Concepts 1 & 2 and Young

I remember reading Young and Fish's piece as well as many of the other works that were referenced in this article for The Writing Center's Reading Group. I remember talking about the various dialects of English with many of my friends, knowing that for every language that there is, there are dialects. When studying a foreign language, these are explored. The French language has variations in different parts of France, Canada, Rwanda, Senegal, Belgium, and several countries. These were taught to me in high school and here at Transy, and yet the only variation of English I was taught was that spoken in England. But, why is that?

Young provides an answer to that question that states that it is based on attitudes. Variations on the language that I speak now change with the amount of people who speak it. That, to an extent, changes the way that it is read. One of the points that Young makes lies in a story about accessible scholarship. "What had happened was, Summers called professor Cornell West to his office and went straight off on the brotha for writin books everybody could read, for writin clear, accessible scholarship." This is to say that scholars are willing to dismiss the works of other scholars for not sounding scholarly enough. But, that can be counter-intuitive when a scholar wants to make their work accessible to a wider audience. Then, that work can become the discourse of the masses rather than that of the few.

It's interesting to make this point when self-proclaimed intellectualists state that the doctrine of intellectualism doesn't require higher order abstract thinking. As such, to spread a positive and true message, anyone can be an intellectualist. Are we practicing what we preach?

There is a species in Doctor Who known as The Ood. They are born with their brains attached to a cord near their spine which they cup in their hands. Humanity saw them as lesser beings and invaded their culture, modifying their brains into a piece of technology that acted as a translator. The Ood would think and then communicate via the translator to respond to orders given to them by humans. They were sold as servants, and their true voices and language were never heard until a small colony of them were found imprisoned speaking to each other. They speak in tones that are heard by humans as music.

When I read Dryer's "Writing is Not Natural," I thought of this species. "This habit [of English speakers talking about writing as though it were speech] conceals an essential difference [between writing and speaking]: speech is natural in the sense that as modern homo sapiens, we've been speaking to one another for nearly two hundred thousand years. Our speech has been bound up in complex feedback loops with our physiology and our cognition." Many of the stories and legends of pre-common era societies were passed by word of mouth, and that's the main purpose of Ood speech. Their "singing" is their speaking and every "song" is a story about themselves and how they were developed as a society. When translators were attached to them, they spoke to each other in a type of English that could be understood by the people around them. The point that Doctor Who, as a show, is making here is that the Ood culture and way of life was invaded because it wasn't understood. Since it wasn't understood, it was ridiculed and taken advantage of. Remind you of anything?

So, when humans speak, it feels and sounds natural because that's how we've communicated for a long time. Talking about writing as though someone is speaking is effective on paper. Hypothetically, though, if someone who is mute could only communicate through writing and someone were to say "this is their voice" and create an entire commentary on that when it isn't applicable to their work, the work itself could become the less important factor. So, when we equate so many things things to voices, the context and the focal points of a discourse shifts.