Pro patria or pro-patois
First, and most importantly, a Greek-speaking friend shared with me after last week’s discussion of “metaphor” that Greek moving vans say metaphores on them, because they’re transferring stuff from one place to another, which is so great.
A moving van labeled “metaphor” in Greek
PATOIS, n. There’s a saying in linguistics that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” which Wikipedia tells me was popularized by Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich (of course it would be a Yiddish scholar!).
We could replace “dialect” with “patois,” a term with the same blurry boundaries: some kind of non-standard speech, perhaps a particular vocabulary or accent, perhaps a whole language. But that’s the thing about languages: they impose themselves with militaries or state regulations. A patois—to me, the term feels more belittling in French than in English—can never hope to achieve the same. Patois indicates a regional variation. In English, it often refers to Jamaican Patois, a language that linguists call Jamaican Creole, but it can refer to other speech, too. In French, it particularly connotes regional speech in the South of France, or perhaps in Switzerland or the Aosta Valley.
This week I was listening to an episode of the podcast La Marche de l’histoire about Swiss French patois, and was equal parts delighted and horrified when they explained the etymology of “patois.” As a non-native French speaker, it had not occurred to me that “patois” is linked to “patte” (paw). There is an Old French verb patoier that means something like “to handle roughly, to paw at” and also “to gesticulate.” In the podcast, they offered some folk etymologies in explanation: either there is an association with people from rural areas (Provence, Val d’Aoste, etc) gesticulating a lot while they speak, or, more pejoratively, the idea is that in conversation with a patois-speaker, it’s necessary to communicate with gestures because the words are incomprehensible.
That’s rude, obviously. Worse, these prejudices—that regional languages are unclear, unsophisticated—were marshaled by the Abbé Grégoire during the French Revolution into a national effort to stamp out linguistic variation in favor of making everyone speak “standard” (Parisian) French. This would make everyone feel more like citizens of the nation of France, he reasoned. The text he wrote has “anéantir les patois” (annihilate patois) in the title. When you’re using words like “annihilate” in the reports you’re presenting to your legislature, it’s time to ask “Are We the Baddies?”
Jokes aside, the French Revolution wasn’t bad—this is a subject for another newsletter, or every single future newsletter until I die, and we still won’t have worked it out—but this newsletter is less pro patria and more pro-patois.
In the case of France, the main instrument of annihilating les patois was public education. I think of public schools as a social good, but their history is, as always and everywhere, fraught. Efforts to standardize and universalize French long outlasted the Revolution and were largely successful. Regional languages still exist in France, but they’re far rarer than they were.
Public education is one method of curtailing minority languages, and the others are the aforementioned armies and navies. Most standard, official languages are the result of some form of violence, whether it’s soldiers or residential schools. Once these standards exist, we use them to inflict social violence on each other. We mock the accent, the intonation, the vocabulary, the grammar, the spelling, and the punctuation of anyone unlike us, whether it’s race, class, sex, ability, nationality, or some other quality.
But—but—ugh, fine—standards are useful. Things are clearer when we all approach speaking and writing with the same set of rules. When you learn a foreign language, you want to know how to communicate in a way that will make sense to most people. For that and many other reasons, it’s helpful to be able to point to one set of rules and say, there, that one’s the official standard.
As handy as standards can be, we have to remember that they’re artificial. They result from choices made by human beings—motivated by one ideology or another, backed by governments and militaries—and those choices have costs. One cost is that far fewer people speak patois these days, and we’ll never know what songs and stories and family histories we’ve lost because of that.
This week in Capital-R Romance, I’m still reading Les Mis. Ironically, after writing the paragraphs above about how linguistic diversity is to be celebrated and accents are beautiful—I really do believe this, I swear, but it’s Descriptivist Confessional Hour now—I ran into a stretch of chapters in my Les Mis audiobook narrated by a volunteer reader whose accent I cannot handle. She’s clearly an anglophone, probably American, and I can never focus on the content of what she’s saying because she sounds too much like me. So I revise my statement: everybody’s accent is beautiful except for mine.
Anyway, despite my mean-hearted judgment leading me to distraction, I made it to IV, 6, ii (63% finished). After many, many chapters of longing stares, Marius and Cosette have finally spoken to each other. “My name is Marius.” Momentous! So obviously, Victor Hugo ended the chapter right there and switched to talking about something else. I have never been edged this hard in my life.
TOO LONG; DID READ
This week in small-r romance, I read a lot. Here it is in list form:
KJ Charles, Jackdaw (m/m, historical, fantasy) A novella set in the Charm of Magpies world, this was one of my last remaining unread KJ Charles books, and I loved it. Jonah and Ben are fugitives from the magical justice system for crimes they committed under coercion, so they hide out in a tiny village in Cornwall and accidentally become beloved members of their community. It’s perfect because it’s KJ Charles. And for KJ Charles, this one is surprisingly free of murder and actually quite cozy!
KJ Charles, Rag and Bone (m/m, historical, fantasy) A novella set in the Charm of Magpies world, this was my last remaining unread KJ Charles, at least as far as my library’s collection goes. It takes place after the short story “A Queer Trade,” and it follows Crispin, ex-warlock, as he tries to find a way to use his powers for good instead of evil, and Ned, a normal person who makes a living selling used paper, as he tries to figure out how he can fit into Crispin’s strange and dangerous life. They solve some ritual murders together. As I’ve said before and hope to say many more times, it’s perfect because it’s KJ Charles. I cherish her work, since she’s writing at the intersection of fantasy, historical romance, and queer love stories, which is where I want to live.
Sierra Simone, A Lesson in Thorns (f/m/m + m/f + m/m + f/f, erotica, fantasy) Technically this isn’t a romance novel because its central emotional conflict is not happily resolved by the end, but it is about being in love with two of your very dear childhood friends, or possibly five of your childhood friends, and also the eerie ancient manor home where the six of you first spent the summer together. Rare books, dreams, pagan rituals, and a whole lot of sex. I came around on some of this book’s playful literary allusions (the protagonist’s name is Proserpina because she’s a summer girl who goes to spend the winter at this weird old haunted house, and also she’s separated from her mother, okay fine, I accept; her nickname is “Poe” because it goes with the general gothic vibe, fine fine sure whatever) but not others (what on Earth does W.H. Auden have to do with this eerie mystico-religious sex magic shit?). Anyway, references aside, this book really captures the dark, wintery, strangely out-of-time atmosphere of the house, and it’s extremely (t)horny, which takes incredible skill to write well.
Alyssa Cole, A Hope Divided, (m/f, historical) A fantastic, emotional romance set in the US Civil War, gorgeously written as usual. The two characters are trapped in an attic together for days and they fall in love through jointly translating a diary from French into English, which is a delicious premise. As always, Cole evokes her setting—the plantations and forests of the American South, the brutality of the war and of everyday racism—with such mastery.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance nor even books, this week I finished playing a translation video game called Heaven’s Vault. I don’t like or understand games, usually. I don’t care about puzzles that aren’t related to translation, and if games tell stories, well, I’d rather read a book. Then I know I can follow a single narrative through to the end. When I ran across that “Choose Your Own Adventure” twitter thread about being Beyoncé’s assistant, I had to click on all the options, because otherwise how would I know the ending(s)?
Being Beyoncé’s assistant for the day: DONT GET FIRED THREAD
June 23rd 2019
97,838 Retweets255,945 Likes
So anyway, I wasn’t going to play Heaven’s Vault by myself, but Joe offered to play it with me and take charge of all the boring parts (exploring, flying the space ship, talking to other characters, finding ancient artifacts and texts) so we could decipher the glyphs together.
I had some initial difficulties with this game’s treatment of language. “That’s not how Linear B was deciphered,” I complained, more than once, because I’m the worst. “This isn’t how you’d really approach an unknown language.” Granted, the decipherment of Linear B took three different people years and years and it involved Alice Kober handwriting an analog database made of 180,000 index cards. Deciphering the script in Heaven’s Vault offers considerably more instant gratification, and that eventually won me over.
If you don’t like video games and don’t have a spouse who’s happy to do all the actual gameplay nonsense for you, Margalit Fox’s The Riddle of the Labyrinth is non-fiction about Linear B, Europe’s oldest script, and how it was deciphered, and it’s great. It’s a rare moment of lost language retrieved. History doesn’t have many of those—people go to school to learn their nation’s new official language, or they get conquered, or they die out and their writings get buried for thousands of years, and whatever they might have had to say, it’s gone.
So much of history is forgotten or silenced, beyond our reach forever, that when we find artifacts like the Linear B tablets and manage to decode them, it feels like a miracle. This sense of connection to the past—an understanding of how those people were both like and unlike us—is something I cherish, and I get a similar feeling from learning about linguistic diversity, past or present. “They, too, made tax records” and “they, too, inflect their verb endings” might seem like weird things to get emotional about, but feelings are slippery things, hard to explain in any language.
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
