The Importance of Language

Isn't it interesting how the founders of every major religion in the world today came from the East? Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, the great Gurus of Hinduism and Sikhism, the Patriarchs of Judaism were not of a Western culture at all. They all spoke in languages which are not easily translated to the Western mind. They had (and still have) a language which is quite distinct from dividing everything into boxes, carefully labelled and everything in its scientific place. There are words in Sanskrit and Hebrew which simply cannot be translated to an equivalent European word (in much the same way as the French 'ennui' cannot be accurately translated into English, though the sense of it is understood; or the Italian 'disponibile' doesn't ring quite so true in the English translation) but can only be understood.

It seems that many centuries ago the Western world developed along such patriarchal/thinking in boxes lines that we curtailed our language to fit that pattern. We all went along with it and let it become our natural way of thinking. In the West, things are black or white, good or bad, one way or another. It's limiting and stifling as is our language. We have alphabetically ordered dictionaries that explain everything, every word we speak - and they are useful but there are so many things for which we don't have sufficient language. In the East, the language goes deeper, is more powerful and has a more profound resonance. We waste our words. We write dross about any old rubbish and call it poetry. The Eastern mystics chant the same word repeatedly and find the meaning and power in it and that is real poetry: the power of sound finding its way to expression of things which cannot be simply labelled and classified.

Language is surely so much more than the basic communication of needs and wants, or the throw-away words of social chit-chat. Language is something incredibly powerful and sacred. What we speak is what comes from within us. How many of us would be ashamed to pass water, to burp, vomit or break wind in public, yet we pay so little attention to what comes from our mouths, to the words we form and to what we express? All the time you hear people expressing all kinds of negative notions, paying so little regard to the words they are using. Drift through a typical shopping centre and hear the many conversations and hear how many people are speaking negatively of their health, their circumstances (and if you're in England, they're bound to include the weather, whether it's sunny or raining!!) and life in general. So much of it is taken up by social niceties or people just speaking for the sake of having to have something to say. Why waste words? ("By your words you will be acquitted and by words you will be condemned," said Jesus). People lie about global warming and other people respond by being very careful about their so-called (nonsensical!) 'carbon footprint' but how few people in the West take care about what we actually express in our everyday conversations?

"The Past Is Another Country...."

What's the correct answer to the greeting, "Alright?" ? I don't know if this is a Yorkshire colloquialism or in worldwide usage, but far from the genteel, "Good morning, Lady Harley-Farley, how are you?" of another era, it seems that in the age of speed in all things, we do not like to waste time with words and reduce the greeting to "Alright?" You walk along the road, pass an acquaintance and he/she nods, "Alright?" What do you say? "I am very well, thank you, how are you?" sounds too verbose. A simple, "Hi!" or "Morning!" (omitting the 'good', of course)? Or perhaps just a nod and a smile?

When L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is another country, they do things differently there..." he might have warned that they speak another language there, too, and what a challenge this presents in writing historical fiction. In order to find the authentic voice of a particular era, is it necessary to check every word for its usage at the time? For example, 'naughty', in Shakespeare's time, was far more derogatory than it is nowadays. The word 'sick' - I believe - came to England from America some time in the mid-19th century, and I recently discovered (from Stephen Fry's brilliant book), that 'Hello' only came into usage as a greeting after the invention of the telephone. So do I check every word that the characters speak, or is better to capture the essence of the age by using language which is more familiar today? After all, some local phrases of 'old speak' would make no sense whatsoever to anyone born outside of Yorkshire or after 1970. I never understood my grandmother's greeting, "Why don't you come like yourself?" Things didn't break, they 'went west', angry people, 'played Hamlet', to 'make love' was a mild flutter of eyelashes and 'to screw' meant to look or watch and spices were sweets, and sweets were meat. Combine that with all the Yorkshire grammar of nowt, sommat and replacing 'our' with 'us' ('we're having us dinner'), changing 'the' to 't' followed by a sort of guttural 'er' (going t'er shops) and local vocabulary of ginnels and snickets for alleyways, the 'coarser edge' for the kerb...
Perhaps it would be much easier to set the novel in a community that had taken a vow of silence...