Language and Nationality

Social Inferences, Cultural Differences, and Linguistic Misconceptions

Pietro Bortone

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350071650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What role does language play in the formation and perpetuation of our ideas about nationality and other social categories? And what role does it play in the formation and perpetuation of nations themselves, and of other human groups? Language and Nationality considers these questions and examines the consequences of the notion that a language and a nationality are intrinsically connected. Pietro Bortone illustrates how our use of language reveals more about us than we think, is constantly judged, and marks group insiders and group outsiders. Casting doubt on several assumptions common among academics and non-academics alike, he highlights how languages significantly differ among themselves in structure, vocabulary, and social use, in ways that are often untranslatable and can imply a particular culture. Nevertheless, he argues, this does not warrant the way language has been used for promoting a national outlook and for teaching us to identify with a nation. Above all, the common belief that languages indicate nationalities reflects our intellectual and political history, and has had a tremendous social cost. Bortone elucidates how the development of standardized national languages – while having merits – has fostered an unrealistic image of nations and has created new social inequalities. He also shows how it has obscured the history of many languages, artificially altered their fundamental features, and distorted the public understanding of what a language is.

1

Language labelling us explicitly

Is it true that the language you use, the way you use it, and the way you present yourself linguistically establish, even against your will, what your nationality or national identity is? And does it matter? In this chapter, we begin our journey towards addressing those questions by looking at what is perhaps the most explicit and obvious ‘identity’ label that language attaches onto us: our names. Names and surnames are relevant to those questions not just because they are words we use for telling others who we are, but because – while, at first blush, they seem accidental and often meaningless as words – they do say, even if perhaps unbeknownst to us or falsely, a lot about us.

Names

As the ancient classics proclaimed – before modern anthropologists confirmed it – names are virtually universal:

For indeed not one among humans is wholly nameless,

neither the vile or the noble, as soon as he is born;

but to all do parents assign [a name], when they beget [children]¹

(Homer, Od. 8.552–4)

A name is a term used to summon or mention someone. However, its perceived functions, and therefore its importance, do not end there. Giving a name to a baby socially individualizes it, and attributes to it the status of person. The concepts of ‘persons’ and of ‘names’ (in the plural) are sometimes conflated also lexically: ‘names’ is a word used to mean, generically, ‘persons, people’. In the New Testament, we see phrases like ‘seven thousand names died in the earthquake’, or ‘there was a throng of names’, meaning ‘there was a throng of people’ – a usage that reflects the wording in the original Greek.² Many anthropologists distinguish biological birth from ‘social birth’, because the latter, in many societies, takes place days or weeks after the former, when the baby is introduced to the community and receives a name. In a variety of cultures, the act of bestowing a name is accompanied by a ritual or some solemn ceremony. Among several populations, for example the Inuit of both north America and Greenland (Searles 2008: 242), assigning a name to a child is thought to be also how the child acquires a soul. For the Ainu too, the name is the person’s soul (Hoerr Charles 1951: 34–5). According to the Japanese, there exists a ‘word soul’ (

), and people are affected when their name is uttered. And in Jewish mysticism, the name of all individual beings is thought to contain their life force. Examples of such beliefs could easily be multiplied. More generally, names are widely believed not to be adventitious and arbitrary but to have an intimate connection with what they name. There is a mistaken but widespread idea, discussed already in Plato, that the names of all beings are inherent and in the nature of their referents.³

Ancient Greek philosophy appears not to have distinguished, initially, objects from words. In Biblical Hebrew too, the term davar (

) can mean – or, at any rate, is traditionally translated, in different parts of the Bible, as – ‘word’ or ‘thing’. Child psychologists, starting at least with Piaget ([1926] 1947: 48), have long noted that young children think that ‘the name is part of the essence of the thing’ and that ‘the essence of the thing is not a concept: it is the thing itself … not like a label glued to a thing, but its invisible character’.⁴ A name thus not only identifies but is identified with the individual that it names: the two are often conceptually conflated – a relationship of identity not just in the psychosociological but in the logical sense of the term. This is why, for instance, stating someone’s name is considered equivalent to stating simply who someone is, and those who go by a name unrelated to their natal name are seen by some as being untruthful. Our daily use of English makes it clear that names are not perceived as accidental, arbitrary tags, but as coinciding with the person: in English, you may describe safeguarding what others think of you as ‘defending your name’, and the word ‘name’ means ‘reputation’ in many languages. And this is not just a matter of how others see you: research has established that there is a correlation between liking one’s name and self-esteem (Joubert 1991: 822) or self-acceptance (Strunk 1958: 66).

One of the primary purposes of uttering a name is to attract that person’s attention or to prompt such person to come to us. As a result, according to many belief systems, pronouncing names can magically conjure up those named; uttering people’s name is thus a statement of familiarity with them, and even of control over them. For these reasons, there are prohibitions against uttering certain names, such as the secret names that many cultures assign to their members, and the name of deities. Religious Jews have ceased to utter the name of their God at least since the destruction of the Second Temple, and restrictions were in place already earlier. The taboo was not confined to the spoken word: the written use of God’s name also came to be avoided: Hebrew (like Greek, Armenian, and other languages) could use letters also as numerical signs, and the number 15 should ordinarily have been written in Hebrew as

(literally 10+5); but since that combination of numbers, if read as letters, is a name of God, an alternative, non-decimal, combination was resorted to (usually

, lit. 9+6). The name of the Devil is, likewise, unmentionable in many languages, because it is felt to constitute a summoning or a dangerous expression of intimacy, and is replaced by circumlocutions: in Romanian, nefârtatul ‘the enemy’; in Modern Greek, ο εξαποδώ ‘the [stay-]out-of-here’; in Serbian/Croatian, nečastivi ‘[the] dishonorable [one]’; and so on. In some languages, dreaded animals were, in a similar way, not named directly but called by some descriptive term. In Slavic languages, the bear is called ‘honey eater’, e.g. Russian медбедь, Czech medvěd, and in Finnish mesikämmen, lit. ‘honey palm’.

Does your name, apart from naming you, say something about you, true or false as that may be? Among philosophers of the modern era, a view frequently expressed about personal names is that, although names are individuative (they single out someone) and deictic (they point to such person), they are not descriptive (they add nothing about such person). The claim, in other words, is that names refer to someone but mean nothing. John Stuart Mill (1843: 40), for example, asserted that ‘Proper names are not connotative: they denote the individuals who are called by them; but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals’, and he concluded that ‘A proper name is but an unmeaning mark’ (ibid. 43). In the past, linguists of various language backgrounds echoed this idea (cf. e.g. Gombocz [1926] 1997: 156–7).⁵ A number of modern theoreticians have professed a similar belief: Bourdieu (1986: 70b) argued that a name cannot describe any properties and does not convey any information about what it names.⁶ Kripke too (1980: 26ff.), who has written extensively about naming, has broadly concurred, stressing that reference to someone (denotation) is not an abbreviation of meaning (connotation). The argument, in short, is that while a noun like dog applies to any entity whose nature and appearance satisfies certain set criteria, a name like Fido, applied to your own specific dog, picks out a referent without describing it. Similarly, the name ‘Albert Einstein’ (the famous physicist, not some homonymous other) merely denotes a specific individual. To us, it may also mean the author of the theory of relativity, and much besides; but that information is not contained in the name. The inventor of relativity, in different historical circumstances, could have been someone else, whereas the name ‘Einstein’ (for that physicist) would always have referred to that one person, unless he had never been born. Kripke has therefore described names as ‘rigid designators’ (ibid. 48–9), arguing that they would denote the same object in any possible state of the world. In this line of thinking, even a place name – say, Oxford – merely refers to a referent, points to a particular city, but asserts nothing about it: although the name Oxford has a literal etymological meaning (a ford for oxen), if I point out of my window and say ‘this is Oxford’, in the absence of a ford for oxen, my statement is still true.

Nonetheless, there is more to people’s names than this. A name, besides referring to somebody, has also the ability to present that person in a given light, and to suggest something about him or her. Borrowing a distinction made by Frege (1892: 25–6), we may say that a name can express meaning (Sinn) besides reference (Bedeutung). Frege used the term ‘name’ extremely broadly, applying it also to the nouns and even phrases that identify something descriptively, like ‘triangle’ or ‘my next-door neighbour’; it is therefore easy to see why he argued that ‘names’ present their referents to us in a way that contains ‘real knowledge’ and provides additional information about them.⁷ To apply this argument to personal names may seem a stretch, because any additional information that names may convey is not always clear or accurate. Yet names often do communicate more than reference. For a start, as in the case of the name Oxford cited above, a name may have an etymological meaning with descriptive value, and can adumbrate certain traits in other ways. Even the name Fido does so: it means ‘trusty’, and tells you that the referent is a dog. Similar, and indeed richer, observations can be made about the names of people.

In many languages, the etymological meaning of a person’s name is often immediately transparent, because that word may be still in use in its original function as noun, adjective, or verb. It is unlikely that the speakers of that language who choose such word as a name for their child do so regardless of its meaning. The choice of some names presupposes, at least originally, not only the ability to understand a language, but even literacy in that language: the Turkish female name Elif, for example, is the name of the Arabic and Ottoman letter ’alif, whose shape (

) is felt to suggest the image of someone tall, slightly curvy, light, elegant, and above all slender (those choosing that name for their baby daughter are presumably unaware that the original Semitic meaning of the letter’s name ’alif was ‘ox’).

Parents conclud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1 Language labelling us explicitly
• 2 Ways of speaking
• 3 Preference for the linguistically similar
• 4 Linguistic diversity
• 5 Culture hidden in the language
• 6 The effects of languages on cognition
• 7 Let there be a nation
• 8 Creating nations and languages
• 9 Consequences of national languages
• 10 More consequences of national languages
• 11 Language and nationality, a hasty equation
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint