It's all Greek to me

We learn language from the social group we interact with, generally speaking, first the family, then peers and other authority figures at school, church and so on, and perhaps a much larger group such as race or nation by way of mass politics and culture. At each stage, language use grows more complex, but at all times the rules are fashioned for the purposes and interests of the group. I am not a deterministic social constructionist on this point. Language is not a virus with which the helpess, passive individual is infected. All change in language does begin, after all, with some clever individual somewhere. but for the most part, the group rules, and the way a particular group uses language reflects the values of that group.

Take Trackton and Roadville, for example. At the end of the Ways with Words reading, I had the following epiphany: Trackton is a Homeric culture; Roadville a Biblical one. Recall that Homer was the ancient Greek poet credited with authorship of The Odyssey, whose hero, Odysseus, is admired for his cunning, strength, and resourcefulness. His virues, if you will, rather than his virtue. Heath's comment about storytelling in Trackton could apply to the Homeric tale as well: "Stories do not teach lessons about proper behavior; they tell of individuals who excel by outwitting the rules of conventional behavior." Trackton's emphasis on competition and creativity also recalls ancient Greece, whose great tragic drama was developed in a literally competitive environment.

Roadville on the other hand, uses storytelling as social glue. Stories are didactic. They inculcate the morals of the group. To quote Wilde's Miss Prism, "The good end happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." Of course, the Bible is central in Roadvilles stories.

Roadville and Trackton are like a microcosm of Western culture from ancient to modern, which retains a great tension between the Homeric (or pagan) and the Biblical.

Heath notes that Roadville is more concerned with literacy than Trackton. "Roadville parents believe it their task to praise and practice reading with their young children; Trackton adults believe the young have to learn to be and do, and if reading is necessary for this learning, that will come." He does not note the significance of this, namely, that in the Biblical culture literacy is necessary for social control and cohesion. Here is the secret behind our periodic literacy scares and obsession about reading in public schools, and also why we resist the entrance of popular culture, which belongs to the Homeric tradition, into them. Education is about proper socialization, not knowledge.

There is another language tradition represented in the reading, that of the author. I'm not sure what to call it: academic, analytical, Talmudic? This perspective can yield some important insights, but the scientific pretensions often create some unintentional hilarity by trying to render the banal in objective terms. "In Roadville and Trackton, all physiologically normal children learn to talk; yet the social and linguistic environments which surround young children as they grow into their language competence differ strikingly in a number of features." So, everyone learns to talk, but not in the same way. Really! (Note that my first paragraph is similarly afflicted wiht scientism.)

This third point of view is the language of the university. We are not taught it at home for two reasons. First of all because it is an outsider's perspective. It is natural to think critically when encountering a form of language different from our own, less natural to apply the same sort of thinking in our own home. Second, because it reveals the purposes and motivations behind language-use. It gives the whole game away.

The attitudes about storytelling in Trackton and Roadville had different functions. In the first, the individual is exalted and celebrated (often by way of degrading everyone else). In the second, the individual must be shown his proper place, taught to defer to the wisdom of the ages.

Is the analytical language of the scientist and professor purely distinterested, or does it have its own purposes, hidden even from itself?