MDMD2: The First Thing They'll Ask ...

[Dave Monroe]

"'Come, Sir,-- what's the first thing they'll ask when you get back to 
County Durham?  Eh?  'Did ye see them rahde the Eeahr at Taahburn?'
   "Is it too many nights alone on top of that fam'd Hill in Greenwich? can 
this man, living in one of the great Cities of Christendom, not know how to 
behave around people?--  Dixon decides to register only annoyance.  'Nooah, 
the first thing they'll ask is, 'Did thoo understand 'em the weeay they 
talk, down theere...?'"
   "Oh, damme, I say, I didn't mean,--" (M&D, Ch. 3, 15)

Of course, it'll be Mason's turn to be mortified at Dixon's behavior shortly 
("'There's this Jesuit, this Corsican, and this Chinaman ...'" to "'Are you 
crazy?' he whispers, '-- People are staring.  Sailors are staring'" [pp. 
15-6]).  Yet more complementarities (urban/rural, center/periphery, 
academician/autodidact, bourgeois/working class et al.) betwixt M & D ...

But I think you all get what's going on here, indeed, I believe Paul 
Nightingale (?) commented on this a little while back, well, the politics of 
language here, class 'n' dialect 'n' so forth.  Mason assumes an unmarked, 
"standard" nature for his own speech, only to have Dixon deconstruct Mason's 
assumption of (logo)centrality by pointing out that he is speaking yet 
another dialect ...

>From Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia UP, 1961), 
Pt. 2, Sec. 4, "The Growth of 'Standard English,'" pp. 214-29 ...

"The importance of speech as an indicator of social class is not likely to 
go underestimated by anyone who has lived in England...." (p. 214)

"... usually ... class speech will be a form of the ordinary speech of a 
region, and the relations between this class dialect and the ordinary speech 
of the region ... form a complex of great importance in the development of a 
language.  In the case of English, the sensitivity of this complex is very 
high: a very large number of Englishmen have become tense and anxious about 
the way in which they speak their own language.  This problem has a deep 
bearing on the development of English society ...." (p. 215)

"In any language, it is the development of major central 
institutions--government, law, learning, religion, and literature--which 
leads to the emergence of a reasonably common language among men drawn from 
various parts of the region to take part in these central activities.  But, 
under Norman rule, this central language was alien, and the removal of these 
centralizing tendencies [1204] in English led to a greater variation in 
ordinary dialects.  When modern English emerged [ca. 1500, following the 
legal recognition of English in 1362], as the language of these central 
institutions, the relation of the centre to the outlying areas was more 
complex than hitherto.  However, the centralizing tendencies continued to 
operate, and slowly the speech of the centre became accepted as the basis of 
the new common language.  The old East Midland dialect, with some influences 
from other rehios, became the basis of the common language of the centre.  
Yet it is less the rise of one reghional dialect than the emergence of a 
class dialect.  The regional dialect had the advantage of being spoken in an 
area reaching to the capital, London, and the two universities of Oxford and 
Cambridge...." (pp. 217-8)

And recall Dixon's markedly non-Oxbridge edumacation ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=697&sort=date

But to continue from The Venerable Williams ...

"But the new common language, from the beginning, showed marked differences 
from the speech of the ordinary inhabitants of these cities....  In the 
written language, particularly, this divergence was quite evident, and it 
was largely from the forms of this written language, which when spoken still 
showed the results of regional influence, that the new common language 
spread over England." (p. 218)

"Between the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries, Englishmen 
in touch with the central institutions wrote a common language, but still, 
in diminsihing degree, spoke it differently." (p. 218)

"The class-structure of England was now decisively changing, at the 
beginning of a period which can be summed up as the effort of the rising 
middle-class to establish its own common speech." (p. 219)

"The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a strenuous effort to 
rationalize Englsih by a number of differently motivated groups.  The Royal 
Society's Committee 'for improving the English tongue' (1664) represents the 
effort of a new scientific philosophy to clarify the language for its own 
kind of discourse.  A different group, running from Addison and Swift to 
Pope and Johnson, were concerned with the absence of a 'polite standard' in 
the new society.  Yet behind these intellectual groups there was the 
practiucal pressure of a newly powerful and self-conscious middle class 
which ... thought 'correctness' a systematic thing which had simply to be 
acquired." (p. 220)

"Common pronuciation (as distinct from regional variations) changed 
considerably during this period: partly through ordinary change, partly 
through the teaching of 'correctness'.  English spelling, as is now well 
known, is in fact extremely unreliable as a guide to pronunciation ...." (p. 
221)

"An amusing sidelight on this process is the development, in literature, in 
journalism, of an 'orthography of the uneducated'.  It has been one of the 
principal amusements of the English middle class to record the hideousness 
of people who say orf, or wot, even though these can spell the standard 
pronunciations.  The error consists in supposing that the ordinary spelling 
indicates how proper people speak." (pp. 221-2)

"Between about 1775 and 1850, what is later called 'Received Standard' 
pronunciation changed markedly...." (p. 223)

"It was no longer one kind of Ennglish, or even a useful common dialect, but 
'correct English,' 'good English,' 'pure English,' 'standard English'.  In 
its name, thousands of people have been capable of the vulgar insolence of 
telling other Englishment that they do not know how to speak their own 
language....  this attitude spread from being simply a class distinction to 
a point where it was possible to identify the making of these sounds with 
being educated ...." (p. 224)

"It is now customary, in language theory, to mark three kinds of English 
speech: Received Standard, whose history we have been tracing; Regional 
Dialects, the varied survivors of many localities; and Modified Standard, 
which has gained currency in varying kinds in different areas, representing 
a development from regional dialects but falling short of Received Standard.
   "Most people who use this classification are, of course, attached by 
their own speech habits to 'Received Standard' ...." (p. 224)

And see also ...

Aarslef, Hans.  The Study of Language in England,
   1780-1860.  Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983 [1979].

Crowley, Tony.  Standard English and the Politics
   of Language.  Urbana: U of Illionois P, 1989.

Smith, Olivia.  The Politics of Language, 1791-1819.
   New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Not to mention ...


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