Fanny Gupta
A little boy was playing in the yard in front of his house when a neighbour stopped by. “Where’s your mother?” she asked the little fellow. “She’s in, she’s out,” he said. “Where’s your elder sister?” the woman asked again. “She’s in, she’s out,” came his answer as he continued playing. “Where’s your grammar?” she snapped. “She’s upstairs, taking a nap.”
Quaint forms of English grammar such as the child’s above add spice to life in a city that accommodates more than a hundred nations. Who wants uniformity? Not me. I love the strange accents and the linguistic gaffes that pour out of a multitude of humans who look around hopefully to communicate with strangers. They give you the flavors of countries you may never see and yet would like to.
Adel was an Egyptian who came to me for spoken English.
“Adel why don’t you change your style? You said to me just now: “I am sorry I am late. I am coming up the lift and I am meeting friend.” You mean that when you come up the lift, you meet some friend or the other. So you are always late. How many times have I told you that when you speak of actions that you do frequently, you should try to use the simple present? Use the continuous form while something is happening at the moment of speaking.
Adel looks embarrassed and says:
“I am seeing your point!”
“You mean ‘You see my point.”
“But sir, you said that when the action is taking place at the moment of speaking I can use the present continuous.”
“Adel, you forgot that a certain category of verbs does not take the ‘ing’ form although the state is prevailing then. Don’t you remember stative verbs?”
“Oh, yes! Sorry sir. I ‘see’ the point sir and now I ‘hear’ the bell” Adel grins happily to show he knows the rule, as the bell rings a second time to announce the coffee break.
The next day Adel comes back and of course he forgets to use the rule. You see most of his colleagues and all his friends speak his mother tongue! The society that supports him can live with Adel in perfect compatibility despite his non-standard English. It’s a different matter, of course, if he is the secretary to his boss who has to package standard language in his emails and written communication. Possibly he gets fired. Adel then either picks up the standard or changes his job to one which succeeds because Adel is just the sort of guy from whom they like to make their purchases, or eat their meals with.
Do you think that Stone Age man would have celebrated the discovery of language when he danced round the fire and made those guttural sounds repeated by the rest of the flock and then onwards were counted part of an unspoken dictionary and an unexplained grammar? I bet he didn’t. Just like us. We learn what gives us pleasure and utility and leave to others the niceties of grammar. In such an august place as the Consulate I was told that a particular officer’s room was at the “backside of the room” in which I was standing. My instinct was to laugh. I didn’t, of course.
Yet, grammar or “Gran’ma” as the little boy, out there, put it, is not less fascinating than the discoveries of space or of technology. When we text messages on the mobile and prune the spellings we do not let go off grammar. Instinctively we follow the rule- for example in English you will write “luv u” and not “u luv” if you wish to say “I love you”. That means your English grammar is well stored in your brain – the rule that the subject comes before the verb. Now put on your thinking cap if your mother tongue is not English and think of a similar message in your language. Does the subject come before the verb or is there no subject at all or does the verb come before the subject? As the Black characters say in an American movie: “You have it man! You have it!” – the competence to learn and unlearn rules. You are a member of the species that can talk and create – a human! Never mind the linguistic gaffes!
Rules! Or call it a code! They mean the same. The credit goes to Noam Chomsky
For bringing out the excitement in language learning when he popularized the notion that “language is rule-governed creativity.” “Grammar is a code- a closed system.” The child makes linguistic gaffes even while articulating the target language, his mother tongue. Instances such as “I eated the ice cream” and “beated the dog” are common in the speech performance of children in the first years of their socialization within the family and primary school. It’s nothing to worry about. A similar situation arises in a second language situation when adults who are not proficient in the language speak in our midst over here where English is a link language, for practical reasons.
Since grammar is a rule-governed activity, every stage at which the learner stops acquisition of the target language is a kind of “Interlanguage” (an intermediate stage in learning) a concept put forward by Larry Selinker in the seventies as a follow-out of Generative Grammar popularized by Chomsky and his School of thinkers in the sixties of the last century. From this angle there are many interlanguages circulating along the counters of shops and business groups, along the footpaths and coffee shops, in the courts and the mandirs or mosques where a multiplicity of cultures use a link language and hook on to English.
The American Noam Chomsky whose concept of rule governed creativity revolutionized attitudes to language learning and teaching
And now? Well, the pidgins, the creoles as well as the standard forms of all major languages go on merrily around the globe while the business of out-sourcing is making it necessary for Asians to sit up at their desks and study their rule-governed creativity in English or German or French or even Chinese, Japanese and Korean as the case may be. This is the twenty-first century- the age of multiple languages in the metropolis and the market places? The market places have been the famous centres of learning, in the 16th, 17th 18th and 19th centuries, for Whites, Blacks and Browns who wished to sell goods and services to each other, to get jobs during colonial rule- for the multitude of coolies, drivers, ayahs, slaves and the businessmen who wished to strike a deal with the Whiteman, the Asian or the African. The delightful pidgins and creoles were born.
Students of language who are ambitious to speak and write the standard forms of a language need not feel let down. They can take heart from Winston Churchill, who was a great prose writer and an orator of the early twentieth century. In school he continued to fail in Greek and Latin and was not promoted for four years in a lower class. Yet he grew to be a famous writer and orator in later years and twice Prime Minister of war-torn England. He attributed his skill in his mother tongue to his thorough knowledge of grammar, to the excellent efforts of his English language teacher who used different colored chalk to parse and analyze the English clauses time after time on the black board.
Well! Few teachers spend days on parsing and analysis if not weeks or months. If they don’t then you may still get to be a famous writer or orator. There are famous speakers who never parsed or analyzed a language but could sweep you off your feet with the power of their words, their ideas and their conviction!
Churchill led England to victory in World War Two. Above he shows the victory sign, not for language of course – he was a purist.
Perhaps if Shakespeare had to write a comedy on a metropolis he would pen some lines similar to these below and get them mouthed through multi-racial beauties:
All hail the pidgins, the creoles!
All hail the mother-tongues and second-languages!
Hover and linger in four-wheeled drives
Come on Blacken, Whitey, those in Hubble
Let’s rejoice in the language bubble.
His villain would be Standardized English and he would have invented delicious new mixed forms that second-language users need when under pressure to communicate with so many regional groups or natssssssssionalities in India.
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