sightseeing; the English language

It’s been a sightseeing day so far, but now I’m going to take it easy and do some philosophy— reading over Meillassoux’s Bristol paper again, for instance. (He is being worthily replaced by Alberto Toscano for the event, but his paper will have some sort of presence there.)

STONEHENGE. I’ve always wanted to see it, and in fact that’s why I came to Salisbury (which turns out to be well worth visiting in its own right). Stonehenge reminds me of the Sphinx, both for its world-historic air of mystery and for the fact that it is physically much smaller than you would expect. (As opposed to the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower, which both blew me away with unexpected physical massiveness.) Seeing Stonehenge was of course fascinating, though being there in person didn’t spark any new theories in my mind as to what it was for. That might sound like a truism, but it’s not— in most cases I have found new monuments and cities to be nothing like what I expected, and also intelligible in new ways once I encountered them in person. They often do spark new historical theories in my mind. I think you do have to see things in person to get a grasp on them… My entire view of ancient Greece, for instance, is totally different now that I have the actual Acropolis in my mind rather than some fantasy image of it gleaned from books and photos and films (the latter are never quite accurate enough).

To give another example, I often forget that most readers of this blog have never set foot in Cairo, and so must be imagining something completely different from the reality, just as I myself did for many years…

(Incidentally, the one monument that I loved much more than expected was the Taj Mahal. I went there as a sort of touristic duty, but the Taj is a stunning object. The only other physical thing that I find equally hypnotic is the famous gold mask of King Tutankhamun, which is of course much smaller. The Taj Mahal looks like it’s made of pure ivory, and better yet, it subtly changes color every couple of minutes as the sun changes position. Unfortunately, Agra is such a hellhole of tourist harassment that I actually wedged a chair against my hotel door while sleeping, since even the hotel desk guys were hassling me into hiring their cousins as guides. Small mobs of rickshaw drivers tugging on my shirt in the street, and so forth. The only place I’ve ever had it as bad as that was at the Pyramids in Giza, where they seem to have assembled an all-star team of the 300 most evil Egyptians in one place to try to ruin your life. Everywhere else in Egypt is bearable, including Luxor. When you go to the Pyramids, simply do not engage in human interactions with anybody there, since they are all underhanded manipulators and sneaks. Ignoring them is the only way to appreciate those majestic structures. Leave the Pyramids and a few other unfortunate harassment sites, and you will find the warm, hospitable Egyptians I know so well.)

OLD SARUM : On the way back I got off at Old Sarum, a place I knew nothing about. This is a huge earthwork which was, essentially, Salisbury before Salisbury was built. That mere hilltop in the middle of farmland actually had a castle and a cathedral on top! All you’ll see now is the remains of stone walls and a former city gateway. Salisbury was built to replace it in the 1220’s, apparently due to water supply problems. The large structures up there seem to have been torn down in the 1500’s.

Incidentally, it’s a bit surprising that Salisbury wasn’t bombed to rubble in WWII, given that the Spitfire was manufactured here. What I’m told is that Luftwaffe pilots were under strict orders not to harm Salisbury, since the Cathedral was used as a valuable navigational marker for the bombing of other English cities (a fact apparently learned only during post-war interviews of Luftwaffe pilots).

I’ve also been interested by my minor struggles speaking English with the English. The only other place that really happened to me was in Yorkshire 5 or 6 years ago. Yes, I realize that Newcastle has a reputation for speaking a form of the language nearly unintelligible to outsiders, but I didn’t have that problem during my half-day in Newcastle in 2003 (presumably because they recognized me as an outsider and spoke differently than they otherwise would have).

The difficult thing is trying to figure out what it is, exactly, about the way they speak in Wiltshire that makes me need a few seconds to figure out what they’re saying. Is it a different stress pattern from my own, or different vowel sounds, or what exactly ? I’m still trying to get a handle on the issue. It just takes 2 or 3 tries, and then I get what they’re saying. They’re having the same problem with me, naturally.

Of course it’s only a matter of time until English goes the route of Latin splitting up into the Romance languages. A fun taste of this can already be had in India. I’m not even speaking of the interesting and familiar accent of the English spoken in India, but of the written form of the language. One of my favorite things to do in India is simply read the newspaper. Perhaps 1% of the words are completely unknown to me, while others are known but used in a slightly different manner, or in a way that would be quaint or unidiomatic in other English-speaking parts of the world. For instance, my favorite newspaper story in Chennai last spring was about a police crackdown on “rowdies, goons, and dreaded gangsters,” all immediately intelligible of course, but also something that you’d find in the U.S. only in a different decade– if ever.

If I had the proverbial “time machine,” one thing I’d use it for is to sample different descendants of the English language in various parts of the globe 1,000 years from now.