LETTERS: THE PRIDE OF LANGUAGE

To the editor:

Once again on Ebonics: It seems the arguments do not go away. They would not have arisen if those who write and speak on the topics had a grounding in language history. Such a study shows that since at least the days of Sanskrit, about 3000 B.C., we have taken pride in our language system. In the study of some ancient languages, students were summarily executed if they did not learn the grammar properly. The rage for order is not new, and it is understandable when we consider that the first, but not the only, aim of language is to communicate.

When the lady at the ticket booth in Edinburgh tells me that the bus leaves from Platform E and notes that I write "E," she excitedly corrects me and says, "No. E as in Epple." I would have wound up far in the Highlands had we not solved that. An Old Testament story tells of a tribe of soldiers who cannot pronounce "Th" even when their lives depend on it.

We often communicate more than we intend to. And old wives' tale has long argued that there are no class differences in the speech of the Icelanders and that the archbishop and the fisherman's wife speak exactly the same. In America we have paid a price for not having a king and, consequently, has not learned to speak the King's English. That's OK with me. But dictionaries and language guides record the speech patterns of an elite, educated people. The earliest American universities were established to train ministers and priests.

But language serves esthetic purposes as well as crass, pragmatic ones, and we should not be surprised that an argument for Ebonics, and what that argument implies, has arisen after we no longer speak in defense of lyric poetry or teach it. An American poet wrote:

My mother knows the loveliest tricks, of words and words and words,

her speech comes out as smooth and sleek as breasts of shining birds.

She shapes her speech all silver fine because she loves it so,

And her own eyes begin to shine to hear her stories grow ... .

We had not dreamed these things could be of laughter and of mirth,

Her speech is as a thousand eyes through which we see the earth.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau