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cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
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> uploaded to the files section.
>
Colonial linguistics
"However, assumptions about the status of linguistics as a science
elide enduring, widespread links between the work of linguistic
description and Christian proselytizing, nowhere more evident than in
Pike's own comments on his object of study, phonemics, as a "control
system blessed by God to preserve the tribes from chaos" (quoted in
Hvalkof and Aaby 1981, p.37). As a leading figure of the Summer
Institute of Linguistics, single largest organization of linguists and
missionaries working in the world today, he can be considered a
postcolonial American successor to colonial-era missionizing
linguists. This continuity between colonial past and postcolonial
present is very clear in missionary linguistic work now ongoing in
marginal communities all over the world, with collateral goals and
effects both obvious and intimate (Schiefflein 2000). Lte colonial
era missionaries left another sort of mark on cotemporary linguistic
scholarship if, as Gaeffke (1990) asserts, disproportionate numbers of
their offspring are now scholars of Oriental languages (Errington
2001, p. 3)."
"Assumptions about the naturalness of monoglot conditions helped
Europeans grapple with bewildering linguistic diversity , which they
could frame as a problematic Babel-like condition to be subjected to
regulation (Fabian 1986) or balkanization (Calvert 1974).
Historiographies of missionaries show how the linguistic descriptions
they authored, augmented by print literacy, served as means of
powerfully yet intimately " [c]onceptualizing, inscribing, and
interacting, with [colonized people] on terms NOT OF THEIR OWN
CHOSING" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, p. 15) (Errington 2001, p. 6,
emphasis added)."
So THAT is where the terms "Indo-Aryan" and "Dravidian" are coming from.
"Images of originary purity helped most practically to develop just-so
stories justifying missionary efforts to describe and propagate
unitary, territorially distinct languages. However tenuous the
historical evidence for such narratives, they legitimized linguists'
selections and marginalizations of dialects as more or less similar to
local ur-languages (Errington 2001, p. 9)."
Aka the "Aryan Invasion Theory"
"Herzfeld (1987, p. 116) points to the dependence of such purist
versions of language not just on ur-forms' locations in a distant past
(the imaginary Indo-European homeland) but also their relations to
some perduring place. He thus emphasizes what Bhaktin would call the
chronotopic character of language purism; the usefulness of such
chronotopes for colonial linguistics can be described with two brief
examples (Errington 2001, p. 9, second parenthesis added). "
The never to be found so called "proto-Indo-Euroepan homeland" is such
a "chronotope."
"The colonial origins of comparative philologyand some would say of
modern linguistics more generally (Newmeyer 1986)can be read from Sir
William "Oriental" Jones 1786 demonstrations of structural
commonalities between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit (Aarsleff 1983),"
Errington (2001, p. 13).
"Comparative philology brought into convergence the exercise of
distinctively European reason and distinctively European power,
allowing intellectual relations between European rationality and its
(linguistic) object to be conflated with political relations between
the colonizing and colonized peoples. This made philology central for
scholarly figurines of "colonial dialectics of inclusion and
exclusion" (Cooper and Stolar 1997a, p. 3), because it elided the gap
between scientific study of abstract language structures and political
control of human conduct. In this way the science of language
(difference) simultaneously served to "transmute
.polyglot agonies of
Babel into a cult of transcendent European erudition" (Herzfeld 1987,
p.31)," Errington (2001, p. 13)."
"Crucial here is the culmination of organismic tropes languages
Schleicher's diagrammatic family tree (stammbaum) image of language
change (Hoenigswald 1974, Calvert 1974) in the mid-nineteenth century.
This image of branching descent was directly instrumental for
inventing the kinds of linguistic pasts described earlier and for
reifying colonial languages as unitized counters (Silverstein 1997, p.
127)," Errington (2001, p. 15).
The untestable stammbaum model then is most useful to "transmute
.polyglot agonies of Babel into a cult of transcendent European
erudition" or the hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
langauge. Booyah! But unfortunately this "transcendent European
erudition" would not have been possible without Panini.
"Schleicher's empirically threadbare, Hegelian gendered metaphysics of
language is now largely forgotten. However, its professedly
empirical, inductive framing of language difference served as a
powerful license for global legislations of difference between the
West and the Rest, and so between colonial zing and colonial zed
peoples (Said 1995)," Errington (2001, p. 15)."
Where ever the European colonialist appeared, languages suitable to
enhance their interest automatically became "foreign" and the rest
"native." Therefore, "Indo-Aryan" is "foreign" to South Asia and
Dravidian is "native."
Errington, J. (2001). Colonial linguistics. Annual Review of
Anthropology, 30, 19-39.
M. kelkar