Parlez-vous Chinese?

ProetryPlace Blog 10 Parlez-vous Chinese?

    What’s the big deal if half or more of the earth’s 6000 or 7000 spoken languages are no longer heard or spoken by the middle of this century as I reported in an earlier blog? “Why not just one universal language?” as a friend recently asked, referring to that assertion, “Wouldn’t that be a lot more efficient?”

    It seems highly unlikely that the world’s population could ever agree on one common language. It might be logical to select the most commonly used language, Mandarin, with over one billion users, as our universal base. Are you ready for that? English and Spanish tie for a distant second with about one third as many speakers in the Americas. But note that there are more English speakers in China than in the United States.

    More to the point is the question of desirability of one common language or the flip side, why are languages disappearing at such a high rate. The Ethnologue group lists 377 languages know to have gone extinct since 1950. How did they disappear? What happened to those few remaining speakers of these languages? Did they just fade away? Were their offspring simply absorbed into some larger society or was some more traumatic sociological/cultural event responsible? How will the thousands of additional languages disappear in coming decades?

    I recently stumbled into the website of Dr. George J. Leonard, a longstanding professor in the Humanities Department at San Francisco State University. Dr. Leonard has published many articles and books, often relating to multicultural and interdisciplinary studies. He is an erudite scholar and skilled writer, presenting complex cultural analyses in common, understandable language. One of his articles, Japanese Haiku and Matsuo Basho,  relates to the question of the value of diverse world languages.

    I found Dr. Leonard after Googling a question about haiku and the Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho. Basho is probably the best known and appreciated haiku poet. He is credited for having developed and perfected the form in the mid seventeenth century. I was curious why and how this non-rhyming poetic form with its 17 syllables arranged in three lines came to be. It seems that Japanese, with a proliferation of words that end in vowels is almost more difficult not to rhyme than it is to rhyme. The 17 syllables (Japanese on) derives from a still earlier form, but I can’t tell you why 17 and not 16 or 18 or 21.

    Translations of Japanese haiku to English often do not retain 17 syllables but the beauty and simplicity of the original poem is retained as well as possible in translation. Take Basho’s most famous:

old pond

frog jumps in

sound of water

    The opening line creates a setting in nature, an aura, a tranquil atmosphere—in two words. Line two presents some action and suggests a time of year (when ponds are not frozen and frogs like to jump into them). The third line wraps up the moment as it occurred, leaving the reader not only with a visual image but the faint sound that briefly disrupted the peace and quiet of the old pond. Well, that is my simple interpretation after many readings and after venturing into Dr. Leonard’s discussion.

    Shakespeare never experienced Basho who wrote a century after he did. Shakespeare wrote beautiful rhymes and consistent meters in his sonnets and in his plays, setting the standard for centuries. For fun, I arranged several of his quotations in the form of haiku (though lacking essential imagery qualities of the poetry).

love all

trust few

wrong none

and a fool thinks

himself wise—a wise man knows

himself a fool

    According to George Leonard, a group of American poets, the imagists, took inspiration from Basho and his haiku to break away from what they considered the constraints imposed by rhyme and meter. As their name implies, they did not want to tell a story in verse; they wanted to present an image. They shunned rhyme and invented new meters. They embraced Whitman’s free verse. One of them, Amy Lowell, listed seven rules for imagist poets (thus weakly fettering their new-found freedom) that established imagery and brevity as essential elements of their work.

    Carl Sandburg, contemporary to the imagists if not always considered one of their company, has been a favorite of mine since I encountered his imagist poem, Fog, some 65 years ago.

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches [love that line]

and then moves on.

    So, the question is: would we ever have seen this poem without the influence of a strange (to English, European, and American poets) Japanese form of verse called haiku? Reason enough, I think, for humans to seek to preserve diversity in cultures and languages just as nature provides diverse life forms as a means to survival.

    Besides, it keeps Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone in business.

Richard Allen Anderson  < : - , ProetryPlace Blog 10 http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com