The Paleolinguist Bulletin Summer Session 2023
A comparison of some other efforts in language crossing and mixing that resulted in one case "bastard Greek," and in another "Lingua Franca a universal hotchpotch."
The Progress-Index, (Petersburg, Virginia) 29 July 1872, Page 4, Column 2.
JAPAN IN SEARCH OF A TONGUE —One of the late magazines contains a queer story to the effect that the Japanese are in search of a new language, and that their pundits are gravely inquiring which of the European tongues it is best to adopt; that they balance between the German and English, troubling themselves not at all about any difficulty in the task of persuad-ing an ancient people to slip off its language and with it its traditions, its habits, its gods, as easily an a snake slips Its skin or a locust emerges from its shell.
Such a change would surely rank among the greatest of which the nineteenth century has been so prolific, and would, were it possible, be another example of the mechanical forces which have almost replaced the natural and less conspicuous agencies that here slowly moulded the world through its long history. Instances enough may be found where tribes and peoples and even nations have dropped their own and adopted, whilst they mutilated, another system of speech. Before the rise of the Roman power, Greek. a bastard Greek, had become the common medium of inter course on the coasts of the Mediteranean, and held its own long after the Legion had triumphed over the Phalanx and Sacred Band, becoming embalmed, as it were, in the New Testament. Again, but centuries later, a form of Latin, robbed of its grace
but holding its strength, prevailed on all the borders of the Empire, and yet again the Crusading Ages produced their Lingua Franca or universal hotchpotch, with which Europe and Africa, Goth, Hun and Moor, might approach and understand each other, and from which sprung by successive disintegration most of the modern tongues of Continental Europe. Travellers say that each a matrix of dialects is even now forming in the pigeon English of Canton nod Hong Kong.—But, however this be, new languages can spring only from wide-spread interchange of races and only in the midst of barbarism, whore opposing forces meet and when nothing is yet fixed and stable. When Gutenberg or Faust had carved the first moveable type and the first press had received and given up its sheet the birth of
new languages was already impossible, for from that moment what had boon shifting from day to day, and governed almost wholly by the ear had received a new guide, the eye: in that new press lay the germ of all grammars, lexicons, synonym books, the possibility of all Johnson., Freunds, Boyers, Websters, and even Trench on the Study of Words.
Japan therefore cannot afford to wait for a pigeon English to arise on the quays of Hakodadi or the streets of Yeddo. And, truly, if they desire to swap languages with any people, why should they exclude ... (remainder of article not accessible)
ANALYSIS: Clearly, amid the confusion created by symbol based languages with limited syntax and multiple definitions, still the remedy was far worse than the malady. The lessons from "bastard Greek" and universal hotchpotch from the Crusades offer no solution, but serve as a warning when a culture comes under direct fire from integration of a new minority language infiltrating the lexicon, syntax and pragmatics of the distinct prescriptive spoken language of the culture. Anthropology might find some social advantage to all the mixing, but the end product might be what the news makes headlines with: language endangerment, obsolescence and eventual total disappearance.
Ethnologists are keen to apologize with statements that the language doesn't completely disappear, but theory often does not hold up to reality.
Pidgin-English Sing song: Or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect, Charles Godfrey Leland, Eighth Edition, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., London, 1910
Pagoda image: https://unsplash.com/s/photos/japanese-temple
James C. L'Angelle Undergraduate Research University of Nevada, Reno
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