May 3, 2006

Babble

Language seems altogether logical. Some folk believe it’s what makes us human. Without it, we’d have to think up some other way to tell our stories and, of course, gossip.

Early on in God’s imagining us, he gave us only one language and not very many words to go with it and thought that would suffice. It worked so well for the Shinarites, that they built a city with a tower so tall it reached into heaven. Since it was at a time before elevators, they called it a stairway to the stars and gave some subsequent  songwriter an idea that made millions. Even architects and contractors could actually understand one another [Gen 11.1-9].

The whole idea made Jehovah nervous with a case of the “what ifs” and “whethers” they might get carried away with notions of empire and lording-it-over and preempting and the like. So he confounded — and just to make sure — confused the whole one language and few words bit by turning the one into quite a few with lots of words and even jargon for good measure that began to grow like coathangers in a dark closet. Berlitz made a fortune out of the Babble (aka Babel).

Jehovah took a couple of other chances to fool with language when he made the Word flesh, but the world had got so used to the many tongues and confusion that it didn’t much care for the idea. Then, a few years later, J took the old feast of Pentecost along with some different tongues — this time of fire — and tried again so that everybody could understand everybody else for a change, not with language, for he saw what we did with that, but with a common Spirit we  could take and make something out of it besides towers. We welcomed that, for then we could get to back to the towers, only we made steeples, instead.

What some of them did with national anthems is another matter and maybe grist for another installment.

May 2, 2006

Inglés

I don’t know much if anything about national anthems except that people wherever always seem to be very proud of them. They sing them if not always on pitch, at least with great reverence and attention. 

We’ve got one that I wish was more about peace and justice, a little less about war and violence, and was better suited to the range of the average human voice. But be that as it may, it’s ours, it’s here seemingly for the duration, even if it does take singers like Marian Anderson to make it really come alive.

Our national anthem is in the news again. Nobody seems to mind how often it is butchered by rock “singers” at baseball games or that the great opera baritone Robert Merrill once even forgot the words. I guess the point is that it’s sung at all. 

But it’s in the news this time and all about the language it’s sung in. Our president says that if we’re going to sing it at all, he’d prefer that we use English. I’m sure that the Brits will be pleased to hear this, and that they’ll hope along with the rest of us that he may follow his own advice, say, maybe beginning at press conferences.