely and deeply the English language empire spreads, foreign language study will always be essential to Australia’s destiny, as much for that disposition as for the ability to communicate. What better place to start than to study the world of difference around us?

Full strength to the Asian language lobby. They’re a pretty experienced bunch overall and they have their priorities right. They know where competitive pressures come from. They see reality for what it is, not what they want it to be. That happens when you don’t have your head in the sand.

Warren Reed was an Australia-Japan Business Cooperation Committee Scholar in the Law Faculty of Tokyo University in the 1970s and has spent much of his life in the Asian region. He was also chief operating officer of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA).

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0 Comments

  1. sally.rose

    January 27, 2009 at 6:01 am

    Just call me Sue

    Not making the extended effort to learn a second language is understandable, but when people can't be bothered even trying to pronounce somebody's name correctly it's plain lazy, and refusing to correct yourself once the mistake has been politley pointed out is the height of rudeness.

    I bet the PR department from that radio station would have something to say about callers being told to bugger off!

    Your colleague is right that Australians tend to be remarkably dismissive of such mistakes. He'd probably already encountered it with his own name.

    That's probably why so many of the overseas students I met at uni introduced themselves as Alice, Tom and Sue rather than by their beautiful real names Xiao, Throung and Seoukow.

    It's embarrassing that guests feel like Australians are prepared to go to so little effort that they have to use an "Aussie" name, and when our media can't get the Secretary General of the UN's name correct who can blame them?

  2. MikeM

    January 28, 2009 at 9:33 am

    The perspectives of language

    There are other considerations, besides the practical value in commerce and foreign affairs, of speaking the languages of one's neighbours. One's language provides part of the necessary framework for thinking, imagining, reasoning and understanding. As legions of literary translators have found, there is an art not readily captured, in expressing in one language thoughts that have been expressed in another. The more different two languages are from one another, the more difficult it may be to convey the sense from one to the other.

    Douglas Hofstadter has an interesting illustration with his book, Le Bon Ton de Marot (which, although having a French title is written in English), though perhaps he pursues it at unnecessary length. He takes a short poem, "Ma Mignonne," by the sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot, sends copies to fifty-odd friends, asks them each to translate the poem into English. He then discusses the surprisingly varied results. In the process he ranges over a wide field of topics to do with nature and structure of language.

    Hofstatder is a computer scientist and his real interest in language is for artificial intelligence and machine translation. This might not seem difficult: load a computer up with, say, a Chinese-English dictionary and let it rip. The subleties become immediately apparent when one considers a pair of sentences like these:

    Time flies like an arrow.

    Fruit flies like a banana.

    To get full value from a second language one must become sufficiently fluent to not just speak it but to think in it.

    But even basic command of a neighbouring country's language is considered a thoughtful gesture. The second most read article on the web site of The Jakarta Post today is this one, which was posted on Friday:

    "Apa kabar?" Obama readily responds in Indonesian

    US President Barack Obama responded in fluent Indonesian to answer a State Department employee's question after Hillary Clinton's swearing in as the 67th Secretary of State on Thursday.

    A letter from the US Embassy in Jakarta issued Friday states that, after making his formal remarks at the event, President Obama mingled with US diplomats, shaking hands and chatting casually.

    Charles Silver, a former Counselor for Public Affairs at the US Embassy in Jakarta, addressed Obama in Indonesian, saying "Selamat siang, Bapak."  Without missing a beat, President Obama responded, "Terima kasih. Apa kabar?"

    Silver responded "Baik, baik" and then told the President he had served in Indonesia several times and Obama complimented him on his accent.  The President then said if he were to visit Indonesia he would like to visit his old neighborhood in Menteng.

    If the conversation had occurred in English:

    Silver: Good afternoon, sir.

    Obama: Thank you. How are you?

    Silver: Good, good.

    … it would never have rated a mention.

    In short then, command of another language enlarges the universe in which one can think and even making an effort can be appreciated as a neighbourly gesture.

    As a final, parenthetical thought, one that has caused the US much grief in Iraq, in the milieu in which military intelligence is collected,  most proceedings are not in English.

    MikeM sometimes writes about things that he does not know how to do.

  3. olgabodrova

    January 29, 2009 at 1:36 am

    Il faut être indulgent

    Excellent blog, very good comments. But while I agree with most of the views expressed in this blog and am absolutely horrified by the disgraceful behaviour of the radio station, I want to say a few words in support of those who are struggling with foreign language pronunciation.

    It's common knowledge that the sound system of any language is unique and that you only have a chance to master another tongue if you start before you turn 13. As I've started my proper English studies rather late, try as hard as I might, there is simply no way for me to get rid of my Russian accent completely; even to distinguish by ear the subtle difference between two marginal English phonemes such as /æ/ and /eə/ can be nearly impossible sometimes.

    Equally, a native English speaker doesn't hear the difference between the Russian "mishka" (teddybear) and "myshka" (mouse); a Japanese trying to speak Russian faces a huge embarrassment if they pronounce [l] as [r], and an American with fluent Italian will always sound American.

    I don't think I'll ever hear my first name pronounced correctly in Australia but I am ok with that and in fact always introduce myself using its English pronunciation. We certainly need to respect other people's feelings while speaking their language, but at the same time let's be tolerant and not over-judgmental.

    When the 23-year-old American Van Cliburn won the 1st International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet mass media translated and pronounced his name in Russian as Ван Клиберн [Van Klibern] so it became an ever lasting tradition. The pianist himself liked this interpretation of his name so much that he always preferred it to the correct transcription and insisted on being announced this way while touring in Russia, allegedly saying "I won the Tchaikovsky competition as Van Klibern, this name brought me victory".

  4. MikeM

    January 29, 2009 at 12:20 pm

    Adoption of “Western” names

    "That's probably why so many of the overseas students I met at uni introduced themselves as Alice, Tom and Sue rather than by their beautiful real names Xiao, Throung and Seoukow."

    Not necessarily although it may be in some cases. I spent time working in Seoul and our cultural mentor was an Australian-born Korean called James. A couple of months into the assignment James said to our Korean translator (whose command of both languages was excellent as was her bilingual command of IT jargon in both languages), "you are doing well here, it's time you picked an English name." 

    So she did, and that was her name we used after that.

    I moved from New Zealand to Australia many years ago. One of the aspects that struck me was the much greater propensity to address people here by their first names, even over substantial authority gradients (the converse of practice in Korea). I put it down to the influx of immigrants from non-English-speaking Europe in the couple of decades after WWII – people whose names white bread Australians struggled to pronounce. My wife's family is from Poland and while her five-letter family name rolls off the tongue, the name of the cosmopolitan south-west city of Wrocław certainly doesn't. (If you look carefully, that "ł"in the middle of the word has a small diagonal slash across it and is pronounced like an English "w.)

    If people keep calling where you come from "Rocklaw" instead of "Vrokwav" there comes a time when you go with the flow.

    The only Polish word that MikeM remembers from his time in Poland, one in which he was extensively drilled by his wife's nephews, is klatka, meaning bird cage. 

  5. sally.rose

    January 29, 2009 at 11:02 pm

    Pronunciation can be

    Pronunciation can be dificult.  Growing up I had a speech impediment and couldn't pronounce my own name until I was about 8yrs old. But I think when you meet someone you owe it to them to at least have a decent go.

  6. olgabodrova

    January 30, 2009 at 3:06 am

    It comes down to convenience and the need to communicate

    I wonder what Chinese immigrants themselves think about their English monikers. Is that such a big deal for them? As an immigrant myself, I think you simply have to accept it as part of moving to another country, just like you need to learn a new language and truly become part of that new community in order to succeed (that does not mean, however, that you have to loose your identity). I would rather spare the embarrassment to other people struggling with how to pronounce or spell your name every time you have to introduce yourself.

    N.B. Out of curiosity, I've searched a few online forums on the topic a moment ago and have found out that Chinese people think their English names are ‘cool', ‘interesting', ‘bring good luck', 'easy to remember for my foreign friends' and, perhaps most importantly, ‘if Chinese names are not correctly pronounced, they sound ridiculous or the meanings will be changed'. Enough said.