If we look at the languages spoken in the world today, we notice wide differences in the use to which they are put. Most languages are the first language of some community and serve the everyday functions of that community perfectly well. On the other hand, some languages have wider functions than that of everyday communication and are used as official languages in the administration of whole nations. Yet other languages enjoy an international role. English, for instance, is the language of international air traffic, business communication, and scientific publication, and is the lingua franca of tourism. Unfortunately, the differences in the roles that languages play frequently lead some people to believe that some languages which do not fulfill a wide range of functions are in fact incapable of doing so. In the view of some people, some languages are just not good enough.
This sort of opinion is often seen in societies where a minority language is spoken alongside a major language. Consider the situation of Maori, the indigenous language of New Zealand. Linguists estimate that English is the native language of some 95 percent of the New Zealand population and the only language of about 90 percent. People who identify themselves as Maori make up about 12 percent of the New Zealand population of just over 3 million. Although the Maori language is regarded as an important part of identity as a Maori, it is spoken fluently by only 30,000 people.
Over the last twenty years, there have been a number of initiatives in the areas of politics, education and broadcasting to try to use Maori and, as a result, it is now an official language of New Zealand. As these initiatives have progressed, however, some people have begun to express the view that Maori is simply not capable of being used as an official language. This kind of opinion, in fact, is not based on logic. I recall a comment in a New Zealand newspaper, which tried to make the point that Maori was no good as a language because it had to borrow words from English in order to express new ideas. English, on the other hand, was a very flexible and vital language because it had throughout its history been able to draw resources from many other languages to express new ideas.
Now let’s look at the ways in which languages are supposed to be inadequate. In some instances, it is features of the structure of a language which are picked on as the reason why another language is to be preferred for a particular function. In Switzerland, some people speak Romansh, a language descended from Latin, although German has been making inroads for centuries. As with Maori, there has been a push in recent decades to increase the areas of life and activity in which Romansh is used. Now, German is a language which can very easily combine words into ‘compounds’. Romansh is a language which cannot do this so readily and instead uses phrases as a way of combining ideas. Some speakers of Romansh believe that Romansh is not good enough to be used in really technical areas of life because ‘German is able to construct clearly defined single words for technical ideas, Romansh is not’. This notion ignores the fact that other languages such as French and Italian are in exactly the same boat as Romansh, yet obviously have no problem in being precise in technical areas.
Another reason given for the view that a language is not good enough is rather more serious; it is the argument that ‘X is not good enough because you can’t discuss nuclear physics in it.’ The implication is that English is a better language than X because there are topics you can discuss in one but not in the other. At first glance this seems a very telling argument.
However, this view confuses a feature of languages which is due just to their history with an inherent property of languages. That is, this opinion concludes that because there has been no occasion or need to discuss, for arguments sake, nuclear physics in Maori; it could never be done because of some inherent fault in Maori. A little thought, however, will show that this argument cannot be maintained. Computers were not discussed in Old English; Modern English is the same language as Old English, only later; it should follow that Modern English cannot be used to discuss computers. This is clearly absurd. What of course has happened is that through time English has developed the resources necessary to the discussion of computers and very many other topics which were simply unknown in earlier times. And ‘developed’ is the crucial word in this matter. English expanded its vocabulary in a variety of ways so as to meet the new demands being made of it. All languages are capable of the same types of expansion of vocabulary to deal with whatever new areas of life their speakers need to talk about.
If one looks at the words which are used in English to handle technical subjects, one sees that in fact the vast majority of these words have actually come from other languages. This process is usually called ‘borrowing’, though there is no thought that the words will be given back somehow! All languages do this to some extent, though English is perhaps the language which has the highest level of ‘borrowed’ vocabulary, at least among the world’s major languages.
However, this is by no means the only way in which a language can develop its vocabulary; there are many cases where the vocabulary of a language is developed from within, that is, by using its own existing resources. One of the reasons why a languages own resources may be used in the expansion of its vocabulary is that a writer wants his/her work to be readily understood by its intended audience, who might be put off by too much borrowing. This is what Cicero* did. In order to write in Latin about the ideas of Greek philosophy, he developed a Latin vocabulary which corresponded to the ideas he wanted to put across. An example of this was his use of the Latin word ratio to mean ‘reason’, a usage which has come down to us today in English. He also invented new words made up of Latin elements: for instance, the word qualitas, which became ‘quality’ in English, was coined by Cicero to correspond to a Greek idea. Thus, he composed his philosophical works in Latin partly to make Greek philosophy available to a Latin-speaking audience, but also partly to show that it could be done. This was because some of his contemporaries were skeptical about the possibility of Latin being able to express the ideas of the Greeks!
Minority languages, like Maori and Romansh, are today doing very much the same thing as Cicero did for Latin, constructing vocabulary out of existing resources within the languages, precisely so that they can be used to talk about areas like computers, law, science, and so on, for which they have not been used so much in the past. These two languages are unlikely ever to become international languages of science or diplomacy, but if history had been different, they could have, and then we might have been wondering whether perhaps English was ‘just not good enough’.
Cicero: a Roman orator, politician and philosopher of the first century BC
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