MULTILINGUALISM
Multilingualism is like juggling cats, amazing
when you see it, but a right-minded person would call some Animal Protection
Officer. And it is a fraud! Anyone can do it, provided you don’t want to say
that much. We are all capable of saying hello, where’s the toilet, sorry I
dribbled down your cleavage, in every single language in the world. All you
need do is learn a few simple phrases. But try explaining how to change a car
tire, and even the most multi-lingual of lingualists is a dead loss. And
the more multi-lingual a lingualist they are, the more confusing things get…
Unscrew the what with the what, and why? The words will be
obscure, if learnt at all, and no linguist is ever saying what they think they
are saying.
In Hong Kong, for instance, no-body changes
their tires when they wear out; they change their cars! There is thus no
translation available that makes any sense to anyone.
But then who needs someone else’s language when
you’re trying to get them to change your tire? It is far more useful to beat
them with a stick. The British built an empire on knowing little more than:
“Whatto, how’s it going? Take that you swine!”
MULTIMORONISM
It is a scientific fact that as soon as we learn
to speak one language, the language acquisition centres of the brain die and
fall out of our noses. From then on we are all language morons. We need a lot
of motivation to torture ourselves with a second language.
A language class is a stressful and dunce laden
affair. Is this the train to Croydon, we might ask despite never knowing what a
Croydon is or whether there is any point in having a meaningful relationship
with one. And most certainly there is no Chinese word for it! Therefore it is
not a concept universally acknowledged, and not going to get you far on the
MTR, and even less far on the MRT if you’re in Singapore.
But then, who is going to ask anyway, especially
if you are a man, and you have a map with a big dot saying you are here?
Confused? You will be. That’s the state of mind of everyone in a language
class.
As for having a conversation in which meaningful
cultural exchanges can take place, you have to be joking! For a start, what
does “you have to be joking” mean anyway? It is just stuff you say. So
why translate?
In Cantonese it turns into something like “you
must be fixing/teaching a mistake/error” but then you would never say that in
the sort of sentence where I’ve used it.
Most of what we say is untranslatable gibberish,
so to have any chance of saying anything meaningful, for an Englishman, is to
gibber in English and not attempt to gibber in foreign where the only people
you fool are those who know no better. Bi-lingual, my arse! You’re just having
me on! Y’what?
SPEAK A THE GLOBISH
The question is, is multimoronism the same for a
Cantonese born and bred speaker? And the answer is, not quite, because English
for all its mysteries quite likes gibberish. You can gibber away in
outrageously bad English and native speakers will fill in the gaps for you. This
is how it has come to dominate the world. If you want to remain a cultural
backwater wallowing in increasingly irrelevant and backward looking ideologies,
then just have a language that cannot be understood unless spoken correctly.
Living in Hong Kong I have managed to acquire some
Cantonese. Ten years of hard labour brought me to a level where I discovered
that the intense conversation around me was concerned with the price of fish.
Nobody was discussing the analects of Confucius. Nobody was delving into the
working methods of Wong Kar Wai, and if they were, they were doing it in
English.
About the only thing one did want to hear about,
the dirty stuff about celebrities posting their sexual shenanigans on the
Internet, were not the sort of thing anyone cared to talk about in faltering
conversation with a gweilo. So another ten years of waiting for general
usage to sink in through practice, as promised by the teachers of language
courses, has resulted mostly in my forgetting everything despite being
completely immersed in it.
Jimmy Lai, a man not averse to showing dirty
linen on the front pages of his newspapers, declared that gweilo’s don’t want
to read about that stuff because they aren’t interested in anything about Hong
Kong. He’s wrong. Completely and utterly wrong and totally correct all at the
same time but not for reasons he would even think of.
This is the stuff we do want to know. In fact it
is the only stuff we really want to know in Hong Kong, because that's what
makes you feel at home. It’s the gossip of the village. We talk about each
other and how everyone is an arsehole - except for me and you and I’m not so
sure about you. But gossip is untranslatable. No matter how much
Cantonese we know, we wont get it, because it is couched in the private and
mostly meaningless code this sort of stuff is couched in, in all societies.
Ooh, you what? Never? Did he? Give it one with bells on. And nobody ever
teaches this stuff and the reason why is because it’s impossible to learn and
if it isn’t, I want to know what I was paying all that money for in lessons?
DON’T SPEAK A THE GLOBISH!
When there are attempts to bring the Cantonese
world into the Hong Kong Gweilo world, it always evokes bewilderment. Trying to
explain what compensated-dating a pseudo-model means makes it as dull as the
whole process of learning a foreign language. The salacious and
scandalous becomes a moment where all one can utter in response is, “Y’what?”
And be greeted with puzzled stares. If one is a Cantonese dabbler, one tries to
get out of it with a plea for explication: kindly explain to me what is so
“pseudo” about a girl who poses for photographs in a professional capacity,
thus in English acquiring the descriptive name of model, as in Photographic
Model, or Bikini Model, or Artists Model, especially if she’s naked?
You end up sounding like you’ve the sense of
humour of a German. “Y’what?” is the only response to that, except in Cantonese
nobody says that. They say something like, “Hahaha,” meaning “how embarrassing
to have you show how stupid you are.” And as for compensated dating, which as
most Englishmen know, is the norm because all dates cost money and you spend it
in the hope off a little late night sympathy, one is never going to get to the
bottom of it.
The solution then is to create Mangalese. Just
as English has become Globish. Cantonese has to develop a mangled form that
Hong Kong native speakers can learn in schools so that they understand people
like me!
MANGELESE
Those who are born between cultures might
genuinely get to understand this stuff better than the rest of us. But it is up
to them to popularise the language. We all have too much to do to waste energy
on trying to get beyond a few ‘ow’d’you doos. It is far better to spend
the time learning something useful like plumbing, a skill not practiced in Hong
Kong largely because so much energy is spent on extra English tuition trying to
iron out the quirks of Chinglish.
A shower head that squirts clean warm water and
not a trickle of scalding brown water, would go a lot further towards
increasing communication skills than tri-lingual education systems that succeed
in creating more confusion than enlightenment. So why not settle for
Chinglish, and augment that with Mangelese so that those of us coming to
Cantonese from English, can meet the culture halfway?
What is needed is a great sage to announce that communication is superior to language and that it is not a failure of character if one is a language dunce. It is just the grand plan of natural evolution and interfering with it is to court extinction. So let us work on communication not on language?