Book Review·Storybook｜Language Controversy in Speak Not & Fricatives

【Thank you for the invitation to "Suffix"】

The new book, Speak Not, was introduced by The New Yorker a few months ago, and seeing the last part of it was about Cantonese's struggles with a Mandarin-dominated language, plus Hebrew's past and present, I'm very impressed. I wanted to read, and I had the opportunity to post a book review, so I wrote to the editor/professor, asking if I could write a book review for "Speak Not", and explained that I wanted to incorporate my experience of living in Israel and Cantonese-speaking regions. The reply was, "We've arranged for someone to write it." If it was just such a refusal, it would be fine, but the editor/professor also added, "And the person who was arranged is a linguistics professor." Seeing this, the anger in my heart rushed up, hurt by her unspoken meaning. I have dealt with this editor/professor several times because of publishing articles and poems, and I feel that it is not very good. After submitting the article, whenever I have to send a letter every few months, she will always say that you need me A large number of revisions are strictly suppressed. However, the revisions generally do not exceed five revisions. This time in particular, the last sentence seems to say that linguistics professors are more advanced than any other reader who wants to review the book.

I grew up in a university, and I didn’t think that professors were any better than ordinary people. On the contrary, my observation since childhood told me that professors are not as good as many simple middle- and lower-class manual workers in terms of life, academics, and behavior. I don't like the editor/professor's presupposition. The linguistics professor may write professional book reviews, but the TA may not have the experience that I have lived in these two places for several years, and the perspectives must be different. Is the shallowness of this editor/professor.

So, I'm just curious, just how appealing this book is to linguistics professors?

" Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language " covers the three main languages - Welsh, Hawaiian and Cantonese; it also includes two interspersed languages - African languages and Hebrew. Judging from the subtitle "Empire, Identity, and Language Politics", this book is more inclined to sociolinguistics, mainly analyzing the frictions and compromises and language politics between a language and mainstream languages from the perspective of history and social background. From Welsh to Hawaiian, the author objectively introduces readers to Welsh and Hawaiian's historical background and role in language politics.

And the third part: Cantonese will be my focus. The author mentions that Cantonese is a language that has been spoken since the 4th century AD. As of today, there are about 7 million people in Hong Kong and 73 million people around the world, most of them in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Canada and other places. Like the previous two languages, the author rewinds the time to nearly two hundred years ago, starting from the opening of the port, speaking of the development of Cantonese, the process of being/disapproved, and why Cantonese has become a language used by a large number of people overseas.

For example, as a ceded colony, in 1877 the Governor of Hong Kong, Hennessy, became the first leader to encourage the use of English within the Chinese community. Since then, English has gradually become the language of schools and other public and public service places, and has continued for a hundred years.

Fast forward time to the transition between Chinese and English, and the title of the chapter is also changed to "Cantonese gives you nasal cancer" in the "friction" between Mandarin and Cantonese! The author states that,

 “Just as with Tibetan or Uyghur languages, which have been heavily suppressed in recent decades, Cantonese connects a speaker with an identity, history and culture that is outside the government's control, and is therefore seen as a potential threat to the Communist Party's grip on power.”

"【例句】Like Tibetan or Uyghur, which have been severely suppressed in recent decades, Cantonese also connects Cantonese speakers in terms of identity, history, and culture, which happens to be outside the control of the government and is therefore subject to Seen as a potential threat to the CCP gathering power." At the same time, the following absurd "news" appeared:

After the Sino-British handover was completed and a large number of Mandarin speakers poured into Hong Kong, the friction between Mandarin and Cantonese has been stalemate. Cantonese identities stand in stark contrast to many Mandarin-speaking identities who think speaking in dialects is uncivilized and irrelevant. Cantonese, threatened in Hong Kong, the land that nourishes it. However, what about abroad?

The penultimate chapter of Speak Not is titled " Sounds of Separatism ". Suddenly, the narrator is known to focus on "I", and the perspective changes from a quiet historical and social background narration to a more subjective perspective that seems to be in it. The author described the occupation of the Legislative Council during the 19-year anti-amendment movement, specifically how to wear a gas mask, how to feel the police tear gas, and all the details the author saw at the scene. After careful reading, I found that the author James Griffiths From Wales but living in Hong Kong. Therefore, during the anti-amendment movement, I obtained first-hand material on the scene as a media. It is precisely what happened that Hong Kong ushered in a wave of immigration.

At this point, I can't help but think of " Fricatives " ("Fricatives") by Eric Yip, a young poet from Hong Kong who recently won the UK National Poetry Competition. Instead of the Cantonese-Mandarin friction in "Speak Not", "Fricatives" melts the Cantonese-English friction in exile into steaming rice.

This poem is full of themes of identity, culture, language, race, exile, etc., each of which is very large, but is subtly turned into short, specific moments and meaningful by the poet - as a student constantly practicing foreign language pronunciation in order to eliminate the Hong Kong accent; The pain in exile that can be called "writing material"; the sex that seems to happen unequally in the backstreet; the heart of the mother when she came to visit relatives, etc...

Susan Sontag said in "Against Interpretation" that interpreters of Kafka's "Castle" could form three armies. Everyone has a castle that they can never walk. If you are a Freudian psychology school, what you may read in "The Castle" will naturally inspire you to "sex", "Sex Drive", etc. If you are a sociologist, it may be more convenient to discuss the castle that can never be reached from the perspective of the huge state institution and social composition; if, if... In book reviews or academia sometimes I read some esoteric approaches, but there is not only one way of interpretation for a poem, and thousands of interpretations are ultimately interpretations, and it is not necessarily right for the author to verify. Remember the "blue curtain"? Maybe the author just saw a blue curtain?

Eric's award-winning poem has more than a theme, on the contrary, the theme of "Fricción" feels many and large after reading the whole poem, but it is very finely kneaded, small, and fine to the white of hot rice. end. With so many themes, Eric has touched the identity, language, and cultural collisions that scholars and poets can't write about, and appropriately introduced small scenes , such as "you" who gave oral sex in the backstreet. The "you" here refers to a general and vaguely specific, as if the poet has clearly pointed out who is in what position, however, it is not.

Eric's poems also contain the most familiar bond of "parents" in our Confucian culture. That's right, how can such a situation be without the shadow of the parents? In such a struggle, in the backstreet accompanied by urination, did the "you" in the poem become the pride of the parents?

This book and this poem have always revolved around the theme of "language". Poetry is more similar, so when reading a poem, you will feel that you see a mouth👄, and the opening and closing of the mouth 👄 will always be reminiscent of sex, and think of the behavior in the backstreet described by the poet. This is also true. However, what I like about "Fricatives" is the breadth of topics it covers and the details of its description; and what I like about "Speak Not" is its breadth and depth, including its rich depictions of Hong Kong, Cantonese, and other languages. Yiddish, Hebrew, etc. They make language no longer just the "language" of many people, but contaminate the society, history, politics, struggle, entanglement, tolerance and connection that are constantly cut and chaotic.

It's "July 1" soon. Twenty-five years. Hong Kong has fallen into such a situation, and Cantonese has also entered such a situation. Diaspora in Hong Kong has never stopped, and even continues. The more suppressed a language is, the more it will bounce back. Culture, identity and identity are very difficult to dissolve, and even if it is easy to think about it sometimes, its backlash can be very powerful. This is the same with Yiddish-speaking Jews. Now, the younger generation of Jews does not speak Yiddish much, but there is a fever for learning Yiddish. Why? Many young people are willing to keep the memory of their grandparents in this way. Many grandfathers were survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and to retain the endangered language they speak is to say "Never Again" to totalitarianism, Nazism and crimes against humanity. a way. That's good. Therefore, this article is also dedicated to Hong Kong, the place that will always retain its original color in my heart.