austraLasia 1515
When is language not a language?
ROME: 2nd April 2006 -- Have you ever wondered what 'the
new languages of the media' really means? Let me tell you that as
a linguist raised in the Chomskyan tradition, but also as a native
speaker, I have wondered and am still wondering. Most native speakers
of English with or without a trained linguistic background, have this
inborn sense that language is a human faculty and that its application
to anything else is at best metaphorical and at worst deceiving.
Over time I have made a study of this term in the
context of Salesian documents. It produced very interesting
results. It suggested on the one hand that English readers often
have to engage in mental gymnastics to understand what our documents
are really saying (and I am referring only to a
single term here, 'languages'), and on the other hand, that we might
give a little more thought to a debate that has been raging for fifty
years now.
Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that
there are quite different schools of linguistic thought on the
Continent (think of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, the Prague School...) from
those in Britain, US, Australia - think Chomsky, Halliday,
Dixon...). But what is commonly agreed upon is that where
Latin-based languages have three words (linguaggio, lingua, parola
to go straight to the point), English has but one, language.
And in English, language is normally applied to a human faculty
or something at least a recognisable extension of the human as in 'body
language' - but even here, it is immediately seen to be
metaphorical. We are becoming used to 'computer language', but
are able to recognise a finite grammar, rules and so forth.
Further extension of the term becomes nice poetry, but unhelpful prose.
Instead, linguaggio in Italian is a more
abstract term, but when we move to the point of abstraction at which
human language and cinema, or young people's subcultural styles fall
together, then we are at a point where all kinds of behaviour fall
under the mantle of language. St. Paul's Publications have
published a Dizionario di scienze e techniche della comunicazione
(1996) where they point this out - saying that even in Italian a term
like linguaggio audiovisivo "is at best a working
hypothesis;...after thirty years of research it has not been possible,
despite notable effort, to demonstrate the existence of cinematic or
television languages".
Now with regard to our own documents. A corpus of
all official documentation from 1960 to 2006 produces the following
statistics: 91 uses of the term linguaggi and 213 of the
singular form linguaggio, virtually all of them in the context
of phrases like 'language of catechesis', 'new language of media' and
so on. What is fascinating is that the use and extension of the
terms reflects a debate going on in the world around us but without
ever referring to that debate. In the '60s (GC19) but a single mention
of the singular linguaggio, with 'scolastico' attached, a
concern about catechesis. In 1971 (GC20) it still appears in the
singular but with nuovo attached for the first time and a
semi-definition that it is to do with the 'characteristic style' of
young people's system of communication while recognising that there is
language 'in senso stretto'. This is just after Chomsky's well
known lecture (1968) where he made it clear that for him language was a
'specific type of mental organisation'. That is his 'senso stretto'.
Our usage began to diverge from that to 'style', and it follows along
that track thereafter to linguaggi audiovisivi, esspressioni
drammatiche, creativtà (GC21) and so on, broadening all the
time. The broader understanding of language was acceptable in the
context of the European 'schools' I referred to earlier, but there is
little doubt that it left English readers bemused. Nor has there
been a real effort to define the way we are using these two terms, (the
one word in singular and plural form) though there have been some part
definitions.
My final point is this. When the Vatican
translator went to work on John Paul II's last Apostolic Letter, Rapid
Development, he came across linguaggi inediti in n. 3 of
that letter. He translated it as vocabulary. Full
marks in my book. Linguaggio and linguaggi appear
to invite the gloss languages and language in English,
but especially in the context of communications, I would suggest these
are false friends. Vocabulary, expressions are two of a
range of possible terms according to context. It is not only nor
primarily a translation issue as the St. Paul's Dictionary cited above
indicates. We could benefit from some further definition of
certain terms we are using with considerable frequency now. Linguaggi(o)
is one of them It appears 25 times in AGC 390!
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