Le fahtre: the evolution of language
Le fahtre qui schlag la moutre avec un schteck.
That’s the best approximation I can give of the way it sounded. My father always gets around to saying that at some point. Then he laughs. Of course, the first time he said it, I didn’t know what he was saying. I knew that it was foreign, that it related to the area of Switzerland he grew up in since it always came up when we talked about the Jura. I must have known what it meant the second time he said it. I would have asked or he would have told me. Either way it hadn’t remained a mystery for a very long time. So little of a mystery, that I never thought about it much. I laughed along with him because it had become the sort of private joke people tell in families. The same kind of inside joke I imagine people who belong to tribes, neighborhoods, and cultures, share about things.
You may be wondering what the sentence means. If you have some background in German you were probably able to figure out most of the words by approximating the sound, then get the meaning of the sentence despite the French words that hold the German together and make it meaningful. That’s what this sentence is: two different languages living together in a productive relationship, working together to provide a means of communication for a group of people. This particular group happens to live in a small strip of land that straddles the geographical range of two major languages: French and German.
If you speak German, you will have noticed that it is dominant in the sentence. If you don’t understand German and but speak some French, you will have recognized five words in the sentence. These are the words that glue the sentence together and give it meaning. But, without the German, you won’t understand the sentence.
If you don’t speak German or French, you probably have no idea what is going on in this sentence. I didn’t either, but I was able to ask my father. What my father said translated roughly to “Father is beating mother with a stick.” It made him laugh when he said it in English too.
This might make you think that my father is, at best, an insensitive old fool, from another generation, whose attitudes toward women could use some adjustment. You would be partly right. He can be insensitive. But he is anything but a fool. The first time I really thought about the meaning of the sentence and his laughter, I was outraged. I have to confess that I might not have stumbled on this new approach had I not had some coaching from my girlfriend at the time. She couldn’t believe that this guy with a weird accent could be so blind to the implications of what he was saying. Seen from her point of view, it was terrible. I, on the other hand, was an innocent victim, brought up in a household ruled by rampant insensitivity.
Yet, I felt I had to give my father a break. After all, he was an immigrant and deserved a second chance. After really listening to what he was saying, and thinking about it some more, and having changed girlfriends, I began to understand that his laughter had nothing to do with bemusement at imagining his father beating his mother with a stick. I decided to test my theory. I confronted him with the meaning of what he was saying. Sure enough, my father was confounded. He became quite angry with me and I had to beat a quick retreat. Not only was he not a fool, he was also, despite his age, gender, and race, quite sensitive. It then dawned on me that, that when my father heard himself say that sentence (and a few others), those sounds from a language that now belonged only to memory had the power to take him back to a completely different time in his life. He was laughing at the pleasure of remembering. Those words took him back to a time and place that now existed essentially in his mind only. The place he remembered is still there; the mountains are ageless. But the people that sentence brought to mind, his childhood, his teenage years were gone, along with the quirky hybrid language.
The other day, I read something in a reputable magazine that made me laugh. To paraphrase, it stated, unequivocally, that the people of Earth are losing their languages at a rate of one every 14 days. Studies have apparently been done that have estimated the number of languages in existence globally at 7,000. A quick extrapolation of this figure leads to the frightening conclusion that, within approximately 250 years, there will be no languages left on Earth. Within 250 years mankind will have fallen silent!
The article also clearly stated that the language of imperial powers is a threat to the continued existence of the languages of weaker, dominated, cultures. There is this notion that languages are endangered in much the same way that species are. The implication is that, through a bi-directional symbiotic relationship, languages and cultures are like living organisms which are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as living animals. Languages exist and disappear, in this reading, as the result of insensitive “imperial” cultures which deny continued survival to weaker species.
You can make quite interesting discoveries when you decide to investigate your family’s language. My parents were raised in valleys only about thirty minutes away from each other by modern conveyances. Yet, despite their proximity, the residents of my father’s valley were suspicious of those residing in the other valley, and vice-versa. The inhabitants of the two valleys spoke the same language with a different accent and you could, if you yourself had been brought up in the area, immediately ascertain who was from where by the (funny) way they spoke. Each valley had its own convictions about what traits provided it with an edge over the other. At the time it might have been, and may still be, depending on which corporate interest is doing the boosting, world famous watches (unfortunately bought out by foreign interests), the remains of a Roman road, a hockey team, better views over the mountains, a more glorious history, or several famous native sons (or daughters). You also discover, by asking a few questions and doing a little research that, while from a linguistic standpoint the main difference between the valleys my parents grew up in was primarily one of accent, you can travel in different directions and find quite different groups of people. These people live in an area referred to roughly in English as “up there” or “on top”. The area is known more formally as the Franches-Montagnes. It is a place of towering pine trees, open fields, boulders, ponds, cows, and well-kept farms. People here are famous for their special breed of horses and (until the laws changed) the illegal absinthe they distill. People from this remote region also spoke a different patois.
Once “on top,” if you drive just a few miles further westward, you will come to a river called the Doubs. If you cross it, you will be in France. The river is key to both the national and regional identities of both the Jurassiens (Switzerland) and the Francs-Comtois (France). This identity depends entirely on which side of the river you are from.
Interestingly Spanish, the language of a great, dominant empire and once the language of the invaders holding the now French-speaking area along this Franco-Swiss border, did not become the language of the area. The Spaniards, who occupied the area during parts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were homesick and developed vin jaune, or “yellow wine”, from the local Savagnin grape. It closely resembles vino de jerez, originally from a Spanish town known as Sherish during the Moorish occupation. Over time, vin jaune has been seamlessly integrated in local wine-making culture and is a source of great pride to local vintners.
I say “interestingly” because, on reflection, it’s very difficult to determine conclusively which languages are “imperial” in a long-term historical context. I alluded earlier to the Roman presence in Switzerland. Ancient Rome is a prime example of a ruthless imperial power. Yet, Latin is no longer spoken anywhere in the world. The former colonies of Rome speak an array of languages ranging from English to Arabic. Vulgar Latin, spoken by Roman soldiers, merchants, and officials gradually merged with existing local languages to give rise to today’s Romance languages: Ibero-Romance (Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese); Gallo-Romance (mainly French); Italian; and Rhaeto-Romance which includes Friulian and Ladin (languages spoken by around 750,000 people in the extreme north of Italy); and Romansh, spoken only in the Grisons (Graubünden in German).
This same sort of process also obtained in the development of English, today’s “imperial” language par excellence. English is a West Germanic language that grew out of dialects first brought to Great Britain by Roman auxiliary troops (Tungri, Batavi and Frisii) then by Anglo-Frisian and Lower-Saxon settlers from northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands between the fifth and seventh centuries. Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England, the local population spoke a Celtic language. English was also heavily influenced by Old Norse, the language of the invading Vikings. The Norman conquests of William the Conqueror, which culminated in 1066, resulted in significant changes to the language as it was heavily influenced by the French of the time. In addition, English has borrowed heavily from a variety of languages (for example, thug and pajama from Hindi, or pizza and spaghetti from Italian) and has constructed many, primarily technical words, from Greek and Latin.
This evolution raises questions in my mind. Why did other languages and particularly French come to have such a strong influence on the English language? Were the English people at the time of the French invasion second-rate and backwards? Were they a primitive people with a weak culture, a poor legal system, and no proper system of government? Were they a people that could be easily taken over by colonizing outsiders? Apparently so…
On inspection, conquest quickly begins to look like a leitmotiv of human history. Take a closer look at any group of people on any continent and you will find when records are available that they have been conqueror and conquered at different times in their history. I would challenge anyone to find a group of people that has consistently throughout their history been blameless of “imperial” activity whether by invading another continent or some valley a few miles down the road.
I’m like my father. I say these things, but I’m not insensitive. Of course, there are victims and we should never cease to fight to right the wrongs that the strong inflict on the weak. Yet, on the other hand, victimhood has its limitations. The English language is now conquering the world because, to paraphrase Lao Tzu, it does not destroy its opponents but co-opts them. It provides, as Latin did, a value that people recognize. It won’t be the last language to provide this medium for expanded communication. It is just the latest one to do so.
I investigated the languages spoken in the area my parents come from. I found that the language, called Franc-Comtois by linguists, is subdivided into two separate language dialect groups: Jurassien-Méridional and Jurassien. The first belongs to “Arpitan” and the second to the peripheral Oïl languages. These two groups are, respectively, subdivided into five and six sub-dialects. According to UNESCO, Arpitan, also known as Franco-provençal, is an endangered language in France and Switzerland. It is endangered and on the verge of extinction.
Perhaps, it’s all evolution and Darwin was right. I’m wrong to laugh at the notion that languages are endangered and face extinction.
Did I mention that my mother’s father spoke French peppered with Italian words? His family moved to the Jura in search of work in the early part the twentieth century. They came from the part of Switzerland where people speak Italian. Well, they speak Italian and Ticinese. Ticinese is, according to my reading, the comprehensive denomination for western Lombard languages spoken in the Ticino canton of Switzerland…and northern Italy. It seems that when people move out of their valleys, they need to communicate with the larger world around them. It would also seem that when new people move into a valley, the locals shape the language of the newcomers to suit their needs. Latin becomes French, Italian, and Romanian. Rather than extinction through the iniquitous influence of imperial powers, it would seem that languages have a natural life cycle, like the humans and cultures that use them.