The concept that attempts to shape the language used to ones advantage as being a peculiar invention or tool of the left is asinine enough. If the left differs from the right in this arena it is in their ineptness not in their over use of this method. One example alone the re-branding of the estate tax alone as the "death tax" alone is enough to show the right uses such language play both self consciously and to great effect. But in reality such language play goes back to time immemorial.
However Mr. Gordon's article on the use of diacritical marks goes well beyond this sophistry into a land of rhetoric that makes "I am rubber and you are glue what you call me bounces and sticks on you." Look positively brilliant by comparison.
Firstly the absence of use of diacritical marks is largely due to two temporary circumstances. Firstly Diacritical marks used to be difficult to produce in many documents. Often times they would be hand written above typed words and then the work printed from a photographic plate of the result. Secondly the large expansion of higher education associated with the Baby Boomer generation produced college students that had less strenuous backgrounds, especially in language.
An example of the type of students who attended college previously were some of my classmates who had attended a prominent Catholic school in New Orleans. They were quite proficient at both Latin and Greek. I received a collection of college books from my Lutheran minster and many of them where in Latin and German. An African American Professor who taught me in the 1990's said that if I were serious about academia as a profession I would learn German.
Until the sixties it was quite common for text books written in English to just go off for pages in untranslated this or that. I can't say the number of times that I have read the sentences along the lines of -- And the most important thing to remember is followed by up to several pages of untranslated text in a foreign language, most often German.
Now both trends have changed. Computers have made it much easier to add diacritical marks. And University admissions have gotten much more competitive again. Foreign language is taken much more seriously.
Diacritical marks aren't just some decoration. They convey meaning, often meaning as important as the letters. While it is perfectly possible to read English without the vowels, it is almost impossible especially for a foreigner to read pinyin without the diacritical marks that are essential to meaning. Pinyin itself is a version of Chinese writing using Latin letters. The diacritical marks represent tones. Different tones make different words. The wrong tone can transfer an innocuous term into a grave insult.
Why would you want less information. And writing in Commentary's Contention blog Mr. Gordon should certainly value the desire of people to learn the language of their ancestors. Using the correct words helps English language learners of foreign languages of all stripes.
The idea that this is some one way street is also ridiculous. Reading almost any foreign paper you can find no end of English words. China now produces many books in Pinyin primarily for foreign readers. And the use of native words can convey real meaning. Even in the Pentateuch even where the words are exactly the same the old testament and the Torah represent very different works whose separate religious and historical traditions have attributed very different meanings to the same passages. To refer to the Old Testament when one means the Torah is an error not a convenience.
I don't know what Gordon is trying to convey. Does he not want to provide the reader with important information about the meaning of what he is writing. Does he only read English and no other language? Has he not read anything printed before 1950? Or, is he just a big DooDoo head?
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