The Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page B

grammar or syntax that is indispensable or universal. The ways of dealing with matters of number, tense, case, gender, and the like are wondrously various from one tongue to the next. Many lan-guages manage without quite basic grammatical or lexical features, while others burden themselves with remarkable complexities. A Welsh speaker must choose between five ways of saying than: na, n', nag, mwy, or yn fwy. Finnish has fifteen case forms, so every noun varies depending on whether it is nominative, accusative, allative, inessive, comitative, or one of ten other grammatical con-ditions. Imagine learning fifteen ways of spelling cat, dog, house, and so on. English, by contrast, has abandoned case forms, except for possessives, where we generally add 's, and with personal pro-nouns which can vary by no more than three ways (e.g., they, their, them), but often by only two (you, your). Similarly, in En-glish ride has just five forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden); the same verb in German has sixteen. In Russian, nouns can have up to twelve inflections and adjectives as many as sixteen. In English adjectives have just one invariable form with but, I believe, one exception: blond/blonde.
    *Sometimes languages fail to acquire what may seem to us quite basic terms. The Romans had no word for gray. To them it was another shade of dark blue or dark green. Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of yes or no. They must resort to roundabout expres-sions such as "I think not" and "This is so." Italians cannot distin- THE MOTHER TONGUE
    guish between a niece and a granddaughter or between a nephew and a grandson. The Japanese have no definite or indefinite articles corresponding to the English a, an, or the, and they do not dis-tinguish between singular and plural as we do with, say, ball/balls and child/children or as the French do with chateau/chateaux. This may seem strange until you reflect that we don't make a distinction with a lot of words—sheep, deer, trout, Swiss, scissors—and it scarcely ever causes us trouble. We could probably well get by without it for all words. But it is harder to make a case for the absence in Japanese of a future tense. To them Tokyo e yukimasu means both "I go to Tokyo" and "I will go to Tokyo." To understand which sense is intended, you need to know the context. This lack of explicitness is a feature of Japanese—even to the point that they seldom use personal pronouns like me, my, and yours. Such words exist, but the Japanese employ them so sparingly that they might as well not have them. Over half of all Japanese sentences have no subject. They dislike giving a straightforward yes or no. It is no wonder that they are so often called inscrutable.
    Not only did various speech communities devise different lan-guages, but also different cultural predispositions to go with them.
    Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are ad-dressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it. There are more of these speech conventions than you might suppose. English speakers dread silence. We are all familiar with the uncomfortable feeling that overcomes us when a conversation palls. Studies have shown that when a pause reaches four seconds, one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something—a fatuous com-ment on the weather, a startled cry of "Gosh, is that the time?"—rather than let the silence extend to a fifth second.
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    vital adjunct to language is the gesture, which in some cultures can almost constitute a vocabulary all its own. Modern Greek has more than seventy common gestures, ranging from the chopping GLOBAL LANGUAGE
    off the forearm gesture,