Annie Kitchin | David Salmon’s nostalgia for empire

As I read David Salmon’s column, ‘We don’t want your patois, UWI’, published on September 8, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. I had thought it was common sense for those who know absolutely nothing about a technical subject to first ask questions and listen to specialists before venturing an opinion. But Mr Salmon clearly disagrees with the idea that knowledge should take priority over ignorance. He dives head first into matters which are utterly foreign to him so it is hard to find in his article even one claim which is factual.

The specialist writing system for the Jamaican language was designed by the linguist Frederic Cassidy and slightly modified by the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at The University of the West Indies, Mona. David Salmon declares that this system “relies on the usage of conventions found in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)”.

He is quite wrong, as he would have discovered if he had asked experts who know about these matters. IPA transcription is actually unreadable to non-specialists. It aims to cover all the sounds in all known languages. For a useful explanation of ‘The Sounds of English and the International Phonetic Alphabet’, visit https://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm#phonchart (see attached image).

INCONSISTENT ENGLISH SPELLING

Cassidy-JLU, like most newly devised, systematically ordered writing systems, does not deal in phonetics but in phonemes, i.e. the actual sounds that comprise a specific language. These are written, not using IPA conventions, but the normal Roman letters to which we should all be accustomed by now. After all, this is the alphabet used for English spelling. Mr Salmon appears to be particularly confused on this point. He writes that, “Locally, if English letters were used to represent phonetic sounds, it is likely you will produce a language that better reflects the writing of Miss Lou, rather than what has been produced to date.” By ‘language’, Mr Salmon seems to mean writing system; and what he calls ‘phonetic sounds’ are, technically, phonemes.

Furthermore, Mr Salmon’s “English letters” are not as precise as he imagines. The English spelling system is a world champion in terms of being complicated and inconsistent. There are many jokes which highlight its contradictions, and one of my favourites begins as follows: “Dearest creature in creation”; and continues by making fun of the varying pronunciations of the ‘or’ in corpse, corps, horse, worse; and the ‘ea’ in heart, beard, heard. Then, there are at least six different pronunciations for the single string ‘-ough’. Is this what anyone would call an easy-to-learn, intuitive system? By contrast, each letter in Cassidy-JLU represents only one sound. I still cannot fathom just how Mr Salmon managed to confuse himself so totally on this matter.

Where Mr Salmon really took my breath way, though, was when he began giving advice on linguistics to the linguists at UWI. He quotes the title of a paper on the standardisation of spelling in Swahili, which he either did not read or has utterly failed to understand. He claims that, “[b]ased on its history, there is no push to divorce the language from English as is seen in Jamaica”. Since Swahili comprises a Bantu base with heavy Arabic influence, how is English of any relevance? And in what way, exactly, is the process used to transcribe Swahili any different from that used for Jamaican Creole?

COMING TO TERMS WITH WHO WE ARE

Mr Salmon reveals the real issue for some people: the fear of “divorc[ing] the language from English”. He expresses an unwillingness to recognise that the same process has occurred with Jamaican Creole as with Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. They all originated in Latin and developed over time into languages in their own right. Mr Salmon refuses to acknowledge the fact that Jamaican Creole has also developed to become a language in its own right. It is not merely a bastardised form of English.

A new writing system is obviously a challenge to those who feel nostalgia for empire. It throws into sharp relief all those aspects of the language which have nothing to do with English, and this is uncomfortable for some. In the final analysis, a new writing system forces us to come to terms with who and what we really are, and stop hiding behind myths and illusions. Hence the outrage in some quarters! As Salmon himself says, “The JLU’s system is also not intuitive by nature. Only those who have learnt it will understand it.” Indeed!

I really cannot take seriously those who complain that the Cassidy-JLU writing system is difficult and unintuitive. There are several YouTube videos showing people working it out for themselves, without training, and doing a very good job of it. No one is born with knowledge of an orthographic system. It has to be learned. Some people are quicker than others; some are much slower. Of course, some human beings are by nature conservative, and cling rigidly to the tried, trusted and known. Others are more adventurous and willing to embark on something new. The varying reactions to the introduction of Cassidy-JLU demonstrate this difference clearly. Despite Mr Salmon’s claim to the contrary, it is, undoubtedly, ‘mental slavery’ that causes some stubborn souls to refuse to open their minds to change.

Annie Rose Kitchin is an international conference interpreter, linguist and teacher. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com