I came across this in researching something else, and thanks to a
scan, am passing it on. It comes from Pierre Alexandre's _Languages
and language in Black Africa_ (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972 - a
translation from French). What caught my attention was that the 3
myths he refutes (on pp. 32-34) are ones that one still hears today,
over 3 decades later. Don
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I have already outlined the general characteristics of African
languages. The first which I shall discuss might be called the
negative characteristics; more precisely, I must explode some
widespread myths.
The first myth to explode: "African languages are poor." Certain
scholars who should know better (sometimes they even hold M.A.'s or
Ph.D.'s), continue to say that "these dialects include only a few
hundred - or a few thousand - words." This presumes first of all that
they have an answer to a problem in general linguistics which is quite
far from being solved: the nature of a "word." Even if one concedes,
as one might easily do, that a word is a linguistic unit which
deserves a separate entry or a separate article in a dictionary, it
would still be difficult to determine what constitutes the wealth of a
language. Does it involve the total number of words in a dictionary?
If this is the case, then written languages have an advantage from the
start: that of lexical sedimentation, which writing permits. If I flip
through my dictionary at random, I will find many words that I will
never use or will use only rarely, such as "deictic,"
"hexadichloroethane," "gules," "modulus ,""parbuckle," and
"certiorari." It might indeed seem that we should admit that the
vocabulary which people possess, given an equal intellectual capacity
of the speakers, is practically identical from one language to another
and that where we speak of a language used in a technologically
complex civilization we should speak of different specialized
dialects, mutually incomprehensible between different professional
categories.
African languages may seem poor if one examines the few published
lexicons. This so-called poverty stems directly from the
lexicographers' ignorance of the language they were studying or of the
civilization these languages expressed-and sometimes, too, from an
ignorance, if not of their own language, at least of the language in
which they wrote. Despite these obstacles, dictionaries do exist whose
size compares well with that of the American Heritage Dictionary,
Webster's Collegiate, Chambers, or the abridged O.E.D. Examples
include, among others, the Mande dictionary by Delafosse, the Hausa
ones by Bargery or Abra-ham, the Swahili dictionaries of Sacleux,
Krapf, or Madan, and the Kongo dictionaries by Laman or Bentley.
One last point: it seems probable that in civilizations whose culture
is exclusively or primarily oral, the active vocabulary' which each
person has at his command is larger-precisely because of the lack of
graphic memory aids-than it is in a civilization which makes extensive
use of writing.
Second myth to explode: "African languages have a fundamentally
concrete orientation and do not lend themselves to expression of
abstract ideas." This myth is an offshoot of the former one and
belongs to the same general category of misunderstandings about
African civilizations. Without specific changes, no language can ever
express more than the total context in which it is used. Notice the
word total. This is self-evident for the material context: there is
obviously no English word meaning "hippopotamus" (we use a Greek word)
or "kangaroo" (the word is based on a misunderstanding on the part of
the earliest ex-plorers). We can as readily concede that a language of
Equatorial Africa will have no word for "apple tree" or "snowdrift";
but as soon as so-called abstract terms enter in, a European or
American, applying a kind of scholasticism of universals, whether
consciously or not, is astonished at not being able to translate word
for word certain ideas which seem to him not only natural but
universal. It happens that "abstract" terms are those which belong to
a nonmaterial context: to the values of a civilization or, in the
final analysis, to a system of relations which forms the structure of
this civilization. Basically this opposition of concrete to abstract
is not quite satisfactory. It would probably be better to use terms
such as substantial and relational. Surely an African living in a
civilization different from our own must regard French or English as
being singularly lacking in abstract terms. To prove this, it suffices
to read modern ethnographic works: almost invariably the authors must
retain the African terms, or give a long definition, often complex and
only approximate, the first time they use an African word. At another
level, a lexicographer can easily collect terms designating visible,
tangible objects in the physical setting, such as parts of the human
body, common tools, furniture, etc., precisely because he can show
them or touch them. But what of an idea such as the "acquisi-tion of a
moral and economic preponderance at the expense of someone else thanks
to the possession of an evil supernatural substance held in lawful
bounds by the presence of vital energy with a cosmic origin" (in Bulu,
asee)?
The argument has been even more convincingly set forth as the
incapacity to extract the common denominator from a series of objects
or analogous beings by arguing, for instance, that some languages have
a term to indicate every species and variety of antelope but no word
for antelope in general. Similarly, on a French boat one finds
hawsers, sheets, halyards, bowlines, sluices, gaskets, etc. but no
rope - which proves that French sailors are incapable of abstraction.
Here again it really comes down to a cultural difference. There is no
inability to abstract (in the strict sense of the word : "pull out
of") but only different means of abstracting wherein the criteria are
not identical. Thus some people have maintained that Africans cannot
distinguish more than three colors-black, white, and red - a
conclusion based on an overly rapid analysis of their languages. What
seems really to happen is that the chromatic terminology of these
languages is based more on vividness than on shades: "red" would be,
approximately, "vivid" "white" is "clear" or "pale"; "black" is
"somber" or "lofty" - the shades being suggested by reference to
objects (as we do with "orange"). What is involved, in brief, is the
expression of different world views, which are, however, no less
complete or complex. A language may be more analytical in some
spheres, more synthetic in others. The global wealth of expression may
well be the same for all languages.
One last argument: "In African languages there are no words for
hypotenuse, plesiosaurus, circumference, and ontology." Response: Nor
are there any in French or in English. I will come back to this
question of scientific vocabulary later.
Third myth to be exploded: African languages are (a) very easy, (b)
very difficult, because they have no grammar." There is no language
without grammar. At least not in this world.
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