We hope that commentator, Mike Hoskings has a security detail. He has dared to question publicly the official attempts to preserve the Maori language. For thirty years or so, Te Reo Maori has been made a cause célèbre amongst some Maori and heaps of politically correct bureaucrats. But it remains an endangered language. People just don't want to use the language, let alone learn it.
Some radicals have pushed to make Te Reo a compulsory subject in government schools.
Here is Hosking's piece--which, as you read it you would do well to bear in mind that he has possibly, if not probably, committed career suicide.
The Bible declares that man is made in God's image. We are the only creature upon the earth so designated. But what does that designation mean?
One thing it does not mean is that part of man has the spark of the divine. Thinking along these lines always degrades human beings, on the one hand, and curses humankind by heading straight into neo-platonic heresies, on the other. Rather, the Word of God declares unequivocally that man, in body, soul, spirit, heart--that is, man in all his aspects--reflects and bears the image of God Himself.
To strike out the neo-platonism that lurks always at the edges of Christian doctrine we repeat that our body reflects the image of God, despite the fact that God Himself is "without body, parts, and passions".
As Douglas Kelly puts it:
. . . while the image of God is not corporeal as such, yet man's body does correspond to that divine image in a way not true of even the highest animals. Koenig summarizes these corresponding features of man's body to the divine likeness:
a.) man's countenance which directs his gaze upwards.
b.) a capacity for varying facial expressions.
c.) a sense of shame expressing itself in the blush of man;
d.) speech.
[Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1--2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Fearn, Ross Shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications, 1997), p.197.]
It is the last aspect (speech and language) which seizes our attention as being particularly after God's image.
The war on guns is not a war on guns, but rather a war on
words. The war on marriage is not a war on marriage, but rather a war on
words. The war on unborn children is not a war on life, but rather a
war on words. The war on true victims is not a war on victims, but
rather a war on words. And all of this is because of unregenerate man’s
hostility to the Word. Words remind them of the Word, and it is a Word
they do not wish to hear. Immanuel Kant says that Immanuel can’t be Immanuel because of Immanuel Kant’s cant.
Having words retain their meaning, and having an objective and fixed
connection between the word and the referent is something that reminds
men too much of their Maker. “For he spoke, and it came to be; he
commanded, and it stood firm” (Ps. 33:9, ESV).
And so they want the right to keep and bear arms to mean something like
not having the right to keep and bear arms. They want the married state
between a man and a woman to be something that can also exist between a
man and a man, because we have decided to use the word marriage
that way.
They want a child with a heart, liver, lungs and thumbs to be
a cluster of tissue only — but a cluster of tissue that (magically) has
a salable heart, liver, lungs and thumbs. They want a victim to be
whoever they designate a victim, and not someone who actually
might be one. This is not, as it sometimes first appears, to be a battle
between facts and feelings — although it certainly presents itself that
way sometimes. The real battle here is between facts — the will of God —
and feelings — the will of man.
They also want their crusade for freedom to eventually extend to geometry, so they can liberate all the oval triangles.
All these individual battles are important, but there is one battle
that runs through each of them. That battle is over whether words
proceed from the Word, or from the heart of rebellious man. Shall God
speak the Word, or shall man? The ancient rebellion began with the
question, “Did God say?” Has God spoken? Do we really have His Word? And
since we do not actually have His Word, or so the serpent whispered,
who shall speak instead?
God wants us to speak with gratitude, and so we speak with envy. He
wants us to speak with contentment, and so we murmur. He wants us to
speak the truth, and so we take ourselves to the Internet to spread
lies. He invites us to praise Him, and so we disparage His glory by
insisting that the cosmos is just one great big matter-in-motion
pile-up.
But the men who do all this are clever enough. They want an
intellectually sophisticated basis for their rebellion. They don’t just
go and do it. They carefully laid all the groundwork first. They insist
that anyone with half a brain, that anyone who is really educated, that
anyone who has basked in the Enlightenment sunshine, should know, by
this point in their project, that we don’t really know anything. Didn’t
you know that?
This is the telos of Immanuel Kant’s entire project, the gist of which boils down to a division between phenomena and noumena,
between the world as it appears to us, and the world as it actually is,
and to which we have no access whatever. The world as it actually is is
closed off to us. We know nothing about it. We are stuck on this side
with our thoughts about it all, which are very deep thoughts, are they
not? Do they not make the sophomores go whoa?
Immanuel Kant is the world’s most ironically named philosopher, and I
suspect there were a more than a few horse laughs and snorts from the
angelic hosts over it. Immanuel — God with us — Kant. And his whole
project amounts to saying that “Immanuel can’t.” But He can, and did.
So for the simple (and faithful) Christian, these Freebird solos on
the air guitar of philosophy collapse before the question — which world
was Jesus born in? In which world did He heal the sick? In which world
did He die for me, and in which world did He come back from the dead?
The phenomenal world or the noumenal world? In which world did He
forgive my sins?
The division is not between the world as it appears and the world as
it is. The division is not to be found in the world itself at all. The
fundamental division is always in the heart of man, and so we have the world as gift and the world as refused gift. The world saunters up to us in much the way described by Thomas Reid, and says hi.
We respond either by thanking God and receiving the pied beauty gift
with profound gratitude, or we say that dappled things certainly are presenting
themselves as dappled phenomena, but is this not much the same as when
you rub your eyeballs hard and see sparkly lights? Over in the noumena,
there might not even be any dappled things. No sense thanking God for
that.
It is therefore my considered opinion that any Christian leader who
has taken more than three graduate credits of anything needs to have Colossians 2:8 tattooed on the inside of his eyelids.
The connection between a word and its referent — in the world God
gave as a gift, mind you — is the connection that a two-hundred-year old
oak tree has with the soil it has grown in. But modern man — what
Andrew Lytle called momentary man — wants words and their referents to
have the connection that pond lilies have to the silt on the bottom —
and they are working on getting rid of the silt, and the bottom, and the
pond.
Then the lilies will be free. Then they will fly. Then they will soar with the pigs.
Making Maori an official language of the country and committing millions
of tax-extracted State money to the propagation and teaching of Te Reo
have had the unintended consequence of seeing a decline in Te Reo
competence and use. In effect, it has removed the language out of its
cultural context--and without that life force it cannot survive.
Desperate calls for Te Reo to be made compulsory in all government schools represents a doubling down on folly and will end up doing even more damage to the language--just as facility in reading, writing, and maths has declined under the intrinsic incompetence of compulsory government education. Since the government school system makes a virtue out of teaching pupils nothing but what they themselves want to learn, what hope is there for the Maori language if it becomes subject to such pedagogical inanity?
Professor Paul Moon--an expert on Maori and the NZ colonial period--has written an excellent piece on the Maori language and its prospects. He sets it in the broader context of the extensive decline and extinction of languages over the last century. [NZ Herald] He asserts that this bleak general trend is worsening. A key issue is who ends up speaking the language and the brute reality is that Maori has not broken out of its ethnic constraints. It remains a race-based language, unable to break out of its cultural constraints. Other languages have broken that barrier and proved to be more acquisitive of speakers and more dynamic in adjustment and change.
Holding Maori Language Week in the chill of winter somehow makes the challenges that Te Reo face seem that much bleaker. It's
certainly a tough world out there for minority languages, especially
those battling against the relentless onslaught of English.
Evolutionism is a contradiction in terms. If it can be described meaningfully, it must logically be a false cosmology; if it were a true cosmology, it could never be described. Moreover, none reading these sentences could make any sense of them. If, however, they have meaning to the reader, evolutionism is thereby revealed to be bunkum.
Linguist Vern Poythress explains why this is the case:
Each person who uses language relies on language rules. Many of the rules he knows tacitly, without having them explicitly taught in a classroom. He may not be able to formulate what the rules are, but he shows that he knows them by his usage. For example, if he has begun to learn English, he knows that the word "banana" describes a certain kind of fruit. He knows that "moved" is the past tense form of the verb "move." He knows that in making a declaration, the subject precedes the verb: "The cat is on the mat." He knows that in a question some form of helping verb or some question word precedes the subject." "Is the cat on the mat?" He knows that in a noun phrase with a definite article ("the"), the words occur in a certain, fixed order: "The three large cats" is acceptable, while "Large cats three this" is not.
He knows these rules even if he uses languages to deny that we can know anything, or to deny that we can know about language rules. The rules are indispensable. Vern Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word. Language--A God-Centred Approach (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2009), p.60f.]
Evolutionism argues (using rules of language and logic) that the cosmos is ruled by no rules. Everything is ultimately and substantially stochastic or chaotic or random. Laws, rules, and patterns are false mirages, disconnected from reality. Thus, evolution is compromised from the very start as being hopelessly self-contradictory. Any evolutionist who uses language to argue the contrary or deploys logic in the attempt to establish his case represents an oxymoron. It is as madcap as the chap who shoots his opponent with a Tikka T3 hunting rifle to prove that guns do not exist.
One of the characteristics of human society is the common language of "the day" will always reflect the established religion of that society. Ultimate beliefs work out into language, social conventions and eventually the law-code. When the establishment changes from one religion to another, language necessarily changes. The more bizarre the incoming establishment, the more inane and stupid "officialese" becomes.
Here is a classic example: in the United Kingdom, marriage is now no longer an institution referring to a man and a woman. It has been debased into an institution of startling inclusivity. But, what to do with the "old language"?
Next week parliament will vote on the thorny issue of titles for
married gay partners. They will be asked to clear up laws dating as far
back as 700 years. The changes are needed to ensure a gay married King
could not style his husband Queen.
Under the previous arrangements of Civil Partnerships gay partners
were not allowed courtesy titles as their unions were not deemed full
marriage. This is the reason Sir Elton John’s partner David Furnish is
not entitled to the dubious honour of being known as “Lady John”.
However once full once full gay marriage comes in next month gay
Dukes could claim the title Duchess for their partners. This would also
be true of other courtesy titles such as Princess of Wales, Countess and
Lady.
There are parts of the church--far too many for comfort--which crave acceptance from outsiders--otherwise known as Unbelievers. Some speak of churches needing to be "seeker friendly"; others appeal for relevance, clarity, plain speaking.
What might clarity and plain speaking look like where we live? To make people feel at home in a church service one would need to use "f . . .k" every third or fourth word, because that's how folk speak at home around here. Mind you, then folk would say, "Why f . . . bother going to f. . . church--it's just like f. . . . home anyf....ingway." Point well taken. We think this stuff risks becoming so loopy it belongs in the asylum. That's what a craven lust for acceptance will do to you.
The Church of England risks becoming a poster boy for this kind of inane worldliness.
Marilynne Robinson is an accomplished novelist. She is also a teacher of literature and creative writing. In her most recent book of essays, When I was a Child I Read Books, she reflects on how her library has become her community--a community which encompasses human beings from ages past.
I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 21.]
It is an amazing and humbling matter to be part of a community of ages and be able to interact with, argue, debate, discuss, and think with members of our species who have lived hundreds and thousands of years before us. They, of course, could scarce conceive of us; we, however, know of them. They are part of the fabric of our lives.
Here is where the inestimable richness of a liberal arts education begins to appear.
Long time forgotten is the impact of Johnson's English Dictionary. Once words were defined in meaning and in their spelling the ability to communicate could extend out beyond a single generation. The works and writing (and speech) of former generations could be understood by every new generation. Until Johnson's Dictionary, historical speech and writing was so unlike contemporary English it was virtually a foreign language.
But now we are so smart, we want to go back to enforced ignorance. The Queen's English Society in the UK has self-terminated. This from Brendan O’Neill:
When we were ensconced in the ivory towers completing our grad and post-grad work, Marshall McLuhan was a name to conjure. He was "framed" according the academic narratives of the day as a prophet who was discerning the depths of the emerging technological culture, foreseeing the impact of mass media upon us all. To evoke McLuhan in an intellectual discussion was chic. To quote him was an intellectual tour de force.
Alan Jacobs, writing in the New Atlantis, evalutates McLuhan and his legacy. The distillate? Nothing much left, really. To quote a modern poet, "Ain't it funny how times slips away." Here are some of the more scintillating observations made by Jacobs.
One of the most grating distortions of the English language is that trendy pop-jargon which sweeps through business and corporate and governmental communities like typhoid fever. The most common of the pestiferous species is "verbing"--the grammatical act of turning nouns into verbs. Fortunately most instances of "verbing" have the shelf-life of high fashion: tenure can be measured in nano-seconds. They prove to be as ephemeral and transitory as those suborned to use them.
But, according to Anthony Gardner, writing for the Economist and in INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2010, "verbing" has been going on in the English language since time immemorial. There are, however, some features of modern life which have turned a trickle into a deluge.
YOU'VE BEEN VERBED
By Anthony Gardner
Created 05/01/2011 - 18:26
Friending, trending, even evidencing and statementing... plenty of nouns are turning into verbs. Anthony Gardner works out what’s going on ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2010
Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed.
The English language is in a constant state of flux. New words are formed and old ones fall into disuse. But no trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs. “Trend” itself (now used as a verb meaning “change or develop in a general direction”, as in “unemployment has been trending upwards”) is further evidence of—sorry, evidences—this phenomenon.
It is found in all areas of life, though some are more productive than others. Financiers are never lacking in ingenuity: Investec recently forecast that “Better-balanced autumn ranges should allow Marks & Spencer to anniversary tougher comparisons”—whatever that may mean. Politics has come up with “to handbag” (a tribute to Lady Thatcher) and “to doughnut”—that is, to sit in a ring around a colleague making a parliamentary announcement, so that it is not clear to television viewers that the chamber is practically deserted.
New technology is fertile ground, partly because it is constantly seeking names for things which did not previously exist: we “text” from our mobiles, “bookmark” websites, “inbox” our e-mail contacts and “friend” our acquaintances on Facebook —only, in some cases, to “defriend” them later. “Blog” had scarcely arrived as a noun before it was adopted as a verb, first intransitive and then transitive (an American friend boasts that he “blogged hand-wringers” about a subject that upset him). Conversely, verbs such as “twitter” and “tweet” have been transformed into nouns—though this process is far less common.
Sport is another ready source. “Rollerblade”, “skateboard”, “snowboard” and “zorb” have all graduated from names of equipment to actual activities. Football referees used to book players, or send them off: now they “card” them. Racing drivers “pit”, golfers “par” and coastal divers “tombstone”.
Verbing—or denominalisation, as it is known to grammarians—is not new. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Language Instinct[1]” (1994), points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Elizabethan writers revelled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”. There is a difference today, says Robert Groves, one of the editors of the new “Collins Dictionary of the English Language”. “Potential changes in our language are picked up and repeated faster than they would have been in the past, when print was the only mass communication medium, and fewer people were literate.” So coinages can be trialled around the world—and greenlighted—as soon as they are visioned.
What makes these leaps so easy is that English, unlike other Indo-European languages, uses few inflections. The infinitive does not take a separate ending, so while in French the noun “action” has to become the verb “actionner”, English can use the same form for both. In German (apart from “essen” meaning “food” or “eat”), such words are virtually unknown; the same is true of Chinese—though the noun meaning “thunder” can be used as the verb “to shock”. In Arabic such formations are not found at all.
What’s the driving force behind it? “Looking for short cuts, especially if you have to say something over and over again, is a common motivator,” says Groves. So fund-raisers say “to gift-aid” rather than repeat “donate using gift aid” all day long, and CIA agents looking for suspects to kidnap find “to rendition” handier than “to subject to extraordinary rendition”.
Sometimes the results are ridiculous—notably when verbs are minted from nouns which were formed from verbs in the first place. To say “Let’s conference” instead of “Let’s confer”, “I’ll signature it” instead of “I’ll sign it”, or “they statemented” instead of “they stated”, makes the speaker seem either ignorant or pretentious. (The late General Alexander Haig, whose military jargon was so singular it became known as “Haigspeak”, even wanted “to caveat” a proposal, and was duly ridiculed.) Using an elaborate verb when there is a far simpler alternative—such as “dialogue” for “talk”—has the same effect.
On the other hand, verbing can be entertaining—especially when applied, with a touch of mischief, to a proper noun. A classic example is “Gerrymander”, dating back to 1812, when—under Governor Gerry of Massachusetts—political boundaries were redrawn so tortuously that one district acquired the shape of a salamander. In 2004 a smear campaign against John Kerry, the Democrats’ nominee for president, gave us the verb “to swiftboat”, derived from the type of naval vessel Kerry had commanded in Vietnam. Nor should we forget “to Bobbitt”, the verb coined when an irate Lorena Bobbitt took a knife to quite a specific part of her husband’s physique.
Some lovers of the language deplore the whole business of verbing (Benjamin Franklin called it “awkward and abominable” in a letter to Noah Webster, the lexicographer, in 1789); others see it as proof of a vibrant linguistic culture. Certain words seem to bring people out in a rash—among them “actioning”, “tasking”, “impacting”, “efforting”, “accessing”, “progressing” and “transitioning”. Often, though, the dictionary yields surprising precedents: “impact” was used as a verb in the 17th century, and “task” in the 16th. Other verbs have managed to escape linguistic ghettoes (“to access” was recognised by the “Oxford English Dictionary” over 20 years ago, but only as a computing term), or acquire new meanings: “to reference”, originally meaning “to supply with references”, has now become a near-twin of “to refer to”.
Coinages that seem to bend over backwards invite derision. You may not be rushing “to boilerplate” (automatically include) material in a document, or “to demagogue” a political subject (discuss it in a rabble-rousing manner). Locative verbs are particularly clumsy: “I’d like to showcase/front-stage/hothouse/workshop this.” A few simply appear crass—none more so than “to incest”, meaning “to force into an incestuous relationship”.
Not every coinage passes into general use, and with luck “to incest” will quietly fade away. But as for trying to end verbing altogether, forget it. You’d simply be Canuting. [2]Anthony Gardner[3] is a writer based in London. He reviews books for Intelligent Life magazine and edits the Royal Society of Literature’s magazine RSL. His first novel "The Rivers of Heaven[4]" is being published by Starhaven in September. Additional research by Joe Parham. Illustration: Bold & Noble.
Links:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/0060976519
[2] http://moreintelligentlife.com/../../../../../../authors/anthony-gottlieb
[3] http://www.anthonygardner.co.uk/
[4] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rivers-Heaven-Anthony-Gardner/dp/0936315296/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250613018&sr=1-6
T. S. Eliot in Christianity and Culture writes on how a nation, as part of a cluster of nations, can achieve real and lasting peaceful unity. Many who write upon such themes veer toward one of two extremes: either peace will be achieved by the suppression of differences (which are seen as the root cause of quarrels), or it will come through universal isolation and fracturing (where everyone is concerned exclusively with their own business). Eliot, however, argues that true lasting unity and peace can only be achieved if people are loyal both to general corporate values, while at the same time being loyal to the local and particular.
He writes:
The unity with which I am concerned must be largely unconscious, and therefore can perhaps be best approached through a consideration of the useful diversities. Here I have to do with diversity of region. It is important that a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with local loyalties. These, like loyalty to class, arise out of loyalty to the family. (T. S. Eliot, Culture, p.125)
This view captures an essential, Christian construct: the equal importance of the universal and the particular. This distinctly Christian doctrine is derived from the being and nature of God Himself. Our God is triune: within the Godhead, the particulars--namely the three Persons of the Godhead--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--are equally ultimate with the oneness of God. Thus, in the Being of God Himself, the one and the many are equally ultimate.
Unbelieving thought, captured by the machinations of a finite creature, will always drive toward either making the "many" absolute, or the "one". We see this tension everywhere in our modern Unbelieving culture. The libertarian or the anarchist absolutises the individual, seeing the collective as intrinsically dehumanising and destructive. The statist absolutises the one state. All diversity, when presented, exists only at the good pleasure of the social collective--provided it is within the bounds of the tolerable. So, the oneness of the collective squashes all diversity under the blanket of what is deemed politically correct.
The Christian position stands in sharp contrast to all Unbelieving ideologies and thought. "Oneness" and the "manyness" mutually co-inhere throughout the creation. Eliot illustrates this Christian distinctive by pointing to the essential power of local, regional languages to enrich a wider universally used language.
The question we may ask about such a language as Welsh, is whether it is of any value to the world at large, that it should be used in Wales. But this is really as much as to ask whether the Welsh, qua Welsh, are of any use? not, of course, as human beings, but as the preservers and continuers of a culture which is not English. The direct contribution to poetry by Welshmen and men of Welsh extraction, writing in English, is very considerable; and considerable also is the influence of their poetry upon poets of different racial origins. . . . But it must be remembered, that for the transmission of a culture--a particular way of thinking, feeling and behaving--that for its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue to be a literary language--not necessarily a scientific language but certainly a poetic one: otherwise the spread of education will extinguish it.
The literature written in that language will not, of course, make any direct impact upon the world at large; but if it is no longer cultivated, the poeple to whom it belongs (we are considering particularly the Welsh) will tend to lose their racial character. The Welsh will be less Welsh; and their poets will cease to have any contribution to make to English literature, beyond their individual genius. And I am of the opinion, that the benefits which Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers have conferred upon English literature are far in excess of what the contribution of all these individual men of genius would have been had they, let us say, all been adopted in early infancy by English foster-parents." (Eliot, Culture, pp. 129--131)
In the light of this, let us make a few comments upon Maori Language Week. The preservation of the Maori language (and, therefore, culture) is commendable--as is the languages of all cultural groups in New Zealand (Polynesian, Asian, Middle-Eastern and so on). But this is something which must come from within Maoridom itself. We believe that Maori has probably made a classic blunder in attempting to make the language an official language, as if bilingualism would somehow contribute to the oneness and unity of our society.
Hanging the language upon the hook of co-governance, which in turn is based upon a spurious notion of Treaty "partnership" will fail to achieve the aims. In the long run it will bastardize the language--as is happening now. Maori is so full of neologisms that it is becoming increasingly swamped by a phonetic tsunami of English transliterations or clumsy verbal manufactures for English equivalents. Consequently its ability to preserve and transmit Maori culture is being lost.
If Maori language is worth preserving at all--and it is--it would be to preserve and keep alive Maori culture, history, and tradition (shorn of the evil of course--which is true of every language reflecting pagan roots and beliefs). But, that requires that the Maori language be intensely Maori! not a bastardized polygot of verbal confusion in a foolish attempt to modernise the language and make it quasi-universal. Above all we need Maori poets and writers steeped in the beauties of their own language who can also write powerfully and fluently in Maori, and who can teach Maori literature and arts to Maori.
We also need these cultural icons to write in English so that we can all be enriched by Maori culture and made the better for it.
There is a difference today, says Robert Groves, one of the editors of the new “Collins Dictionary of the English Language”. “Potential changes in our language are picked up and repeated faster than they would have been in the past, when print was the only mass communication medium, and fewer people were literate.” So coinages can be trialled around the world—and greenlighted—as soon as they are visioned.