At 03/07/98 10:48:24, R I Caddel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
# Obviously, there's much to comment on in this, but at present I'm only
# picking up on one point:
#
# "As the poet and critic Sean O'Brien notes:
#
# Of course, the universality of language and the relative brevity of most
# poetry give poetry an obvious appeal as a means of self-expression, but,
# [...]
# the prospect of many thousands of composers clamouring for publication
# and performance of their symphonies would be absurd."
#
#
# And here we get to the major fault in O'Brien's statement, that sweeping
# "Of course, the universality of language...". Do we really believe
# language to be universal? When we're faced with the seeming omnipotence
of
# murdoch-speak or bbc-speak, do we for a moment make the mistake of
# thinking that's all there is? I think not - Moravians reject the
proffered
# "universality" of Prague speech with all the vehemence that Glaswegians
# reject London Newsreaderspeak. In the North East of England you can
place
# a speech to within a small area by inflection, sentence structure or
# vocabulary. Put a group of librarians next to a group of, for instance,
# taxidrivers and hear the different ways in which they use words - "file"
# and "charge" would be obvious, but there are other areas of radical
# difference, means of making distinctions of tone and meaning. John
# Wilkinson on this list has relished earwigging the levels of language in
# the conversation of the girls in front of him on the bus, and pointed
out
# the applicability of such richness to some poetry. In short, far from
# being "universal" I'm happy to say that language is diverse, localised
to
# an extreme, and is busily being celebrated as such by most of the
writers
# I appreciate from John Clare to Rob McKenzie.
But the cab drivers and the libraries have one thing in common: language.
It might not be a common language, but it's language none the less.
And talking of esperanto and languages in general, you might want to look
at <URL:http://xochi.tezcat.com/~markrose/kit.html>. Could language get
more DIY?
Roger
Linux: The choice of a GNU generation
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