Az alábbi videót két fajta nyelvtanulónak ajánlom nagyon: azoknak akik körmük tényleges szakadtáig ragaszkodnak a 'képzelt okszfordi sztenderd' kiejtéshez, valamint azoknak akik szerint a világ, és így a nyelv is egy merev konstrukció, mely szabályoknak, örökké álló, meg nem ingó, el nem hajló szabályoknak köszönhetik létüket. A videóban hallható Stephen Fry erősen bírálja a merev, nyelvi pedantériára vágyó hiperkorrektorokat.
Érdemes megfigyelni a beszédet, a hanglejtést, de legfőképpen azt, hogy mit tanítottak rosszul a gimiben / nyelviskolában / gyorstalpalóban. Nem mondom, hogy ez legyen a fő irány, vagy hogy olyan mélyen-edukált kiejtést erőltessen az egyszeri tanuló, mint Fry-é, de mindenképpen tanulságos a következő 6 perc. Aki pedig a 'kinetic typography' irányában érdeklődik inkább, nos, remélem megtalálja a számítását!
Az ínyencek kedvéért legépeltem a szöveget; nyelvgyakorlásnak sem utolsó ez a szösszenet! Íme:
Stephen Fry - Language
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY
For me it is a cause of some of upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious.
Sadly, desperately sadly the only people to seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I am on their side.
When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’ and all the rest of them, but none of these are of importance to me. None of these are of importance, I said there. You will notice there the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”.
Well I am glad to say I have outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the the injuction: “ I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches, etc.” which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don’t you think?
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphreys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their sharpies, and take away and add apostrophes from public signs; shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well, sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language? They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel club is the guardian of dog kind.
The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? Hm? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake, avoid Shakespeare: he made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got! He tabled the motion and chaired the meeting in which nouns were made verbs. I suppose new examples from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we’ve been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘actioning’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ winge the pedants, well it’s ‘ugly’ because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Elliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire. Pedants will also claim with what I’m sure is eye-popping insincerity and shameless disingenuousness, that their fight is only for ‘clarity’.
Oh, this is all very well, but there is no doubt what for example ‘Five items or less’ means, just as only a dolt can’t tell from the context and from the age and education of the speaker whether ‘disinterested’ is used in the proper sense of non-partisan or in the ‘improper’ sense of uninterested. No. No, they claim to be defending the language for the sake of clarity almost never ever holds water.
Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind. Having said this, I admit, that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview than it’s obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup.
I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview, and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances. It’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There is no ‘right’ language or ‘wrong’ language anymore than there are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.
Nincsenek megjegyzések:
Megjegyzés küldése