Prof. Michael Silverstein
Dept. of Anthropology
Haskell 119
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL 60637
Dear Michael Silverstein,
I am writing to you to raise an issue about a claim you made that
I think cannot be substantiated.
[source: Silverstein 1985] Reported in Schieffelin, Woolard and
Kroskrity p. 12, where (as Woolard puts it)
"In the 17th century, Quakers
insisted on use of 'thou' forms for all second-person singular address,
rationalizing this usage according to the emerging linguistic ideology of the
time as more truthful because faithful to numerical realities of the objective
world. This practice, soon secondarily ideologized by the larger society as an
index of stigmatized Quaker identity, set off a backlash movement away from any
productive uses of 'thou' by that larger community. A shift to 'you' was
completed by 1700 (Silverstein 1985:246)."
I have two problems with this claim, one of them factual, the
other interpretive.
1. The factual:
When I first read this claim, I remembered having once used in an
elementary linguistics course [to illustrate historical change] some examples
of T/V pronoun usage in Shakespeare that I had come across somewhere, which
showed that in Shakespeare's plays and other writings, the T/V distinction was
declining, and that perusal of his works by date, from earliest to latest,
would show a marked change. I was
unable to remember where I got this data, so I consulted some people who know
the facts of English historical change better than I.
The first person I consulted (I looked at a database that has
gross frequency word counts) did a quick-and-dirty word count of T/V usage from
earliest Shakespeare to latest.
Shakespeare began publishing in (and his earliest
works date from)
1586 or so, and he died in 1617. Of course a gross word frequency count would
ignore all kinds of different social issues, such as who was speaking to whom,
the setting of the play, etc. etc., all the issues of 'power and solidarity' of a ‘Brown and Gilman’ type analysis.
(For example In the King Henry plays, whose settings are much earlier
than Shakespeare's time, there is more T usage than in some of the
others.) I was unhappy with the gross
word count, but I did set up a chart with the frequencies, which I attach
below. As you can see, in the latest
plays/works, V usage is much higher than T usage.
The second thing that bothered me about the Quaker
"causal" link in all of this is that George Fox was not born until a
decade after Shakespeare's death, and did not begin preaching and challenging
authority until about the mid 1650's.
It did not seem to make sense to me that Quaker usage on this T/V issue
could be causal, if even in Shakespeare's time, 50 years earlier, T usage was
declining. Secondly, from my own
knowledge of Quakerism (I joined the
Society of Friends in 1962) I knew that even at their highest influence in
England, their numbers never exceeded a few 10's of thousands, so it did not
make sense to me that such a small number of people, living mainly in the rural
north of England, could have such a cataclysmic effect on pronoun usage of the
whole speech community.
Because the gross data for T/V usage in the Shakespeare corpus is
not differentiated sociolinguistically, we do not know the social status
of various characters, nor which pronoun would be appropriate
sociolinguistically in a particular setting. Also, in the sonnets [at the end
of the table] there is more T usage because of the genre: ‘How do I love thee; let me count the ways’ etc.) I therefore decided to check
further on what is known about the historical data by linguists who study
English history. I consulted a listserv (HISTLING@VM.SC.EDU) of historical
linguists, and posed this question, stating that I thought that T/V usage was
already changing in Shakespeare's time, and asking for data. The responses I
got back were overwhelmingly against the idea that the change could have been
"caused" or set in motion by Quakers. (I list these, most of them as
raw email messages, at the end of this document.)
Respondents reported the
following:
1.
T/V usage began to change in middle English, as
part of a change
involving the lost of the dual. By
1550, it was in full swing. By the end
of Shakespeare's time, it was almost complete, except for relic areas such as
in the north of England, in rural areas, etc.
(Even today, in the rural north, there is some T/V usage; one respondent
gave me an example of having been addressed by a 40-year old woman as
follows: "Fook thee, tha daft
booger!")
2.
The idea that Quakers were responsible for this shift was, as one source
put it, a kind of "urban legend" or at least a kind of folk
linguistic analysis, such as the idea that Castillian has a contrast between
"caza" and "casa"
because a famous Spanish king lisped, and people imitated his lisp to
make him comfortable. (Also Eskimo
words for snow etc.)
3. Various people listed sources on this,
either things they have written,
or other well-accepted sources on the
history of this phenomenon. I provide a list below, and a bibliography at the
end.
2. Quaker Motivation for Retaining
T.
My second problem with
your claim has to do with what "motivation" Quakers had for avoiding
V as a singular. Woolard characterizes
this as wanting to be faithful to numerical realities of the objective
world. I would say that Quaker theology
on this is rather as follows: Quakers
were at odds with secular/temporal authorities on a number of issues, and
during their organizational period, while structuring their emergent Society in
various ways, developed, instead of a written creed on various issues, a number
of "Testimonies" that encapsulated their stance toward the temporal
world. These testimonies (one on Peace,
one on Simplicity, and some others) were challenges to both the secular world
and to members of the Society of Friends.
Nobody was required to believe them or accept them, but members were
challenged ("queried" is the Quaker term) to examine their
consciences to see if a commitment to peace and to simple living would not be
more in keeping with what God wanted them to do. The Testimony on Simplicity included a commitment to "plain
speech" i.e. avoidance of titles, flowery language, flattery (especially
of people in higher positions of authority) and, because there is "that of
God in all people" and all people were equal
before god, this involved a commitment to avoid flattery and lack of truth in pronominal
usage. The idea or principle (not, I would argue ideology) behind this was that flattery, flowery language, etc.
were ‘deceptive’ practices and not appropriate for people who were trying to
discern what God’s will was for them.
In other words, failure to live simply led to avarice,
covetousness, conflict, and eventually war.
Failure to treat all of God's creatures as equal, whether women and men,
blacks and whites, was contrary to God's will and would lead to conflict and
war. Removing these wrongful desires
would put people right with God and usher in a "peaceable kingdom" on
earth, which is what God wanted, and this is what Wm. Penn and others had in
mind when they founded Pennsylvania. And while it is true that George Fox and
others used the argument of ‘reality’ to justify their usage in situations
involving non-Quakers, their argument against the ‘wrong’ use of V was a
theological one, not one based on the simple ability to count.
Lest I make the mistake of interpreting Woolard’s restatement of
your position as if it was what you said, let me address your summarization of
your position (as I take it to be ) on pg. 251;
To
recapitulate, a particular formal indexical distinction gets incorporated into
English through borrowing [from French?], skewing usage of formal referential
categories organized according to universal and particular structural
constraints. In time, this usage is
strengthened by an emerging ideology of formal, standard language as an
instrument of public authority. Against this, an ideology of equality and
private revelation takes up the question of this indexical distinction, finding
in it the very antithesis of a (differential) truth-in-category doctrine of the
representational value of language—to which assertedly more fundamental view of
language characteristically starts with the structure of unmarked categories of
reference, literalizing indexicals as metaphors of such referential categories,
and rationalizes usage in terms of the metaphor as analyzed. In this particular
case, the nature of the now highly ideologized usage is such that the system of
referential categories itself, as a structural norm, is changed decisively in a
direction away from the innovative ideological view.
If I am not lost at this point, I take it that the ‘innovative
ideological view’ is the borrowed one that uses V for singular honorific, while
the Quaker usage is attempting to resist this innovation by retaining the older
system, which is taken to be truer to God’s word and God’s will. In other words, they are resisting an
ideologized view with what they take to be a ‘real’ and observationally
adequate one. (They are probably also resisting the imposition of a system that
originates in another regional subculture—southern England—and which is much
more hierarchical in terms of class distinctions than they, mostly of the
working classes, were comfortable with.)
I suppose this can be called an "ideology" along with
all the others delineated in the various writings on the subject, but whatever
we call it, it was a deeply felt, spiritually-led belief in the equality of all
human beings. Quaker beliefs and testimony arise out of worship, when the Holy
Spirit moves someone to speak on an issue; eventually, if enough members
support a given idea and it is brought forward in Meeting for Worship for
Business, the notion (equality, peace, simplicity) can become part of Quaker
"doctrine" as a Testimony or Query.
But I am personally reluctant to call this an "ideology"
because of the over-use of the term which seems to equate all ideologies as
somehow hopelessly blindered, and because it fails to distinguish qualitatively
how Quakerism might be different from rather more despicable ideologies such as
various kinds of fascism. (I do wish there were a way to distinguish between
these things; I can imagine situations in anthropological field-work where researchers
might get into serious trouble with the linguistic communities they work with
by characterizing their belief systems, or how they encapsulate the 'realities'
of the world in their pronominal systems, as mere ideology.) Thus, if a language has a dual as well as a
singular and plural, or retains it while other languages are losing it, is this
ideological? What if it has a distinction (as Dravidian languages do) between
inclusive and exclusive? When Tamils speak (as they almost always do) of their language
and use the inclusive pronoun (namma moRi 'our (incl.) language') I
personally feel a little funny (because it's not my language) but I realize they do this for pragmatic reasons, and
because in fact, most people who can understand the phrase will in fact be
mother-tongue speakers of Tamil. But is
it ideological?
a. The problem of
reductionism .
To me the tendency among linguistic anthropologists to apply the
label of ideology to every idea, belief, attitude, principle, myth, or
whatever, that has to do with ways people(s) think about language is reductionist. Everything has one explanation, and it’s ideology. I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that
in another important theory in
linguistics, the transformational theory developed by Chomsky, things reached a
point where practitioners and analysts of language were proposing, for every
problem they could not explain, a transformational rule of some sort. Eventually, a number of researchers, Chomsky
included, realized there were methodological problems with this. For one thing, they found the increasing
proliferation of transformational rules simply too complex for humans,
especially young ones just mastering their mother tongues, to learn. Language, they decided, simply could not be
that complex.
Furthermore, the immensely complex rule systems being proposed
seemed to lead to the positing of underlying grammars (deep structures,
whatever) that differed very significantly from each other, such that instead
of languages being more similar at their basic cores, which is what we would
expect on universal grounds, they were immensely different. This did not seem to make sense to people
looking for universality in language.
Thirdly, and I believe most importantly, the ability to propose a
new transformational rule, and to propose increasingly abstract underlying
systems could not be constrained methodologically, and no evaluation metrics
could be proposed to determine whether this or that rule was actually
necessary. The theory, in other words,
was too powerful, and itself needed
to be constrained. There needed to be metrics by which decisions could be made
as to whether a given grammar was a good one, or an optimal one, or one that
made sense on universal grounds, rather than one that had been fudged by simply
adding rule complexity to take care of problems that could not otherwise be
predicted.
It is this problem that I believe ideology studies is now
confronted with—-it is an unconstrained
theory, one that does not contain metrics by which it can be judged whether
something is or is not an ideology.
(Or, metrics by which the appropriateness of attribution of ideology
have not been developed.) The result
is that anything—a pronominal system, an aspectual system, a gender system, can
be seen as riddled with or motivated by ideology. I believe that this notion is a very bad one. The notion that
grammars are embodiments of ideological constructs, or that grammatical
categories have arisen (or been leveled) by ideological pressures is an
unworkable analytical stance, again, because there is no way to constrain this
analytic stance: if Quakers retained T
because of ideology, and others innovated V to distance themselves from Quaker
usage, what motivated the loss of the English dual? What grammatical categories, if any, are not subject to ideological pressure? Which categories are, and
why? Another area of linguistic theory
I am interested in is that of grammaticalization, which I have been led to because of
questions of how a diglossic language like Tamil has changed, and how the
system differs grammatically from earlier codified literary versions. There are
clearly issues of what the literature on this topic calls ‘speaker-centered’
motivations in the evolution of new grammatical morphemes in any language, but
I see no room in this theory for ideological penetration of the sort proposed
here. A category like the dual may be
eliminated in the evolution of a
language, or another grammatical marker, such as plurals for ‘you’ that exist
in colloquial English such as you-all, y’all, you folks, you guys, you lot,
etc. the evolution of which I believe is motivated by a desire to clearly mark
the plural, now that you is ambiguous for singularity/plurality. But is
this attempt motivated by ideology?
Most people who write about grammaticalization attribute this to speaker
motivations to be clear and unambiguous, since you currently isn’t. Is this ideology, or is it an example of a
Gricean maxim (‘be clear’)? Or are Gricean maxims automatically ideological?
b.
Verifiability and
Falsifiability
Another way of stating this methodological issue is to point out
that the theory allows no metric for verifiability and conversely, the falsifiability
of a theoretical insight and/or analysis.
That is, if there are no constraints on a theory, then there can be no
way to verify if results obtained or claimed by another researcher are correct,
and conversely, no way to falsify the claims.
Anything anyone claims, then, is just as ‘true’ as anything anyone else
claims, even if the results are contradictory. Again, this is a serious defect
in any theory; but it clearly is responsible for the full-tilt everything
can be explained by ideology emphasis one hears at almost every
linguistic-anthropology panel at AAA meetings, and anywhere else linguistic
anthropologists gather. There is simply
no way to challenge any claim that anyone makes. In this sense, the theory is
both too strong, and too weak, because it lacks an evaluation metric that
reduces it to being all things to all people.
c. Lack of a
Discovery-Procedure.
A couple of years ago we met during your visit to Penn, and you
mentioned that you were considering the use of my book on language policy for a
course at Chicago, so you cannot fail to be aware that I have not been a
participant in the discourse of language ideologies, and that I am therefore
something of an embarrassment to the linguistic-anthropology community because
I do not refer to the term ”ideology" in every other sentence of my
writings. To me this problem--the failure to distinguish between various types
of (what I call) linguistic-cultural constructs, such as myth, religious
belief, prejudice, origin stories, attitudes, full-blown ideologies like Nazism
and Marxism, and plain old simple ideas, principles, precepts, and/or notions,
is methodologically unsound, and in fact distasteful. In particular, I find it methodologically problematical that
there is no "discovery procedure," as it were, no metric by which we
can decide whether an ideology is in the background or not, or if there is,
what are its features: what is it made up of, how is it expressed, what other
kinds of ideas and notions (racist, sexist, classist, whatever) are woven in
with it? Without this, every researcher can find ideologies lurking in every
culture, and no one is safe from the accusation that their thought process is
riddled with ideology. I always thought
linguistics was concerned with being able to distinguish different kinds of
analytic constructs, but I fail to see this happening in ideology studies. (Perhaps I am missing something, so I look
forward to being straightened out.)
d. Reification of
the notion of
‘Ideology’.
Another reason I find the focus on ideology to be methodologically
unsound is that there is a tendency to reify the ideology into a sort of givens: a
fixed, inescapable, set-in-stone program,
rather than a more dynamic discourse around the topic in question. For example, in my own work on Tamil ideas
about linguistic purism (the tani tamiR iyakkam or 'Pure Tamil Movement’) I
have tried to distinguish between various strands that made up this movement,
and the ways they differed. Treating
this as a discourse rather than an ideology (it was never unified, people never
spoke with one voice) shows the dynamic give-and-take involved, how it changed
over time, rather than the rigid ideological stance that seems to be the only
conclusion one can draw about ideologies, i.e., that Tamils have an ideology
about language. In my view, they have
lots of ideas about language, but they do not constitute a coherent ideology,
as I tried to show in my Tamilnadu chapter in that book. In fact, at various stages of the Tamil
language movement(s), they were sometimes at odds with one another, and at
other times in agreement. But an ideology it was not.
Again, in most of the work I read on the subject, the ideology
(always in the singular) seems to be portrayed as a rigid, unified, invariant
norm, rather than a more flexible or fluid system, made up of different kinds
of ideas, beliefs, attitudes, etc.
Naturally one cannot blame the mistakes of the disciples on the
master, but you cannot fail to be aware that it has become a commonplace to use
"ideology" as a kind of whipping boy and/or bludgeon. At the AAA meetings now almost every
linguistic anthropology panel, and some others as well, are long litanies of
'ideological' this and 'ideological' that. One only need mention the I word and
the analysis is apparently done; the masses have been enlightened, and the
researcher can sleep well at night, knowing that s/he has taken a step toward
clearing up the murky thinking of lesser mortals. (This is at least the ethos
that I observe at such panels---the speakers fail to find the demosthenic
ideology-free space that they can stand on to make objective claims about other
people's ideologies, or fail to even recognize that they themselves are
speaking 'ideologically' as well.)
In any event, I think that your claim that Quakers are responsible
for a linguistic change, and that therefore an ideology can lead to linguistic
change, cannot be substantiated in this case. If there are other cases where
this might be possible, we need to examine them carefully. (I'm thinking of what we went through in the
last few decades when some groups, e.g. feminists, tried to change pronominal
usage in English to eliminate sexism. I
think what happened [at least among academics] was 'avoidance', e.g. of 'he' as
the generic third-person pronoun, but attempts to introduce new forms, such as
'ter' (Kate Millett?) did not succeed.
So instead we now get 'they', as in "Everybody should bring their
own lunch.")
In closing, let me reassure you that my point in writing this is
not to be confrontational , or to complicate your life, but simply to sort out
issues that are of concern to me and are problematical, at least in my
estimation, for the way the study of linguistic anthropology is currently
proceeding.
Sincerely,
Harold F. Schiffman
Bibliography:
1.
Hope, Jonathan 'Second person singular pronouns in records of early modern
'spoken' English', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, xciv, 1993, pp 83-100
2.
Williams, Joseph M. " 'O! When
Degree is Shak'd' Sixteenth-Century anticipations of Some Modern Attitudes
Toward Usage" p.69-101 In English in its Social Contexts: Essays in
Historical Socio-Linguistics.
edited by Tim William Machan and Charles T. Scott Oxford U Press, 1992
3. Bauman, Richard. "Christ respects no
man's person: the plain language of the early Quakers and the rhetoric of impoliteness." Austin, Texas: Southwest
Educational
Development Laboratory, 1981. [Working papers in sociolinguistics, no.
88]
4. _________________Let your words be few:
symbolism of speaking and silence among seventeenth century Quakers. New York:
Cambridge University Press,
1983.
[Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, no. 8]
5.
. Pyles/Algeo (Origins and Development
of the English Language 190-91)
6.
Baugh/Cable (History of the English Language 237)
7.
Lass, Roger. The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. III,
1476-1776 (CUP, 2000).
8.
Busse, Ulrich, 'Markedness and the use of address pronouns in Early Modern
English', to appear in Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress
Anderson, X (ed.) (published by Benjamins, Amsterdam.
9.
Wales, Katie. (1996) Personal pronouns in present-day English.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 xvii, 234p;
10.
Adamson, Sylvia 'From empathetic deixis to empathetic narrative' in TPhS 92.1:55-88 (1994), reprinted in 1995 in Subjectivity
and Subjectivisation ed. Stein & Wright, CUP.