Anatomy of Lingo

Manhattan Publisher William Warder Norton rarely wears a hat, rarely publishes fiction. He wants books which will win scholarly praise. In Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million he had a best-seller (200,000 copies) which won the praise of such mathematicians as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell. Last fortnight he published a Hogben-edited book which is equally scholarly and fit for laymen. It seeks to explain the evolution, anatomy, functioning, diseases and future of language.

The Loom of Language (W. W. Norton; $3.75) contains 692 pages of Swiss Philologist Frederick Bodmer's solid lore about meaningful human noise, enlivened by bright pictures and the "irresponsible or facetious remarks" of Editor Hogben, a former colleague of Bodmer at the University of Cape Town. The Loom is lively, but no cinch to read. Hogben recommends an old-fashioned as a preliminary.

Interglossa. A chapter on the evolution of the alphabet opens the book; a section on the need for an international auxiliary language closes it. Author Bodmer reviews the efforts to create such an auxiliary, beginning in 1661, when Aberdeen's George Dalgarno invented his Universal Character and Philosophical Language. He comes down to Basic English and its current competitors (Iret, Swensen, Aiken), in all of which Bodmer sees virtues. But he does not share Winston Churchill's complete enthusiasm for Basic. He favors a synthetic interlanguage rather than a simplified ethnic one. He and Hogben have drafted one which might be called Hogbod: Hogben calls it Interglossa and recently published a Penguin paperbook about it in England.* It has about 3,000 words, largely of Latin and Greek roots, and a simple syntax on the Chinese style. Intelligent high-school graduates, says Bodmer, might learn to write and speak it in far less time than is required to master English, French or German.

But The Loom's great interest for most readers lies not in its highly colored plans or prophecies, but in its homely texture of facts about language. Samples:

P: "... old-fashioned pedagogues objected to that's me or it's him, because grammarians said that the pronoun after am or is also stands for the subject itself. They overlooked the fact that the authorized version of the Bible (Matthew 16:13) contains the question: 'Whom say ye that I am?' "

P: "Some pedants who have forgotten their Bible lessons in Sunday school object to night starvation, iceman, sex appeal . . . without realizing that they follow such impressive leadership as the Knight Templar, Gladstone bag . . . Lady Mother. ... What is specially characteristic of Anglo-American is the large and growing group of words which can be verbs, nouns or adjectives. . . ." Water is a good example.

P: "Anglo-American has its own peculiar roundabout method of interrogation. We no longer say: sayest thou? The modern form of the question is: do you say? . . . In a few years no one will object to did he ought? . . ."

P: "The vagaries of German word order are not a sufficient reason for the vast gulf between the language which Germans use in the home and the jargon which German scholars write. Accepted standards of such scholarly composition are also the product of a social tradition hostile to the democratic way of life. Intellectual arrogance necessarily fosters long-winded exposition. . . ."*

P: "Those who have been brought up to speak the Anglo-American language have one great linguistic advantage. Their word equipment makes it equally easy for them to take up the study of any Teutonic or any Romance language with a background of familiar associations, because modern English is a hybrid language."

P: "It is a commonplace that Russian collectivism originated in a country which was in a backward phase of technical and political evolution. It is also, and conspicuously, true that it originated in a country which was in a backward phase of linguistic evolution. . . . There is no royal road to fluency in a language which shares the grammatical intricacies of Sanskrit, Lithuanian, or Russian. It is therefore impossible to give the reader who wishes to learn Russian any good advice except to take the precaution of being born and brought up in Russia. . . . Shortcomings of the Russian language . . . signify . . . the existence of a powerful social obstacle to cultural relations between the Soviet Union and other countries. . . ."

The Author. Frederick Bodmer is a 50-year-old Zurich University Ph.D. He was once a London correspondent for Swiss newspapers, then spent eleven years on Cape Town University's faculty. Communication troubles between South Africa's speakers of English and Afrikaans led him to think about an interlanguage. Later he and Hogben did some motorized pub-crawling from Aberdeen to London and back, planned The Loom between drinks. Bodmer wrote the book in Hogben's Highland croft, is now working on another book in London's intellectual Bloomsbury.

*First clause of the Atlantic Charter in Interglossa: U President de United States syn duco Commissari-pe, Mr. Churchill, ge electio e regi Crati de United Kingdom, pre acte unio. In English: "The President of the United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill representing H.M. Government in the United Kingdom, being met together. . . ." *A Loom example of German word order: "These by Th. Noeldeke, History of the Koran, Goettingen, 1860, for the first time put forward basic views on the language of the Koran are in K. Voller's Spoken and Written Language in Ancient Arabia, Strasbourg, 1906, by the wrong assumption, that the variant readings of the later Koran scholars, instead of [being] peculiarities of different dialects, rather only those of the original Koran language reflected, exaggerated, and distorted."

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