What Does Language Speak (Tell)?

.  Silly, I know.  But it all started when I remembered the title of the piece I chose to present for my first, and disastrous chamber choir audition: Officium Defunctorum.  (I was admitted after my second audtion 3 years later.) I was in the first blush of discovery of Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria, who is now one of my favorites in classical music.  I was so in love with the piece that I attempted something way over my head for that situation.  (It didn't help that I handed the audition piano accompanist a score with pages 4 and 2 reversed!)

.  Anyway back to the focus here, even 50 years later I remember that the Latin suffix "-orum" denotes the genitive plural.  So it means "Office of the Dead," a series of prayers designated for remembering the deceased apart from a funeral service.

.  It seems those old suffixes come around in the oddest places.  Soon after the (re-)liberation of Lithuania from the Soviet Union there was a resurgence of the language.  Formal and informal language police insisted on, as Québec now legally mandates, the use of the native language.  Two vignettes follow from an April 12, 1993 Wall Street Journal story... 

  

"We're interested in private owners who hang signs," says Donatas Smalinskas, chief language cop in his Vilnius [Lithuania's capital city] office.  "They think English will attract foreigners.  I tell them English is no good."

   ...  Vilnius  has a private restaurant by the name of Ravioli. Mr Smalinskas

 finds it unsavory.  "We have a word for  this in Lithuanian, " he says.  "Koldunai.  It's the same as the Italian dish.  They have been severely criticized.  They will have to change the sign."

     The lettering is in pink against the sheet-metal wall of a tiny building downtown.  Inside, behind the counter, white things float in a pot of boiling water.  Standing next to it is Audrone Piliboniene, the owner.  In her book Lithuania's linguists are the ones with the bad name.  

     "We decided to use this Italian word," she says.  "We wanted something new.  A new word.  If it so irritates the linguists, what can be done?  We look to the moment when we have to scrub this from our windows." ...

    "We don't want to offend the Lithuanian language," she says, But Ms. Piliboniene can't hold her tongue.  "People enjoy a new word.  Now we have to think of another one, an attractive one.  Such a small place.  Don't these linguists have anything else to do?"

 

.  By the way, note that the last names of the women named in the story all end in the feminine nominative singular suffix "e".   (In Lithuanian it is actually an e with a dot over it, but I could not find that in any of my fonts.)  Anyway, back in the 1990's, when we corresponded with my wife's great aunts, I noticed the same ending in the spelling of their last names.

.  For the other vignette let us briefly harken back to the suffix story above.  Classic literary Latin is what Julius Caesar used.  His De Bello Gallico is held up as an exemplar of the fully inflected language, where word endings convey specific meaning  and give context when properly used.  Now back to the WSJ story.

   Talking to unexpected guests in her wooden cottage, she stands shyly beside a table; it comes up to her waist.  She wears a coarse dress and head scarf  Her hands  are raw, her eyes watery.  The language she speaks, Lithuanian, is the oldest living European language, and she is among it oldest living speakers.

   "Did you go to school?" the linguist asks"That was in Czarist times, says Zose Baliukeviciene, born 1897.  "I had no time for school.  My parents owned four cows.  We had sheep.  Work had no end.  Even in winer.  Work and work."

   Kazys Morkunas of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, re-established 1990, takes a note:  avis.  It means "sheep" in Lithuanian.  In Sanskrit it means the same thing...."I'm deaf now,"  the old woman says at the door. "But I speak lound enough.  Thank God that he still keeps me alive."  And keeps the language alive through her.  "She changed her nominative plural endings," Mr. Morkunas says outside, closing the gate of her weathered picket fence.  "That is very old."  When Mrs. Baliukeviciene goes here's hopng her nominative plurals don't go with her.

  ... Lithuanian has done less evolving than any other [Indo-European] language from Icelandic to Bengali.

.   Inflected languages are called synthetic because they express meaning by adding to, or adjusting words, using suffixes, infixes and prefixes.  I am fascinated by those languages, especially since my native language does not inflect (except for some forms of pronouns like he/his/him, and a few relict suffixes like -'s for the possessive and -s for plurals of most words.)  In contrast English, like other "analytic" languages, adds extra words to convey changes of meaning, e.g. "the Land of our fathers," "by not having it," "give it to him".

.   Vernacular, argot, patois, slang, cant, popular language, pidgin, common parlance, creole, demotic, vulgar speech, street talk:  all of these terms are supposed to indicate that some expression deviates from or has lower status than some kind of higher or more general standard.  I'm still hesitant to believe that ordinary folk actually use all those endings for tense, mood, gender, case and number (Greek and Arabic even have three grammatical numbers:  singular, dual, and plural!) and whatever other idiosyncratic requirements their language has.

.  Yet, in a past visit to England, I was impressed at how well and fully ordinary English people used their language, there in the land of its birth.  Maybe it's we American who take any available language shortcut -- we have no historic commitment to language preservation.  Nonetheless I do remember a tract from a Roman grammarian in the time of Caesar Augustus chastising people for taking liberties with Latin endings.  Perhaps the Latin language was already on its way to evolving into the Romance languages, all analytic, that we now know.  Language is such a fluid thing.  What culture can hold onto any language standard for very long?