Today's Laundry

19 December 2009

Madrid

So Google has been fined about 400,000 euros for digitizing French language books. What idiots occupy these positions of responsibility in the French Government? Language, and literature, are, if not originally, open-source cultural tools, aren’t they? Yes, if you write something and copyright it, it’s yours for a time and you get to make money off it. Fair enough. What doesn’t make sense is for some narrow-minded linguistic chauvinist to participate further in the murder of a beautiful language. A hundred and fifty years ago – I was going to write ‘a hundred years ago’ but my asseveration wouldn’t have been true – French was pretty much on a par with English, a world language. Today you can speak it in France, at least in France outside of Paris where any attempt by a foreigner to communicate in the local lingo is regarded as an act of lese majeste. You can try it in the countryside of that beautiful country and it’s bienvenue, no matter how fractured your pronunciation and limited your vocabulary. You can speak it in Quebec, in Gabon, in the rest of Francophone Africa, in Haiti and a few other places but that’s pretty much it. When I was in college we were conned by French language grifters who persuaded us to take courses in the tongue and then disillusioned further when we learned that if you wanted to work in a French speaking country, you were more likely than not to end up in some desperately poor, malarial dictatorship.

So, we’re witnessing the further decline of French. The lesson is that if you don’t make your cultural patrimony accessible, it becomes ossified, fit only for a museum. Literature – even the bad stuff – needs to be available if it’s going to make any difference to people. In France they’ve decided not to participate in the democratization of literature and culture that is being delivered for other tongues across the internet. You won’t be able to call up a free copy of an out-of-print and out-of-copyright book in that language. Spanish has sped by French as a world language and English is completely dominant (I recall over-hearing a business conversation some years ago in the lobby of a Seoul hotel whose participants were Finnish, Chinese, Russian and Japanese, all speaking some form of English). Chinese is not far behind and Arabic and the Turkic languages will no doubt all have an international role. Only French will not be at the party and that’s because the fools decided not to attend, despite being cordially welcomed if they did.

And in Catalunya they continue to march backwards. A meaningless referendum was held for about a third of the voters in the region this past week. About a third of that one-third actually bothered to vote. The vote was to express support for Catalunyan autonomy/independence. So, let’s see, one-third of one-third is about one-ninth I think. Seventy percent of that one-ninth voted for some form of independence, amounting, in the end, to less than 10% of the voting age population. Hell, I bet that you’d get more voting for Texas independence!

So what is Catalunyan independence about? I reckon it’s about inferiority. The entire region is riven with a resentful, hard-headed dislike of Madrid and Castilla in general. There’s a history behind this, Franco was rough on the place. But Franco died a long time ago and Spain is now part of the EU. The central Government spends a lot of money on Catalunya and there’s no reason for this silly posturing.

Catalan is a ridiculous language. It is something between French and Spanish. If it wants to survive and people want to speak it, I’ve no problem. When the misbegotten regional government in Barcelona decided, however, that there wasn’t enough of it being spoken and it began to promote its use over Spanish, it was a body blow to the economy. Catalunya has always had a strong, industrial economy. Its people are creative and enterprising. Hobbling it with a requirement that forces the use of Catalan in place of a more international tongue is even worse than what their cousins across the Pyrenees are doing with French. There are very few people who speak Catalan but there are now signs in Barcelona that tell you it’s okay to reply in Catalan when someone addresses you in Spanish. The schools require students to learn Catalan. It’s no surprise that more and more back-office work is being transferred to Madrid where I suspect the regional Government doesn’t care whether you answer your phone in Spanish, French, English, Mandarin or even Catalan; the point is to communicate and get the work done.

Barcelona needs to take a lesson from the Dutch. There is no stupid language posturing. The Dutch speak Dutch, German, French, whatever they need to get things done. You can walk into a shop virtually anywhere in the country and do your shopping in whatever language you want, your money is what does the talking. Be practical Catalunya!

Whew! I feel better.