I picked up this book at Hamline library because it sounds like it would be related to my research. It is a typical academic collection of essays related to some subject. Frankly, I didn't read about 75% of it because it was about a mile above my head - I had no idea what they were talking about most of the time. The first essay that interested me was called Linguistic Utopias by Mary Louise Pratt. She started the selection with a few quotes from Margaret Mead in Redbook 1966:
"We are in the process of creating a new civilization in which, for the first time, people everywhere are beginning to take part in the events that are shaping our common future. The realization of the dream of world-wide communication and the growing belief that men can plan for change are opening new potential for human relationships."
"A language that works has been shaped by men and women, old people and little children, intelligent people and dunces, people with good memories and people with poor memories, those who pay attention to form, and those who pay attention to sound, and people with all the diversity of interests present in their culture over generations. This very multiplicity of speakers creates the redundancy that makes a language flexible and intelligible to all different kinds of people who are its speakers at any time."
"On the occasion of the original dedication of the statue of liberty, a sizable number of male dignitaries and two or three of their wives gathered round the base of the statue to perform the original dedication, while members of the New York City Women's Suffrage Association circled the island in a rented boat protesting the event. In a statement issued separately, the suffragists declared themselves amused that the statue of a woman should be raised to symbolize liberty in a country where women lacked even the most minimal political rights."
(check out Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities and read up on Gellner)
"Here are a list of verbal practices which have been associated with women. They can be readily associated with women's relative powerlessness or with the domestic sphere.
1. Planting suggestions in the minds of other people so that they think they thought of it themselves.
2. Speaking to one person in such a way that another might hear and be affected in the desired fashion.
3. In academic writing, gradually building up evidence toward the main point rather than stating it at the beginning and then backing it up.
4. Storytelling as a way of communicating values (to children, for example).
5. Gossip as a way of supporting and surveilling each other, and as a form of power over men, who fear this secret network.
6. Talking often repeatedly with one another for the purpose of maintaining a shared world (small talk).
7. Talking to subjects who don't know language at all (babies, animals, TV sets, walls).
[These practices are in fact NOT used more often by women.] What is of interest is the fact that they are associated with women, and that in mainstream pragmatics, they often fall outside what is labelled normal, straightforward communication. (Gossip violates Maxim of relevance, in storytelling, rules are not followed, etc,)
Another interesting essay was called Language and the Order of Nature by M. A. K. Halliday.
(to read: Order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers)
"Language is as much a product of evolution as we are ourselves; we did not manufacture it. It is an evolved system, not a designed system: not something separate from humanity, but an essential part of the condition of being a human... It is just within the last hundred generations or so that some element of design has come into natural language; language has come to be written down. Writing has been an inherent part of the process. The dialogue with nature has begun to take on new forms; we have learnt to measure and to experiment; and to accompany these new semiotic modes, our languages have spawned various metalanguages - the languages of mathematics and science. These are extensions of natural languages, not totally new creations; and they remain in touch...Now and again some part of the dialogue breaks down, and then it becomes news - like London Bridge; as long as it stays up, its not news. Yet what is really noteworthy about language is how rarely it does fall down. The demands that we make on the system are quite colossal; how is it that it so seldom gets overloaded?"
"It is often objected that language is letting us down; and this especially at certain times in history, when the pace of the dialogue is quickening and knowledge is accumulating very fast. At such times there arise proposals for improving language... (shorthand, universal script, calculus). De Broglie observed that "physics is in suspense because we do not have the words or the images that are essential to us." ... David Bohm devotes a whole chapter to language, in which he objects that, "language divides things into separate entities" and so distorts the reality of undivided wholeness in flowing movement."
"Despite the shortcomings of the language they had to work with, science has continued to progress... Languages have not given way beneath its weight, nor are there any obvious signs of overload...You do not need to keep engineering a language in order to change it; it will change anyway."
"Lemke has pointed out that many human systems, including all social-semiotic systems, are of a particular kind known as 'dynamic open systems.' Dynamic open systems have the property that they are metastable: that is, they persist only through constant change; and this change takes place through interactive exchanges with their environment. In the course of such interaction, the system exports disorder; and in the process of exporting disorder, and so increasing the entropy of its environment, the system renews itself, gains information, imports or rather creates order, and in this way continues to function. Natural language is certainly a system of this general type."
"A semiotic system is one that is characterized by redundancy between its subsystems (meta-redundancy)." A stoplight example: the lights have a set of colors, messages of stop/go, people that react to it: "In other words, what the system 'says' redounds with what it 'means', which in turn redounds with what it 'does'."
"Language is a dynamic open system, meta-redundant... Such a system is good for thinking with and good for doing with, these being the two complementary facets of all human semiosis. When either of these facets comes under pressure, the system responds by creating varieties of itself to meet the new demands. These new forms of language are both created by and also create new forms of knowledge."
"When logicians and philosophers complain about language, their usual complaint is that it is too vague. When scientists find language letting them down, it is generally because it is too precise, too determinant."
"The wealth of reality overflows any single language, any single logical structure. Each language can express only part of reality."
"The act of reflecting on language transforms it into something alien, something different from itself."
"writing provided a new mode of expression - which could realise the pre-existing content patterns without disrupting them. At the same time it provided a new interface through which changes in the system could take place. Writing evolved in the immediate context of the need for documentation and recording. But it opened the way for an alternate theory of reality. The effect of a writing system is to anchor language to a shallower level of consciousness...Written language is corpuscular and gains power by its density, while spoken language is wavelike and gains power by its intricacy. (Meaning the forms of discourse that arise as a result of the medium) Writing puts language in chains; it freezes it so that it becomes a thing to be reflected on...Writing created the potential to structure, categorize, discipline...Technicality in language depends on, not writing as such, but the kind of organization of meaning that writing brings with it - (allows language to be packaged [with ideas] so that preceding arguments can be taken for granted."
"Writing and speaking are different grammars which therefore constitute different ways of knowing, such that any theory of knowledge, and of learning, must encompass both."
(check out The Language Makers by Roy Harris)
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