I just spent what is probably too much time trying to make sense of my notes on Finnish for the last semester – or rather, trying to remember the construction to express necessity (or lack thereof). This is of course something we practiced ad nauseam in class (Minun täytyy harjoitella nesessiivi!) , but I was, as per usual, distracted by the unintentional politics of language learning.
The ‘necessive’ is not particularly complex, as it turns out…genitive, fixed formula, infinitive, et voilà! The possibilities are endless. Or they are at least in theory. If, like me or my classmates, you’re working with a pitifully small vocabulary, the possibilities become very limited – and limiting- indeed. And thus we listened with mounting horror to the simplistic opinions our ignorance (and the manual) forced us to express:
no food in the fridge? should have saved!
office closed? learn to come on time!
no money? get a job!
We were left wondering whether this is what happens in the heads of today’s populists and political scaremongers. Do they frantically look for the right words to express their nuanced opinions, only to be reduced to extremism because of their linguistic limitations?
coloured skin? go back home!
muslim background? stay off our women
homeless and poor? get a job!
One doesn’t want to extrapolate from anecdotal evidence, of course. But I can think of at least one person who, despite brazen announcements to the contrary, seems to have trouble with ‘words’.
The French cannot read […] and when they read or speak in public, their diction generally lacks accent and intonation.
In 1852, Emmanuel Le Maout, botanist, ornithologist and proud Frenchman noted with horror that ‘the Italians’ were unimpressed with French speakers and readers. Or that is at least what he claimed to have heard au delà des monts. Rather than worrying about Italian sensibilities, however, he seems to have been keen to give voice to his own diagnosis of the sound of French. And like any self-respecting intellectual of the nineteenth century, he was appalled at the state of the world in general, and that of his own country in particular. The beautiful language of Racine and Bossuet was done great disservices in the Académie, and the sound of parliamentary speech was, apparently, so abhorrent it could not even be described. A sad state of affairs that was confirmed three years later by Edouard Mennechet, who noted morosely that not only the French language was subject to great abuse. Speech, “a gift from God” and an “instrument of divine creation” was necessarily dependent on its “use” which was a “human invention” and therefore unavoidably faulty.
How can we not be surprised to see a civilized nation like ours persevere in ill-fated habits that, from childhood onward, deform, disparage and denaturalize one of the most noble faculties of man, one of the most precious divine gifts, speech!
And yet, according to Mennechet, one should not be quite so surprised at the inability of the French to read. Much like the cultural pessimists of today, he attributed his fellow countrymen’s failings to the social ills and political instability of (what was then) the modern world.
What prevents them from reading nowadays is the present Zeitgeist; it is the constant agitation that does not allow them to focus; it is the ebb and flow of opinions which does not leave time to think; it is this preoccupation –inevitable after revolutionary times – that torments man, some by incertitude, others by hope; some by greed and others by ambition; and all by egotism and fear.
Uncertainty, greed, egocentrism, exaggerate ambition and short attention spans had apparently robbed the French of the ability to read and speak properly. (One shudders to think of what Mennechet would have made of the Twittersphere).
Luckily, both Maout and Mennechet presented the public with a solution: a manual – consisting respectively of ‘leçons’ and ‘études’ to practice reading aloud. With sufficient analytical rigor and practice, they claimed, everyone could (re)gain the capacity to not only pronounce French in a correct and pleasing manner, but also to inflect their voices artistically and emotionally move their audience. The premise, that one could (and should) be taught how to speak properly was, as both authors pointed out, rather uncomfortably close to the one satirized in Molière’s Would be Noble.
And thus they hastened to point out that reading well cannot be systematized so easily, that there are no hard and fast rules and that, above all, the reader has to mobilize his own intelligence, his morality and his emotional sensibilities to make a text come to life and ‘move’ an audience. For those who did not have the time or energy to apply themselves to a long study of the inner passions of the greats of French literature, however, Le Maout very helpfully included a range of texts ‘annotated’ for breath, rhythm and inflection. If you want to sound like a sophisticated Frenchman of the 1850’s, I highly recommend “the monkey and the magic lantern”.