Also Into You: Nick Drake, "Hazey Jane II"

(You might have noticed that for someone who described their interests as linguistics and music I've been tending a little more towards the linguistics side than the music side. I'd say that I'm just as into music (or rather that for me music and languages are two faces of the same statue), but that my musical activities tend to be, well, writing, playing and listening to music, rather than necessarily writing 'about' it.

But you know what, I've had a couple of thoughts pertaining to some of my favourite songs that I think might be worth sharing - things that feel, occasionally, like a little insight into the brilliance of the people who made them. Or who knows, maybe I'm just looking too hard. In any case, here's the first of these.)

Song:	Hazey Jane II
By:	Nick Drake
Album:	Bryter Layter
Year:	1970

Nick Drake is an incredible artist. His fine-spun, tightly-wound genius reminds me of J. S. Bach or Gerard Manley Hopkins - each beautiful piece is a perfect, multilayered gem, not a note or word too many or out of place, so strongly put together it feels like architecture as much as art. His life story is sadly familiar, but his work (the three albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter and Pink Moon plus a few further recordings) survives. I don't think you need to be a guitarist to be able to appreciate just how right his extraordinary, subtle guitar lines are; if you do try to play them (Chris Healey's brilliant site is a good place to start) you'll see just how horrifyingly good the guy was at his instrument.

I don't mean he was a saint, or anything. His sense of humour sneaks into most of the stuff he does (Five Leaves Left is apparently what it said in Rizla packets when you were about to run out - and if you think he was only smoking tobacco, then you're probably missing something in The Thoughts of Mary Jane...), and as a person he seems to have had far from a Christ-like character, even before depression consumed his life. There's also the matter of whether he was into sex or not. To which I say, how is that any of our bloody business? But I seem to be in a minority in that opinion. But these details, for me, make him seem all the realer - this is a fallible, human person we're listening to, not a robot, which makes his achievements all the more impressive.


Start Over Again [link]

Bryter Layter is his second album - it's his most upbeat, even pop-y effort. Where Five Leaves Left had strings and congas, Bryter Layter adds in a beefy rock backing, complete with bluesy electric guitar (courtesy of Fairport's Richard Thompson, who guested previously but really lets rip now) and full drum kit (Dave Mattacks, also Fairport). Also, John Cale appears, because he was bloody everywhere back then. The overall theme that I get off this track (the closest we get to a radio-friendly single) and this album is that we're repeating something, harder this time, in the hope that it'll work better.

Take the album itself - it begins with the acoustic-guitar-and-strings-backed miniature Introduction (so far, so Five Leaves Left) before slamming on the gas for our focus here, Hazey Jane II. A sprightly brass-and-electric-guitar fanfare and crucially (if you'll pardon the drummer's angle) a straight-ahead rock drum beat launch us into a gear we haven't heard from Our Man In Tanworth-in-Arden anywhere before. (I've embedded the whole album so you start with it for the full effect, if you're making use of the video.)

This doubling theme hits you right between the eyes when we get to the unrhymed, off-kilter lyric with that fantastic murky Hammond organ. The distended opener doubles back on itself awkwardly ("And what will happen in the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"), and then tries again later (in the day!) ("And what will happen in the evening / With the weasel with the teeth / That bite so sharp when you're not looking in the evening?") This figure reaches its apex in the bathetic pre-chorus: "What will happen / In the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"

The scansion and the narrator relax into short, regular (mostly) rhymed pairs (and the brass comes back) as we get to the chorus, the dénouement (which after all means "untying"): "And now that the family / Is part of a chain / Take off your eye-shades / Start over again". We've heard about letting our brother and sister's hair down (in this case in a double sense), and this strength through the joining of similar elements (family members or links in a chain) is the positive spin on doubling - if you stick with family members as doubles the fact that the world is filling up is the negative view.

And, as a little nod, just as we hear "Start over again" the instruments jump back to play the chorus again (but with different words), and then all the way back to the fanfare I was gushing about earlier. Instead of the clumsy overflowing lines we get more of the punchy matched couplets (to the punchy drum beat). The clincher comes in the coda (which, of course, supplements the song as a whole) - Hazey Jane is in the narrator's mind "again". And indeed, this is Hazey Jane II - the rather more sedately orchestral Hazey Jane I (even the chorus says "Hey, slow Jane") finishes off Side One. We're left with the cryptic "If songs were lines / In a conversation / The situation / Would be fine" and a brief major acoustic guitar chord - even when surrounded by a crowd of session players our hero still manages to get the last word!


Now, Take a Little Time to Make Your Story Clear [link]

So what are we to make of it? First of all, let us draw near and affirm our faith that our host is a good enough writer that the awkward verses are intentionally awkward. I mean, if you try singing this by yourself (or even with a guitar) it's almost impossible to get right - other people have picked apart the wizardry involved more lucidly than I can, but let's say you have to be pretty good to act that bad. Looking at the lay of the chords, we see the interplay between the awkward section and the other (hair-down?) section is reflected by the former being in D minor and the latter in F major - the relative major. This gives a dark vs light contrast, evoked by the images of crowding, anxiety and being bitten by night animals set against the narrator lightening up (ahem) and expressing themselves the second time around. The chord that we finish on, and that pops up repeatedly in both sections, is C major. It's a chord common to both the major and the minor, almost like hesitating at the crossroads. As a side note, Chris Healey's decoding of the guitar parts (which sound pretty on the money to me) has the Introduction and both Hazey Janes in the same slack tuning to further add to the parallels. (CGCFCE, a beautiful discovery that is also used (amongst other things) for the song Pink Moon - trying to recapture the magic?)

That enigmatic last quatrain I cited (with its enigmatic C major) coincides with a final brief foray back into the relative minor before the rhythm section winds up - the narrator's problem appears to be expressing himself to Hazey Jane properly. The last lines give us a deftly minimal indication of how wrong the situation is: if songs could substitute for saying what was really on your mind, then there wouldn't be a problem. The figure is so much more effective than simply saying it outright (which I suppose is part of the problem).

I think this uncertainty in the lyric gives us ground to read the whole theme of doubling in two ways, appropriately enough, positive and negative just as the song oscillates between major and minor. We're doing a second album (it's tomorrow i.e. in the morning), and a second song called Hazey Jane - the major says that this time we will say it right (Start over again), or build on what was already there (the family is part of a chain), and we hope this will be true, just as we start the song with this upbeat, major fanfare (taking off our eye-shades to try seeing things major). And yet we can't help but resolve back towards the minor - if we have to say it again, does that mean that it won't work this time as well? (This is where I think the abandoned safety in the books comes in - we're out on a limb in this artistic project, does doing more of the same mean that we'll just go further into No-Man's Land?) Or, worse, will repeating ourselves make the previous effort look weaker? (The awkward verse). In a conversation, as the narrator wants, you at least have the opportunity of hearing the other person talk and reacting to what they're saying. But here, there's the gnawing suspicion that we're just saying the same few things over and over, without any reassurance that anyone's listening or that we're being understood.


The Situation [link]

I don't really like rooting around creators' biographies (I'm definitely on Team Death of the Author, as detailed on my old blog), but if you have a look at the guy's circumstances when he was writing and producing the album, this would seem to be a dichotomy that rings true. I think it's somehow appropriate that even at his most marketable (let's put the fast one to the front of the LP!), Nick Drake is still holding back, still conflicted with desperation for people to like and get his work (maybe this time will work), but worried that it's all for nothing, that what he's saying isn't important enough or people aren't interested. It's that minor reflex that closes the song (the situation is decidedly not fine), and that's the spectre that hangs over Pink Moon, casting its warm, heart-breaking, silvery songs into inescapable pale shadow.

This drama (and dramatising his personal and artistic conflict is as much the soul of Nick Drake's work as it was of Sylvia Plath's or Anna Akhmatova's) will be far from new for those who are familiar with people or with Freud, who like all really great writers says what we would have said ourselves if only we could find the words. The specific dilemma of whether adding is increasing or diluting is also picked out by Derrida's discussion of the term "supplement" - an example he gives of a hymen (a sort of verbal Schrödinger's cat, as Hymen is the Classical god of marriage as well as a symbol of virginity). I don't think any of these reference points are particularly essential to our reading of Hazey Jane II - I merely point them out in case you haven't met and like the sound of them.

Regardless of how tangled up we get with all the records of his lifetime, what I hope I've got across is just how much incredibly layered thought seems to have gone just into one song. Each record practically has a heartbeat - and it's Nick's heartbeat. And as I suspect is true for a lot of his listeners, it's an inspiration in everything I do.

(I hope that was a nice interlude. Sorry if you don't know/like Nick Drake - next week we'll be back to our regular word-weighing with a post on metre, and how it isn't just for poems.)

On the Hardest Language in the World

(It's a question that I see asked a lot in language learning communities online, so I thought I'd give answering it a go. Ditto the number of languages I "know".)

If the content of the stuff I've already put up here isn't enough of a clue, my area of specialisation is languages. My degree is in Modern Languages, but my interests include Classics and Linguistics as well. (It would look a bit funny not putting capital-L-linguistics next to Classics, but I don't normally see any need to capitalise. Classics as in Latin and Greek rather than things that are considered classic is a useful disambiguation. We hope you feel less ambiguated.)

My degree is, specifically, in French and Russian, but one of my hobbies is gaining acquaintance with new languages. A few years ago I made a list of all the languages that I'd like to be familiar with; it comes to around thirty. Thirty languages? I hear you exclaim, How the hell are you supposed to learn thirty languages? All things considered, I don't think it's such an unreasonable goal. Here's why.

Dot-to-dot [link]

Languages don't exist in isolation. Well duh, I imagine you'd say (looks like you're in for a lot of ventriloquising - sorry about that). But what I mean is, languages exist in clumps (or rather clades) - a language that exists on its lonesome from its particular line is quite a rare occurrence. Let's take English: English is a Germanic language that has been radically reshaped by its long contact first with the native Welsh-related Brythonic (back when it was Anglo-Saxon, leaving us with such relatively unusual features such as the continuous/progressive aspect, i.e. I am saying vs I say) and then with French and Latin, resulting amongst other things in our staggeringly varied vocabulary (once your language gets a taste for filching other people's words it will usually go out of its way to do so, resulting in today's English speakers using loans from Arabic, Urdu and Indonesian together without a second thought: The admiral's on the bamboo veranda. A few too many glasses of punch, I reckon. He's asking for ketchup? I'll make some coffee...).

As a Germanic language, English is clearly related to German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (don’t forget Scots!) etc, as you can tell from the fact that knowing English you can probably grok Hast du meinen Vater gesehen? Wir waren neben dem Marktplatz even if you haven't studied German. Similarly, Germanic is just one branch of the Indo-European, the language family that most of the languages of India and Europe are descended from (duhoy). If you take a list of the core vocabulary of a language (kinship terms, body parts, pronouns and irregular verbs, common plants and animals and so on) you get a Swadesh list (named for their originator, American linguist and McCarthy victim Morris Swadesh) - if you compare them across the IE languages the common base is clear. Take the number "one". One reconstruction of the original Proto-Indo-European language root is *óynos: this gives rise to the Latin ūnus and derived Romance languages like French un, Italian/Spanish uno (Italic), German eins, Old English ān (Germanic), Lithuanian víenas, Russian odín, Polish jeden (Balto-Slavic), Persian yak, Sanskrit éka, and derived languages like Hindi ek, Punjabi ika (Indo-Iranian).

I don't mean to hit you over the head with sudden tidings of Indo-European reconstruction (even though it's seriously cool, being what the linguistic community was mostly up to in the 19th century, including famous names like The Brothers Grimm and Ferdinand de Saussure) - my point is that languages are a lot more interconnected than you might expect. Just knowing English gives you a head-start on cognates (shared roots) in German and Romance languages, not to mention that a lot of loan words these days are flooding in from English, despite what self-appointed regulatory bodies like the Académie française have to say about it.

My language list is organised around this idea: for each language branch, I (somewhat arbitrarily) picked two modern languages and one ancient. So for Italic, I had Latin, French and Italian, and for Balto-Slavic Russian, Polish and Old Church Slavonic (the Slavic equivalent of Latin). I also inserted Lithuanian into the group there, partly because the Lithuanians of my acquaintance usually take a pretty dim view of being grouped with the Slavs (they're Balts), and partly because Lithuanians (and neighbouring Latvians) are the IE version of the coelacanth. Language change just doesn't seem to have appealed to them from roughly the same era as Sanskrit onwards, making them lots of fun for the philologically-inclined. But I digress (more than usual).

The thing is, adding the other two corners to the each language group is nowhere near as much work as the first one was. You find that instead of starting from scratch with each new language, you can flick switches on what you already know and slot it into the new one. Learning the grammar of Italian, for instance, if you've got French, is largely working out how to turn your French into Italian forms. So avoir (have) goes j'ai, tu as, il a in French, and in Italian avere goes io ho, tu hai, lui ha. (Actually, you don't need the personal pronouns in Italian - this linguistic switch is called being pro-drop). I also get the feeling that the fact that English has branched so far away from the other Germanic languages makes us overestimate the distance between members of the same branch in general. (Might also explain our reticence to class Scots as a separate language, if we're going on English vs German as our benchmark!) 

School's Out Forever [link]

Another thing that I think puts people off is their memories of enforced languages at school. I've already pontificated on the difference between child- and adult-level learning, but in case you missed it or don't have the strength to look at it again, my idea is that learning stuff voluntarily as an adult is in a different league to learning as a child. Your increased attention span, enthusiasm and access to materials (if you grew up before the Internet was properly a thing, which I'm hoping for the sake of my self-image is the case) mean your bored, school-age self being force-fed verb tables doesn't stand a chance.

Do you have an interest? Look at your language's Wikipedia pages on the subject. Browse news articles and blogs. Hook up with some native speakers, online or in person via stuff like Couchsurfing or Facebook. Do language exchanges - if you have native or near native-level English (which I imagine you must do to persevere through this lot), you're made for life as far as languages to teach people go. Everyone wants to improve their English: talk in English for an hour, and in return talk in your native's language for an hour afterwards. That way, you're both getting roughly the same out of the experience. Also, having an agreed-upon time when you do your Talking In Each Other's Native Languages means that you won't need to bug each other with language questions at other times - which, should you have any kind of interaction with your exchange partner at all outside of your sessions, should be a weight off the nerves of everyone involved.

Depending on how niche your language is, you can probably find a fair amount of free stuff online just devoted to teaching people your language. Why? People love sharing. A thing my mum told me as an awkward preteen about making conversation was this: People love talking about themselves. Sharing the intricacies of your own language and culture to a wider audience is wonderful - I love telling people about the North and my relation to it, just as Harmut clearly loves telling people about German and Germany on his ace language pages. (This and others are on my list of useful online language resources, by the way, so if you know any good ones please let me know - I plan to write some introductory stuff myself.)

A Hero with a Thousand Faces [link]

I'm sure you’re happy that speaking a particular language is a perfectible skill. You can get better at it. But you know what? So is learning a new language, full stop. As I've gone through the motions of acquainting myself with each new language, I've noticed that the same steps keep appearing:

New Language Checklist

1. Work out what sounds are present in the language, and how they interact.
2. Work out how the sounds are written down.
3. Become familiar with the most common forms - greetings, a general idea of how words are used, common irregular words, common vocabulary (the last two overlap).
4. Gradually widen the core to include more vocabulary and more nuance, the more specific nuts and bolts of grammar and usage.

(Compare it to learning new instruments - there's only so many chords and scales that people use, you just need to learn how to produce them. And if it's an instrument in the same family as one you already know, it's all the easier. Not instantaneous mastery, but a good leg up.)

The concept that Chomsky and co. put forward is that people are fundamentally all saying the same sorts of things - they just express them differently. We are united by our humanity - like many great theoretical conclusions, you could have asked anyone in the street and they'd probably have told you exactly the same thing. People on the opposite side of the world from you are interested in having enough to eat and a place to sleep, in looking after their families and making something of their lives. They have the same size and shape brain, a similar pair of eyes and lungs and kidneys. Their larynges contract and vibrate columns of air just like yours, and their ears receive airborne packets of information as yours do. Their voices and brains and minds make different use of the same raw materials, but it would be a poorer world if we required everyone to talk, think and dream in exactly the same way as we do. And with modern technology, they are no longer even a single world away from you. We live in exciting times - here's hoping we don't screw it up.

The Twain Meet [link]

Let's take English and Mandarin as examples of languages that are traditionally thought to be distant and difficult to learn for each other's native speakers. Like most Chinese languages and others nearby, Mandarin has lexical tone - this means that when you learn a word, you have to learn which of four tones it has (five if you include the unmarked neutral tone). English speakers also make use of tone, but to express intonation.

The intonation on the word Well in each of the following phrases (in my UK English, at least) roughly approximates each of the four tones:

1.	Weeeeell, I dunno, it's a fairly big favour...	("high level" mā)
2.	Well? What did she say?	("rising" má)
3.	Well?! Are you going to open it, then?	("dipping" mǎ)
4.	Well! If that's how it is, then I quit!	("high-falling" mà)

(Also like music, tone contours are mapped out on a five-point scale - this coincides with the musical idea that the pentatonic scale is the natural range of the human voice, used as it is in most folk songs and guitar solos.)

Mandarin and the other Chinese languages are also united in their use of Han characters. I grant you, they are tough. You apparently need between 3, and 4,000 characters to be able to get by; but this is ignoring the fact that most characters are made up of a combination of other, simpler characters. There are 214 basic radicals, and a character is usually made up of a radical and a suffix that indicates how it was pronounced in Middle Chinese (unfortunately rarely any indication of how it's pronounced now). So the simplified character 妈 (pinyin mā) means "mother" - it uses the woman radical (on the left) 女 (nǚ) and used to rhyme with 马 (mǎ, horse). In this case we're lucky and the rhyme still works - though the tone is different. You can see how the woman radical is a simplified drawing of a woman - on Memrise they use animations and mnemonics ("The Chinese mother is expected to work like a horse for her family") along with spaced repetition to great success.

But wait a second - isn't English spelling largely based on conventions from Middle English? Doesn't the root in reading and they had read a book come out, even though it doesn't sound the same? I think it's a fair comparison. Basically, when you learn a Mandarin word, just as when you were first learning to write English words, you have to learn the spelling and pronunciation separately. There's also the matter that where Mandarin has lexical tone, English has lexical stress: They import an import has a rare English stress-based minimal pair (pair of items that differ only in one feature, showing that there is a conscious contrast based on the feature) - the Mandarin examples I cited give a tone-based one (mā vs mǎ), which are as about as common as voicing-based minimal pairs in English (like bet vs pet). If you don't know a word's tone in Mandarin, you don't know the word. As English speakers we have to get used to paying attention to diacritics in words (which English seems to be allergic to), but once we know the rules of the game in that regard we're golden. (Mandarin nouns also have associated measure words - a bit like knowing that it's a parliament of rooks, but used all the time, and with a limited number of about 150. A bit like learning a word's gender in other IE languages, but with logic still attached!) There's also the bonus that Mandarin's grammar almost entirely analytic - no learning of irregular verbs required, for instance. It's almost like only having so much room for grammar in their heads people in this case can't be bothered!

That's basically it, really: learning languages is a lot easier if you force yourself to be flexible and open. There will be sounds that you don't normally make (so I recommend getting to grips with IPA shenanigans so you don't get stuck with pasty approximations), and some that you do make, but are said slightly further in or out of your mouth, or with stronger or weaker aspiration, or with a different emphasis style. You need to make yourself listen, and listen carefully. If you've got a tame native speaker to really work over your pronunciation it'll do you no end of good. You have, too, to be humble enough to let yourself be corrected if you make mistakes, which you will do, because that's how you learn a second language. For my money, starting your acquaintance with a new language is like meeting someone new: you should be doing at least as much listening as talking, if not more.

"So How Many Languages Do You Know?" [link]

Christ, I hate that question. When I was living in France and going to a lot of Couchsurfing meet-ups, I found the best answer was, Not enough. I quite like the analogy of languages as people: what would you say if someone said, So how many people do you know? (I warned you you'd be being ventriloquised some more, reader, I'm sorry about that. It's dreadfully rude of me.) I imagine you'd probably ask what kind of "knowing" the person asking you meant. Know enough to have a conversation with? Know enough that you would acknowledge each other in the street? Know enough that you could turn up on their doorstep in the middle of the night utterly distraught, and they would let you in, make you a cup of tea and not ask more questions than you wanted to answer? Know enough to sleep with? Know enough to share your body with? Know enough to fall out and argue with because you both know the other could be better than you're being? Know enough that their heartbeat answers yours, that your lives are intertwined? Know enough that your children will know them as they know you? Know enough that you will be remembered together with them and could wish for nothing more?

I have a casual acquaintance with around fifteen or sixteen languages. I have native English and fluent French and Russian, although not at anything like the level I really should have by this point. About two thirds of the rest I can read more or less with a dictionary and have stilted conversations in; I've found that fluency (in the sense of not needing to translate your thoughts into the language consciously) is a transferable skill - I've had conversations in Ancient Greek, though my reconstructed pitch accent is often met with slight bewilderment.

I've found another useful image is that of planting trees. When you're still getting to grips with the first three steps outlined above, you're digging; when you're onto the fourth step, it's planted, and you're watering; when you achieve fluency (which is nothing like an end point, just as getting to know someone well isn't) your tree is in bloom. If you neglect it, it can wilt, but with more watering and care it should come back into flower. I don't think that you can aim to get to a native or near-native level in much more than one language beyond your own: I find that each new language that I meet makes me appreciate the beauty of my own all the more, the rich soil that I've spent my life with and know as I know myself.

In Summary...

Sorry, did you still want to know which language is objectively the hardest to learn in the world? It's your second language, the one that you slave over in school for hours and hours to what feels like no progress. After that it's more or less plain sailing - so long as you've got the spare afternoons and know how to pitch your mast. Individual languages are only subjectively hard if you’re coming at them from far away and don’t know the ropes.

(Got back on topic in the end, eh... Tune in next week for a slight gear change in a more musical direction. While then!)

On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part Two of Two)

(Welcome back to my beef with eye dialect. Last week we looked at the English class system, my relation to it, and its oppression of dialect deemed nonstandard, drawing parallels with the oppression of minority languages. This week we'll examine the use of eye dialect more in depth and whether any alternatives are still viable in the case of Broad Yorkshire in particular.

Running abbreviations: RP = Received Pronunciation, SE = Standard English, BY = Broad Yorkshire.

Also, content warning: cited NSFW language)


She Sed Wot [link]

Falling back to our eye dialect... First off, there appear to be two similar but conflicting definitions of what we mean by eye dialect. One is the use of phoneticised spellings of standard pronunciation (as in the heading), the other is using phoneticised spellings to indicate non-standard diction. The two senses combine in their design of othering the speech recorded, and by extension the speaker, often in order to make fun of them. After all, attacking what is different from you is the basis of a lot of lazy humour. You could compare this to someone altering or distorting their voice while telling a joke for a character - the one who gets the teller's natural voice is always the one who is treated with the most respect within the joke, if the teller is not the narrator themselves.

For example, here's a joke about Mancunians (inhabitants of Manchester) and Scousers (inhabitants of Liverpool):

In a maternity unit there is a shortage of labels, so the midwife goes out into the corridor and tells the three new fathers (a Manc, a Scouser and a Nigerian) there that they'll have to go in and pick up out their children by family resemblance.

The Manc goes in first, and comes out with a baby. The baby's black. The Nigerian guy says, "Excuse me, mate, I think that baby's mine." The Manc says, "Sorry, man, I didn't want to take any chances - one of them's a Scouser!"

When I heard that joke, the person telling it did an approximation of a Mancunian accent on the last line - that's part of the joke. The Nigerian man's line they delivered in their natural speaking voice, the same as the rest of the narration. He's a straight man, the voice of reason, the one we agree with. We're meant to laugh at the Mancunian (and by extension the Liverpudlian as well). (It's important not to discount potential racism informing the person (who wasn't a person of colour) deciding not to do an impression of a Nigerian person, but I think this sympathetic straight-man aspect is also decisive.)

We might suggest the same with eye dialect: you don't write in eye dialect yourself; to do so would be a sign that you aren't educated (and thus are unable to make the distinction). Eye dialect becomes a way to mark a character's speech and thereby thoughts as substandard and open to derision. Dickens (never afraid to stoop for a cheap laugh) does this all the time with his working class characters; any number of butcherings of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) in white authors' works throughout American history have served a similar purpose.

An interesting case relating to BY is in Barry Hines' novel A Kestrel for a Knave (set in Barnsley). Throughout the novel the working class characters' dialogue is written in dialect (Billy says Alarm's gone off tha knows, and Gi'o'er! That hurts! [short for give over, meaning stop it]), the more well-to-do characters (and the narrator) speaking SE. In the Penguin Modern Classics afterword, when talking about adapting the book for the film Kes, Hines says that he wrote the script entirely in SE, and the cast translated it back into BY for filming. He also mentions that he regrets writing with dialect and would rather the dialogue were all in SE.

These two details, I feel, reinforce the interpretation of eye dialect (or in Hines' case, of written dialect at all) as othering by its very nature - the writer and the cast, both speakers of BY, have no need of it; so we are left to assume that the inclusion of the novel's dialect is for the benefit of outsiders not familiar with BY, even though it seems (in its author's eyes) to demean the characters who speak it.

Pure Written Dialect [link]

I think Hines' discomfort with the idea of written dialect is telling. English other than SE is stigmatised to the extent that it is denied the legitimacy of being written down even by its native speakers. To non-linguists, "accent" and "dialect" are things that happen to other people - if you have an accent, or, worse, speak in dialect, it is a mark of being uneducated. Linguists point out in vain that it is impossible not to have an accent or not speak in a dialect, because these terms have been co-opted into the oppressive narrative of aggressive linguistic normativity. For the record, accents differ on how words are pronounced, and dialects differ in terms of words and constructions used. The line between isn't always very definite, but it has been observed that in the face of increased social and popular mobility the traditional dialects of UK English have tended to be replaced by more-or-less SE spoken with a particular accent. This coincides with the far end of my mixed dialect continuum outlined above. I would also argue that the demotion of dialects to "accents" is a common, self-fulfilling weapon in their erasure.

It doesn't have to be like this, though. It is famously said that the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy - just like the dividing line between different species of the same genus becomes harder to see the closer you look, at what point a dialect becomes a separate language has historically been more a matter of politics than of taxonomy. The different "dialects" of Modern Arabic and Chinese are divergent enough that they are often unofficially termed separate languages; the Romance and Nordic languages are close enough that their individual languages can be classified as different points on a dialect continuum. As the usual rough test for two creatures being of the same species is whether they can interbreed successfully, so the rule of thumb for the dialect/language split is whether two candidates are mutually intelligible, and to what degree.

Take Scots. Debate rages over whether it is a dialect of English or its own language, closely related to English but separate, in the manner of Norwegian's relation to Swedish. As I described above for BY, the situation is complicated by the imposition of SE on the pure form - many Scots themselves appear to consider the language merely substandard English. But thanks to the existence of a literary tradition dating from the Middle Ages and including writers such as Robert Burns there is an established written form of Scots.

Here's the penultimate stanza of Burns' To a Mouse (of which the third and fourth lines have become proverbial in SE) with an SE translation:

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!

But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!

There are several features that distinguish the Scots original from the English: there are words that are found in archaic SE (thou art, thy, nought), as well as ones that have no direct equivalent in SE (lane, Gang aft agley). There are words that do exist in SE, but that have more consonants than the Scots versions (o', an', lea'e) - in this case the apostrophe is called an apologetic apostrophe, as it is apologising for Scots' divergence. Since the 20th century it is no longer used, so for instance in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting we get passages like Renton's analysis of Jean-Claude Van Damme films from the opening chapter:

As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jean–Claude's ready tae git doon tae some serious swedgin. – Rents. Ah've goat tae see Mother Superior, Sick Boy gasped, shaking his heid.

(It's worth noting that some Scots purists condemn Irvine Welsh's writing as hopelessly Anglicised. It's noticeable that the very literate Renton frequently switches between SE and Scots forms - like and here, elsewhere realised as n.)

We can tell from the rhyme scheme in the Burns poem (men rhyming with vain and pain etc.) that even the words that exist in SE and are written exactly the same aren't necessarily pronounced the same. I think this is a key point - in a pure dialect, there is no need to mark consistent pronunciations if they differ from another, because the written form is meant to be read without reference to it.

Writing Tyke [link]

Let's go further with that. There's a lot of dialectal variation within Yorkshire, but around Sheffield (dialectally West Yorkshire), where my family are from, the vowel in goat (using John Wells' lexical set) varies between something like [o:] (like a Spanish o, but long) and [ow] (quite Sheffield - if you've ever heard Sean Bean say O2 you'll recognise the elongated vowel sounds we tend to come out with). I tend towards the latter. Regardless, the underlying phoneme that stays the same across different words in the goat set (old, poke, over etc.) and so wouldn't need to be represented by a different spelling in pure dialectal writing. If it is spelt out somehow (like eauw or something for the latter) it becomes clear that we are in eye dialect territory - a difference is being marked from a standard.

Another example would be the vowel in strut. In Yorkshire it's [ʊ], which is the same as the vowel in put (and Wells' foot set, though in many parts of the Yorkshire and the North in general that has [u:], the same vowel as goose). People trying to parody a Northern accent often write things like "fookin'" to indicate /'fʊkin/ (where they themselves would probably say /'fʌkiŋ/), though to me (and people who pronounce Luke and look similarly) that looks like it should be read /'fu:kin/. (This was, by the by, the point that came up in the conversation that sparked this whole rumination.) Drawing the attention of people gormless enough to do this sort of thing to that can earn accusations of being "chippy" (i.e. having a chip on your shoulder), because it's apparently unreasonable to be angry at the eradication of your culture being used as a badly-informed joke.

Anyway. There are features of BY that don't exist in SE, though: the most famous is probably definite article reduction, where the is reduced to a glottal stop, traditionally spelt t' (A were walkin down t'road). There are other reduced forms that don't exist in SE like dun't for doesn't (It dun't matter) and me for my (A've lost me phone again). In pure BY the second person singular pronoun forms are still used (thou realised as tha, thy reducing to thi like me and taking third person singular endings), the reflexive -self of SE is met with forms in -sen (If ever tha does owt for nowt, do it for thisen), and while is used where SE has until (She's workin while five; occasionally causing quite a bit of of confusion), amongst other features.

It's important to note that features such as mesen and gang (from the Burns) are not corruptions of SE forms – they are different forms that have survived from Old English, often longer than their equivalents in SE - take nowt (pronounced /nawt/ most places, but /nowt/ round Sheffield), continuing archaic SE naught, or tha continuing thou. If you’re familiar with German you might recognise  features in Mousie (Mäuschen) and gang (sie ist gegangen). A good example is the present participle: SE playing, BY laikin (same root as LEGO [laik good]). The Old English form was closer to the German spielend – the generalisation of the noun-forming –ing (German –ung) is a hypercorrection that does not cross into most pure dialects.

In any potential pure written BY standard, a decision would have to be made to what level to phoneticise the spelling. We can follow Scots in ignoring sounds that are present in SE but absent in BY (so ow right at the beginning of the first half for SE how, goin for SE going); spelling the equivalent of SE I as A might be accepted (we could argue SE I is a regular pronunciation of the price vowel, so pure BY should be allowed to regularise it to the trap vowel), but the suggestion (as some BY writers have done) of spelling the equivalent of SE weak to and for as ter and fer is more contentious. Do we represent all weak forms in spelling as a rule? To is already an exceptional pronunciation (it doesn't rhyme with toe, after all), but weak for is unresolved. Incidentally, the question of how representative to make an orthography (and whether to make a new breakaway set more representative of reduction) is an established pattern with the likes of Belarusian as compared to Russian.

A Sailed Ship? [link]

All this is really, though, just idle speculation. If BY was to have its own literary tradition (beyond being othered as the speech of uneducated characters), the time to establish it was at the very latest the beginning of the last century. The influence of SE has pulled us too far along the gradient, I fear, for a pure BY to be able to be freestanding. While local pride has grown stronger with the destigmatisation of "regional accents", I very much doubt that there is enough of a foundation left to build on; the pure dialect has to all intents and purposes been erased, just as was desired. In the 19th century nationalising drive many previously minor Slavic languages delved into medieval texts to reclaim words that were definitely not Russian loans, and people began to use them again, but I don't imagine that a parallel situation could ever really arise now that our society seems (with such incredibly positive results, and which I completely support in other regards) to tend towards the communal rather than the individualising. I would love to be proved wrong, of course - though as I'm not a native speaker of pure BY it's out of my hands.

That's the thing that really gets me about eye dialect - it's waving the possibility of having a proper non-Standard literary tradition in the non-Standard speaker's face, and then blowing your nose on it. It's a disgusting distortion of the written word, which used right could be brilliant.

(So there you have it. Join us next week for my answer to a frequently-asked linguistic question - which is the hardest language in the world to learn?)

On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part One of Two)

(This next one is a two-parter because it's quite long. I also think there's at least some natural division between the first and second halves: in this first part I discuss English social class and its relation to dialect, my slightly complicated status in that regard, and how languages/dialects deemed non-standard are oppressed.)

Now'en, ow yer goin? Or rather, Hi, how are you all? I found myself reflecting on eye dialect recently when it briefly came up in a conversation. (As one of those boringly overeducated people, I find most conversations involving me inevitably tend back to linguistics. Well, when all you've got is a hammer...)

So as it turns out, there are lots of things that I find interesting associated with that particular topic! (Allow me to subject you to all of them in short order...) On a more serious note, it's an interesting jumping-off point to explore my slightly odd but by no means unprecedented class/linguistic status, in the hope that (as I suspect may become more common in the future) there are other people who newly find themselves in a similar position and are wondering what to do about it, and to explore the concept of writing down dialect in general.

Ideas Above One's Station [link]

Here's the deal. Historically in English society (i.e. very roughly from the Reformation to the 19th century), the class division has been Working/Middle/Upper class: the Upper class was the aristocracy (who owned their land and money by inheritance and didn't have to work for or at either of them - aka Old Money), the Middle class was the educated professionals (who had land and money through working for it - aka New Money), and the Working class was the rest of the population (who had neither land, money nor (historically) education, and would work apprenticed trades for little money). Lots of comment has been passed on this three-part division; I'm no specialist on the matter, though if you're interested in an informative observational comic slant on it I'd recommend Kate Fox's Watching the English.

Anyway. Social mobility in this classic framework (let's fix it at, say, the Victorian era to make it sound less hand-wavey) is limited: you need a title to be an aristocrat, and you need an education to be middle class. You can, of course, buy a title (if you're middle class to start with), but you'll be sniffed at as New Money for a few generations; similarly, if a person from the working class suddenly comes into money (the stereotype goes), their lack of social graces and restraint with their money will mark them out as another type of New Money; their offspring (or their offspring's offspring), brought up and educated in a middle class manner, will in all likelihood be accepted, provided they are suitably reticent about their parents' (or grandparents') background.

These old school social climbers have it particularly tough - they'll be looked down upon by the members of the class they want to join, but that pales in comparison to how they'll be despised by the class they're trying to leave behind. It's not hard to imagine why - the people they've grown up with, who have supported and looked after them, are now made to feel as if they aren't good enough, or that the climber thinks that they are better than them. Well into the 20th century "class traitor" seems to have been a stinging insult.

Then, most noticeably starting around the 1960s, things changed. To my mind the most influential factor seems to be the two World Wars fought within fifty years, at devastating cost to the British Empire and all that it encompassed. Huge sections of the adult male population were killed, leaving large vacuums that society instinctively moved to fill. The Old Guard try to stand against the changes as best they can, but they are so depleted, and the post-War economic changes have put enough of the money into the hands of the other classes, that once the children born after 1945 (the Baby Boomers) become a societal force there is little that they can do. Along with increased immigration making the population more culturally diverse as well, English and British society is commonly referred to currently as being in an egalitarian age - indeed, some even talk about being persecuted for being "too posh", sometimes calling this "reverse snobbery". Others claim that we now live in a classless society.

Talking Proper, Like What I Do [link]

How does this relate to eye dialect? I'm getting there. One of the most concentrated class indicators is the use of language. You can probably come up with plenty of examples yourself of words, constructions or pronunciations that are considered "colloquial", "uneducated" or "vulgar". In linguistics this is called proscribed usage (not to be confused with prescribed usage, which is the opposite!). With my Social Justice hat on, I would say that adherence to arbitrary linguistic norms is used as a tool of class oppression; you can find pages and pages of exposition on why (for instance) splitting infinitives or ending a sentence with a preposition or any number of pedantic bugbears are aesthetically, logically or morally wrong, but the truth is there is literally no inherent superiority in any one linguistic construct, and please do quote me on that.

The only fundamental requirement of language as a means of communication is that each party understand what the other is saying. As people like Jakobson explore, there are many more layers communicated in a phrase than what each word literally means in a dictionary (think tone of voice, colloquial vs. non-colloquial (aka register), references to shared culture, poetic quality of the phrase itself etc.) - this is why formal, written English is more long-winded than conversational English: we've only got twenty-six letters and about twelve punctuation marks to get our point across unambiguously, compared to the full range and expressive power of the human voice (not to mention non-verbal cues). Of course, once democratisation via the Internet gets involved, the collective genius of crowd-sourcing comes up with emoticons, but that's another story.

But anyway, the idea of language use as class marker is pervasive - it's commonly cited as the most enduring way to tell someone's class. The educated middle classes are supposed to speak RP (Received Pronunciation, aka BBC English or what most people overseas think of as "a British accent"), the upper classes a distinctively archaic strain of it (sometimes termed U RP, presumably after Nancy Mitford's beloved U and non-U word lists), and the working classes any other local dialect, referred to collectively and somewhat pejoratively as "regional accents". Anyone jumping a class is expected to acquire the native accent/dialect; hence adopting RP is sometimes knocked as "talking posh".

Linguistically, RP can be called the prestige dialect of UK English - it is seen as the standard from which other varieties deviate. Under the language-as-communication idea I set out a minute ago you can see why a standard dialect is needed - otherwise speakers of divergent dialects won't be able to understand each other. This is more or less indeed how standard written English emerged; the problem comes (from an anti-classist perspective) when the standard is valorised over other dialects.

Once-A-Nighters [link]

Here's where I come in. As you can probably tell from my writing style, I've had quite a Classical education, all things considered. I also speak with a Yorkshire accent despite currently being based in the South for my studies, an accent and idiom that I've chosen to retain despite the faint expectation for me to acquire RP. As it happens, at my secondary school (also in the South) I did adopt RP, mainly in a bid to avoid drawing attention to myself, but also to see if I could. At home I would revert to a Yorkshire accent. While at school I could switch accents in the same sentence; I haven't bothered with RP for a few years now, though when showing some non-native friends how to speak RP I found it came back easily enough.

Where I fit into the classical English class system is unclear. By education I'm clearly middle-middle or upper-middle class (going by Kate Fox's subdivisions), but by accent and (apparently) demeanour I identify with my family and my home, broadly working class. In 19th century Russian society there was a group known as the raznochíntsy (singular razonchínets, acute marks stress, pronunciation). The name comes from the words rázny (different) and chin (class, rank), so means something like "other-classers" - the heading for this section comes from an anecdote my Russian tutor told me about one of his classmates coming across the word and reading it not as razno-chinets but raz-nochinets (raz means "once", noch' means "night"), and coming up with the above. Anyway, the raznochintsy were the sons of peasants made good - so they were educated, but not part of the nobility (Russians haven't historically really ever had a middle class). This made them a societal force to be reckoned with because they had the intellectual clout to make themselves heard without the crippling guilt the more progressive nobles inherited. Many ended up in Siberia for their troubles (link to the Decembrists for an example of how welcome dissent was), though not before raising the intellectual fervour that ended with the Revolution.

On a Slide Rule [link]

I find the term quite attractive: I have an education, but I refuse to allow that to negate my Northernness. I am quite capable of speaking RP, but I will not enunciate for your benefit, which is a coded classist way of delegitimising speech you deem nonstandard. (Though if you legitimately didn't hear what I said I'll be happy to repeat it for you.)

I can imagine that some people, on reading the above, would argue that I belong unquestionably to the middle class and am intellectualising my denial. To which I would say, that's pretty damn rude. I personally say that someone's identity is their decision, and people should respect that, even if they would not identify similarly themselves and can't understand why someone would want to.

I choose instead to conceptualise it like so: my identity does not reduce to a single point without further reference. There are people who can describe themselves as Yorkshire without further qualification and feel that that describes them fully, just as there are people who can describe themselves as from a part of London, or on a broader level as English, British, Irish or whatever. I, however, see myself as a point on a line between Yorkshire/working class and middle class. It took me a long time and a lot of distress, but I have come to feel comfortable where I am, and feel no immediate need to justify (in the typographical or rhetorical sense) to either end.

(I should probably mention here that I'm not entirely of English blood; to my mind this doesn't factor overmuch into my cultural and linguistic identity, though.)

Impure Dialect [link]

My idiolect (personal usage), therefore, falls on a similar line between Standard English/RP (the former henceforth SE) and Broad Yorkshire (aka Tyke, likewise BY). Historically (and rarely nowadays in rural and deprived areas) there exist speakers of BY who speak without an awareness of the forms of SE - they are typified as "uneducated", because of the aforementioned equation of the standard/prestige dialect with education.

It is the defining characteristic of educated, non-Standard speakers' idiolect that their diction is informed by two points, not by one. In parallel with my scale of identity above, there is the "pure" dialect at one end, and the standard at the other. Where there is a divergence between pure and standard, the mixed speaker will have to choose one form or another. This is a well-studied phenomenon in linguistics known as code-switching, often examined in bilingual children for maximal differentiation; the choice seems to come down in bilinguals to which language a concept is felt to be easier to express in, or to which language the concept itself is associated with. If you have learnt about a topic in your second language, it may be easier to switch to the second language to discuss the topic - you may not even know the relevant terminology in your first language, even though it is usually the more "natural" to you.

For mixed dialect speakers this choice is coloured by class. Regardless of whether a construct that exists in the pure dialect feels more appropriate in context, the standard form will be preferred. This is a concern quite apart from whether the listener will understand the pure form - if this would not be the case, the choice is straightforward. (Or the pure form can be given glossed.) It must be stressed that this is also separate from concerns of colloquial/non-colloquial register - instances of native pure speakers choosing standard forms over stigmatised pure forms in speech abound, and besides, beyond the concept of possible inappropriate register, colloquial standard usage is rarely stigmatised (outside of the most soullessly pedantic circles, at least). That a dialect is not permitted to exist except for in negative reference to a standard is the essence of its linguistic oppression.

What I contend is the oppression of a dialect bears comparison to the phenomenon of linguicide: the government of a country attempts to exterminate a minority language and replace it with the standard language. You can see the appalling treatment of Insular Celtic speakers by the British and French governments (and that of Native American languages by the nascent United States, or Aboriginal languages in Australia, and the list sadly goes on) as examples of this enforced cultural assimilation; while frequently enforced top-down by state education (in which children speaking the "wrong" language are beaten, for instance), it also, more pervasively, takes root from the bottom up when native speakers tragically see no use in teaching their native language to their children, thereby depriving it of vital new life and them of their cultural heritage.

(And on that cheery note we'll pause. Join us next week for the concluding half, in which I discuss how eye dialect fits into this framework by telling a Manc joke (aw yiss), how dialects/languages can use written tradition to legitimise their way from this linguistic oppression (with reference to Scots), and whether Broad Yorkshire in particular can ever expect to get one.)

On Reading Ambitiously

(As our maiden post, here's some thoughts on why I support tackling Big Things.)

I should say initially that I have no intention of using this title as an excuse to serve up my own fairly small list of Ambitious Things That I've Made It All the Way Through on a bed of Sniping at People Who Don’t Treat Reading as an Extreme Sport. If I end up slipping up and it comes across that way, please don't hesitate to catch your waiter's eye and send this back to the kitchen.

What I do mean to do is to make a case for moving consistently into deeper and more distant waters than those that you are used to. I've used "reading" as my main axis, but I take in my sights any medium with enough breadth to offer the choice.

(I should probably also mention that one of the things that has informed my view of this has been studying foreign languages and the debate/terror surrounding reading set texts "in the original". My view is that making the effort to do so is like seeing a painting in real life as opposed to in a textbook. Incidentally, if you’re not a native English speaker then not all of this will apply to you as is, though I think there are parallels.)

Don't Fear Them, Reader [link]

I think one of the best things about my education (fairly atypical in many respects) was that I was exposed to difficult things on a fairly frequent basis. I had a more-or-less unbroken succession of English teachers who threw The Classics (as distasteful as the canonisation drive is) at us, and indeed Classics teachers who did the same. I don't mean to imply that as an eleven-year-old I instantly got and appreciated the whole of Grey's Elegy, but that I was made aware of the existence of More Difficult Works, and shown that, while it would be impossible that I understand everything going on at first blush (even after puzzling over particular passages and looking up words and allusions, this being just before the Internet got serious), there was still value in attempting to grapple with something big, and the effort involved made what I did glean all the more valuable.

In short, I think that it taught me not to fear works. For me, this was an incredibly liberating feeling: once you have attained your literary maturity (more thoughts on which later), you essentially have the freedom of the whole of human civilization at your disposal. You are free to go up to any great Canon writer in the street, introduce yourself, and they will happily sit with you and hold a conversation. You might be surprised at how like you they and their characters are. The best part is that you can ask them to repeat themselves as many times as you like; it’s as though the same paragraphs or verses throw different shadows each time you read them, or gradually come more into focus as you grow. I don’t think educational background need necessarily affect your ability to do this – if you don’t get (say) a Classical mythology reference, you can look it up, and no-one will think less of you (or if they do, you have my full endorsement in smacking them about the face with a Classical Greek-English lexicon).

Taking Exception [link]

It's also possible, of course, that on meeting a particular writer you find that you don't really get on with them, or that you find that a writer that you once felt you had something in common with feels distant, or trivial. It will occasionally happen that their world-view strikes you as actively harmful, and so should be kept away from those at risk from it; sometimes you know this yourself as you used to get on with them, but now see that they affected you negatively, much as can happen with people. That case isn't really what we’re examining here, though.

How do you react to this lack of a spark? I think an indication of having achieved a certain level of growth is that you can like or dislike a work without needing to justify your decision, but without your decision needing to demonise or canonise the work in question. That is, you can dislike a particular author without needing to pass a value judgement on them, and without the need for a third party to agree with your judgement; if asked, you might be able to crystallise the particular reasons why you dislike their work, but your preference essentially stands alone, set in enough respect for its own validity that it doesn't need to beg.

In this light, dismissing an author (and again, this extends to musicians, painters and directors) becomes quite a serious statement. It implies a certain lack of respect - both for the author themselves but also for anyone who happens to enjoy their work. For works that incite jingoism, hatred and small-mindedness, it is precisely a lack of respect that we show by dismissing them, and with good reason. To my mind, though, it is a sign of immaturity to dismiss something that we once admired purely because we have grown out of it. I don't see any shame in writing for a particular audience; we don't dismiss teachers for spending their time with children instead of adults in their workplace. Who’s to say that in the future, you might not find what you enjoy now similarly childish? Or, indeed, that you might not find a new appreciation for what you now dismiss?

This requires a certain humility, even as it requires a certain level of pride. It seems to me that you have to say "I will not understand all of this, or I may see more than is in fact there" at the same time as saying "I am worthy of attempting to read this". There’s nothing to stop you going forth into the Canon and sampling its riches; all you have to do beyond paying the price of admission (which is frequently nothing in these days of Project Gutenberg and streaming) is to lay down the awful burden of needing to understand everything, or worse, to have everything explained to you.

Child- and Adult-Level Learning [link]

I think this latter curse comes from the schools method of learning being regretfully applied to literature. We take Hamlet and carve it into scene-by-scene homework analysis, predigested with modern English "translations", glossaries for old words and Classical allusions, and scene-by-scene summaries so that you never read an honest pentameter without a swarm of angry explanations cutting it into a train of textureless mouthfuls.

This is what I think of as child-level learning. As children (in the intellectual sense) we are presented with gobbets of information that are simply to be swallowed. This is in order to create a foundation for our adult understanding of the world. You don't need to know the rich history of the Latin alphabet, travelling as it has right from the Egyptian hieroglyphs through millennia of sacred knowledge to the present day, when you are learning to read and write; similarly, when bringing up a small child there is little place for negotiation - you tell it "no" without further discussion so that it learns to accept other people’s needs and opinions as equally and occasionally more valid than its own.

What I think of as adult-level learning requires what was learnt as a child as its spring-board. Instead of force-feeding, education takes the form of kindling: a teacher ignites the fire of interest in a particular field by dousing the dry materials with just enough explanation that the resultant passion can sustain itself, and steps back as the pupil's knowledge hopefully feeds itself. On this level the goal of teaching is not to fill the pupil with enough solid foundation that they can function in general in adult society (or, more cynically, that they can pass a series of exams), but to present a particular view of a subject that will excite their pupil's intelligence so that they charge forward into it in search of more.

You could compare this to the learning of a musical instrument, or of a foreign language. If you are learning on a child-level basis, you will swallow enough (hopefully) to be able to perform in an exam or on the spot if absolutely necessary; if you move to an adult-level one, you will spend your free time practising and perfecting for the sheer enjoyment of it, and achieve more than you ever could on the child level.

Invitation to a Canon Ball [link]

If you have never had this experience in reading (or other media), then I can give you no greater gift than to suggest that you find a copy of a Shakespeare play and just read it straight through. I would recommend Hamlet or The Tempest if you haven't had them dissected in school, or failing that any of the better known tragedies or comedies; get an edition with absolutely no critical apparatus to distract you. (The Gutenberg editions I've linked might be a bit stark, but there are plenty of others if you look around.) Start at the beginning, and read. There will be words and references you don't understand, sure, but ignore them, or try to guess them from context. If you don't understand a passage at all, by all means go back and read it again, or just move on. Resist the urge to look up the answers. Read the words aloud in your head, and (if you're not going to disturb anyone), try reading out a speech or two. Don't stop until you get to the end. They're not that long without the critical padding.

Hopefully what will happen is that the beauty, wit and magic of the play will come alive for you. You are sitting face-to-face with Shakespeare over coffee, and he's cancelled his plans for the afternoon to sit quietly with you and tell you a story. You end up laughing frequently. The whole place is empty apart from the two of you; every now and then he smiles at you as he talks as if to say, "I hope you like this part. I'm proud of it - I wrote it as a present, just for you." This is the magic trick with great works - he says the same to everyone who reads it, and for everyone who reads it it's still true.

You have the right to stride into the Canon and order whatever you want; all you have to do is to allow your teeth the time to sharpen, if you've only been fed on lighter fare before. I think it really is enriching to take on a work that feels as though it's heavier than you are. There's certainly a joyful feeling of achievement in getting onto familiar terms with a name you'd normally see written about to show off a character's erudition - they rarely bite.

Constructive Criticism [link]

And then, if you like, you should read a critical evaluation. I don't know about you, but I never read the introduction to a book before I read the book itself. It means that you're no longer alone with the author - you've got some interloper sitting next to you butting in with "Well actually, I think..." every couple of seconds. If you read criticism afterwards (in the proper sense of the word, that is, "judgement" as in "weighing up"), you have your own knowledge of the work in question, and it becomes more of an even discussion. Frequently, if the critic is a good one, you will end up with new perspectives on the work which will add to your own appreciation of it - but they won't ever try to replace yours, or suggest that they know "the real" so-and-so, and if they do you should feel free to take what they're saying with a large pinch of salt. (Also, by that I don't mean to knock really good stuff like the Introducing... series. I'd say that's more like giving you a push so you don't end up flat on your face with the Big Things.)

This is what real analysis is, if you've only ever been made to find all the instances of Atticus Finch being a good father in To Kill a Mockingbird. You read a phrase or a work, it makes a certain impression on you, you try to fish out what it is about it that made you feel that way. There might be currents underneath the surface that you had no conscious awareness of; a good critic will make the case for their existence, and if you deem it valid they will add to your understanding of the work in question. Good analysis never makes its subject less alive. It might mean that you can no longer take the work seriously, but it will not make you incapable of seeing it as anything more than a collection of bones, cartilage and soft tissues percolating a puddle of blood.

In Summary...

My intention has been to try to convince you, if you are unconvinced, that attempting to fight above what you feel is your weight is a worthwhile and nourishing thing to do. I would be distraught to think that this comes across as a defence of singing the praises of "having read" books - what I mean to suggest is that expanding your "reading for fun" books (or "consuming for fun" media) to include ambitious things (even if they don’t end up agreeing with you) is a rich and rewarding experience, and more than worth the increase in intellectual outlay over, say, rereading a young adult novel series.

(Don't take the link attacks too seriously. They're not meant to be. Hope that was at least thought-inducing, and see you in a week!)