What happens to the Russian language in the age of the Internet? Will we soon unlearn how to read books? Is illiteracy alone behind the epidemics of word distortion? And is it good to return to the practice of exam papers? One of the leading Russian philologists, Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Higher School of Economics Gasan Huseynov talks about this and many other things.
Psychologies: Today there is a lot of talk about the dangers of the influence of the Internet on our language. Do you agree with these concerns?
Gasan Huseynov: Any technology influences the language. For example, the philologist Roman Timenchik once wrote a wonderful article «On the Symbolism of the Telephone in Russian Poetry.» And it describes some of the features of speech and behavior acquired by a person precisely with the advent of the telephone. Let’s say a telephone — an ordinary old stationary device — was usually placed under a mirror. And people, talking, often looked at him. Our great-great-great-grandfathers, when they saw our grandfathers by the phone, could probably say that they behave the way people used to behave at the altar. In this sense, the telephone has changed a person a little as an anthropological type. In general, there is a normal technological development. It is always associated with fears, but photography did not kill painting in its time, cinema did not kill photography, and television did not kill cinema.
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But what about, for example, epidemics of deliberate distortion of words that come from the Internet?
G. G .: All this was before, long before any Internet. It seems that Dovlatov has a funny story about how Brodsky was walking around Leningrad at night with Anatoly Naiman and suddenly asked where the Southern Cross was in the sky — which, as you know, is not visible in our hemisphere. Nyman, laughing, advised Brodsky to find the article «astronomy» in the encyclopedia with the letter «A». And Brodsky, in response, suggested that Naiman himself look there for the letter “A” for the article “astro-mind”. This is a violation of the rules, a play on words — a feature of a creative person, lined on all sides with fences and barbed wire made of language. And of course, such a person tries to distort it all, to break it. This is a normal phenomenon, the desire for freedom. I think such a game has existed since the existence of writing, although no — probably even earlier.
But the scale of distribution of all these “author zhzhot” and “horrible” today is incomparable with the former times.
G. G .: Of course, but the number of these «fences» in our language is already close to critical. The Internet simply made it possible to bypass them. It seems to me that the main problem is that the Russian language is, in principle, considered in society to belong, on the one hand, to the state — to all ministries, deputies and other authorities, and on the other hand — to professional linguists. Therefore, ordinary people all the time feel the language they speak is a little not their own. Literate people do not have a creative attitude to the language, but a wary one: “have I crossed any boundaries?” Prescriptive attitudes in our country dominate over descriptive ones. And even a language researcher is considered a person who does not describe what a language is, but authoritatively indicates what it should be. After all, all our dictionaries are normative. So right, so wrong, and with obligatory notes: obsolete, colloquial. Already the dictionary marginalizes variants and forms. And the result is normativism and dirigisme — a misfortune that was brought up in the native speakers of the Russian language for almost the entire last century. One is correct, the other is not, one is the norm, the other is a distortion. This slows down the language, it loses its flexibility, and it is precisely against this that all erratives are ultimately directed — deliberate distortions that you are talking about.
To make the language a little more familiar?
G. G .: Exactly. And languages that have a tradition of just putting what they have in their dictionaries, that pay attention to the practice of use, these languages get a huge advantage.
For example, English, which willingly includes the same words born on the Internet in dictionaries?
G. G .: Yes! English is constantly absorbing new words, not bothering at all with where they came from. The main criterion is that they are used by people, native speakers. There you can find the entire French dictionary, a huge number of Greek words, Latin — through French mediation or directly, — German, Russian. This language constantly takes everything, masters everything and adapts. And returns, and completely without imposing on anyone. Therefore, I think that English will continue to rise and become stronger as an international language.
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Let’s get back to the influence of the Internet. It turns out that you do not see anything negative in it?
G. G .: Of course, I see, and a lot, but this is not exactly what you are talking about. In my opinion, one of the main — and, of course, frightening — influences of the Internet is that with its advent, words have ceased to disappear and be forgotten. A horror happened, which Socrates was afraid of, saying that writing would lead to the fact that people’s memory would stop working, they would not be able to distinguish between important and unimportant, they would write down all sorts of nonsense that one day would flood the entire human existence. It is clear that he advocated the hierarchical function of language: when only a small group of initiates knew what to teach people and what to forget. Mankind has long gone from this, but the problem is now precisely this property. Words, texts, once appearing on the Web, do not go anywhere, a person drags them along. And if you still need to find a book, and then find something in the book itself, then Google on the Internet will do everything instantly. If we compare the volume of the current «unforgettable» words with the past, then the difference is huge. At the same time, the meaning of many of these words is no longer very well understood by a person. People have always used agnonyms — words whose meanings they do not understand, these agnonyms made up some share in our dictionary before. But imagine a situation where most of our vocabulary is a huge array of not understood, not meaningful words and expressions, which are in constant use. After all, many people use the word “idiosyncrasy” or, say, “homeopathy”, without even knowing what it is. And there are already hundreds of such words — pronounced without any meaning, just like that! I don’t want to look like an alarmist and exclaim “what a horror!”, but this is already a noticeable phenomenon. We found ourselves in a very interesting world, where the characters of Platonov and Zoshchenko suddenly took on flesh and are having lively conversations.
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Perhaps we can already say that the Internet is changing our consciousness?
G. G .: With this question it is better to turn to specialists. I can recommend, for example, the well-known book by Nicholas Carr The Shallows, translated into Russian as «Dummy», just about the cognitive threats of the Internet. But, in principle, you are right: the influence of the network language and behavior in general on consciousness is obvious. Consciousness is weakened. The cognitive and communicative functions of the language are depressed, while the expressive and manipulative functions are enhanced. Hence — sharp judgments, screaming alogism, contempt for rationality. Working a lot with students, I observe the rapid dissipation of memory, fatigue from the perception of a large text. At the same time, a person today reads for a circle, perhaps even more than before — more signs pass before his eyes. But he reads them to a very shallow depth. You give students compact texts — they are perfectly absorbed, they are easy to operate with. But these texts are really small, in one computer screen without scrolling. And one has only to take a longer text — and it turns out that some logical connections in the minds of yesterday’s schoolchildren are no longer held for a long time. Why did a certain event happen and to what point should we return to understand it? Identifying keywords, anchor points in a large text — all this becomes a serious problem.
How to solve it?
G. G .: Change the learning process. Young people need to be given difficult tasks to grow up. They have to write a lot themselves. Develop written speech and accumulate what has been written in order to return to read texts after some time. Do parents want their children to read? Then you need to realize that reading is no longer enough: to learn to love reading, you must first learn to write.
In this regard, should you welcome the return to the practice of writing in exams?
G. G .: No. Writing is not the same. Unfortunately, such a thing as exposition is completely knocked out of our education. In those almost primitive times, when I was studying, they first taught me to write expositions, and only then essays. Excuse me, but an essay, in general, can be written by any fool. As a form of storytelling, writing is much easier. Because the presentation sets a certain framework, requires knowledge of the text — sufficient to retell this text in your own words. This is thus a more difficult task: the text must first be understood — and the text, as a rule, is written by a good writer. And it was necessary to return the presentation to the school, and not the essay at all. And the second thing that the idea of returning to writing doesn’t take into account is play. In general, the main influence of the Internet on a person is the gaming influence. Especially on young people, among whom the majority plays certain games. And the element of play in learning is absolutely essential. Schoolchildren and students need to be taught to write texts in which they would perform some operations to deliberately distort, if you like, the already read text. That is, the same gaming errative practice, parody must be put into practice.
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Do you use these techniques in your work with students?
G. G .: Yes, of course, and not only those. For example, I give them tasks in which the main role is played not by text, but by a geographical map. And you don’t need to remember the plot, but draw the main routes of the characters’ movement using Yandex.Maps or Googlemaps. Or the movement of some historical character. It turns out that this perfectly fits on the reference image matrix, which is in demand as much as possible by today’s life on the network. And if you fill and draw all this with your own hands, with your fingers, then the route of Odysseus is remembered better, and with it the poem itself. The Internet — and this is its great advantage — allows you to make someone else’s experience part of your own experience. True, it is purely virtual, which, of course, has a serious drawback. And the real work with language and on language is always bodily!
That is, it happens through the book?
G. G .: And through the book. And through architecture. HSE students and I traveled to Rome for an internship, and before the trip they packed their book to read. Of course, it was a compilation weighing 2,5 kg. But the experience of working on it before the trip and the subsequent experience of making corrections and additions gave the whole journey a new dimension — linguistic and literary: so that this city could settle in their memory and in their language, they first made its verbal model.
To then post it on the Web?
G. G .: Smile!