Being From Somewhere 1: Letters

Standardized language is great for trade and hegemony, but privileges "the view from nowhere." Can we have it both ways?

I recently read a novel by an American writer. I specify the nationality because at one point I stumbled over the phrase, “the sun shown through the trees.” Using “shown” instead of “shone” was a reasonable mistake—if you knew that “shown” has the same pronunciation as “shone” in (most of?) the US. In Canada (at least where I grew up) the word “shone” is pronounced “shawn.” Similarly, in Western Canada, “aunt” is pronounced “ant.” The American pronunciation of “roof” is “ruff” whereas the Canadian rhymes with “whoop;” and famously, Canadians apparently say “aboot” although that’s not how we hear “about.” I clearly hear myself say “ah-bah-out” hence our (apparently comedic) confusion when we get called on it.

Why should you care? Well, the use of standardized English grammar and spelling is great in that it permits writers from all over the world to communicate. This comes at a cost, though: it feeds into the perspective we’re encouraged to adopt from our earliest years—the “view from nowhere.” I’ve been trying for a while to articulate why I think this perspective has led us astray, and have decided to sneak up on the problem via a set of analogies, because trying to directly state it isn’t working for me.

For an example of the “view from nowhere,” take the International Style in architecture. The Bauhaus movement, led by architects such as Mies van der Rohe, and designers such as Le Corbusier strip buildings of ornament, national character, and local context in pursuit of pure function and rational form. A skyscraper in São Paulo can look identical to one in Singapore; that suggests an identity of place that is not really true. Nowhere is this standardization more hellishly enforced than in airports (which, to be fair, benefit from all being navigable in the same way).

It was in the interests of both American hegemony and United Nations globalization to promote worldwide standards such as the Metric system, universal human rights, etc. The tension lies in how far you take this hegemony. Philosopher Thomas Nagel explores that tension in a book called (unsurprisingly) The View From Nowhere.

This might all sound academic, but for our generation, it’s become much more than an idea: the fact that I can buy a McDonalds Big Mac as easily in Vienna as Toronto is deeply weird. It signals the materialization of the “nowhere” side of Nagel’s subjective/objective tension in the form of real, physical things and sites. Even if it’s not true that all places are now interchangeable, the idea that they can be has been, as it were, painted over the entire planet.

When all human places can be swapped, it becomes easy to think of all natural places as being similarly interchangeable. This means that there’s no effective difference between digging an open-pit mine in the Gobi Desert, an equatorial jungle or the High Arctic. A mine is a mine. Justifications for digging one are typically economic, but even when indigenous rights and ecological impacts are taken into account, the place itself doesn’t actually figure into it. Its economic impact may exist; its ecological significance might be a thing; its cultural importance might also be considered real. But the place itself? That doesn’t really exist, except as a kind of variable name into which those other factors can be inserted.

Something about this keeps nagging at me. I sense a blind spot here, and I suspect (without evidence or justification) that it’s important.

A First Stab In the Dark

When it comes to imagining how we are to react to the ecological polycrisis facing us (of which global warming is only one part), our natural inclination has become to “act locally, think globally.” But while the crises are global, they exist only as local instances: the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed, but anywhere in particular it is specific trees that are being cut or burned. I worry that the classic phrase—meant to galvanize action on the ground—when seen through the view from nowhere, can come to mean that yes, we do act in our own regions to address global threats, but without taking what’s truly local into account.

I think our generation has to accept that we are from somewhere, even when we are actively working on a global scale. I’ve held off writing about this because of that tension Nagel identifies: we oscillate between the subjective and objective, or the local and planetary, in our thinking. It’s great to be a locavore because it helps ground you and should be good for the environment; on the other hand, where many of us live now, there’s no ecologically sustainable way to source all our food locally. Trying to can paradoxically increase our emissions and pollute more than, say, regional factory farms.

So, being from somewhere shouldn’t be a naive localism. Our problems are global, but instantiate here—that is to say, in a way that’s particular to each place, and for which different solutions may have to be found than by adopting “best practices” for local action. It means renegotiating our reality on the ground and with our neighbours, potentially generating accommodations and solutions that are unrecognizable to any movement based more than ten kilometers away.

This approach demands a more subtle working-out of what it is about “being from here” that is geographical and historical, what about it is deeply enmeshed with the rest of the world, and what is absolutely unique. Not easy.

Shavian Madness

There are many ways of unpacking what it means to be from somewhere, and I want to explore a bunch of them. I thought I’d start with one so close to us that we don’t even see it: the lettering in our written words.

To make sense of this, let’s turn to George Bernard Shaw, and his campaign to reform the English alphabet.

Bernard Shaw, one of England’s premier playwrights, lived between 1856 and 1950—nearly a century straddling some of the biggest upheavals in human history. Famously opinionated, he held that English is being held back by its use of the Roman lettering system, which does not faithfully reproduce the actual sounds of the spoken language.

For Shaw, written English is an alphabetic equivalent to Bauhaus. It’s the International Architectural Style, in the form of letters.

Roman lettering’s leveling effect makes the English alphabet the ne plus ultra “view from nowhere” tool. Universalized as it’s become, written English is simultaneously a gateway to full participation in world culture for billions of people, and a disguise that hides local dialects, thereby making real differences between speakers impossible to see from its “nowhere.”

To rectify what he saw as an appalling situation, Shaw sponsored a contest for the creation of a new, English-specific lettering system. He wanted to eliminate the kinds of spelling atrocities that cause newcomers to the language such headaches—how to spell “knowledge” having only heard it, or pronounce “rendezvous” having only read it. The contest was ultimate won, after Shaw’s death, by Ronald Kingsley Read, and the script he came up with is known as Shavian (or, as he would write it out, 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯).

My apologies if your computer doesn’t render these characters. I ran a test before writing this post and Shavian seems to be supported across all major platforms, but I might have missed yours.

There are 40 Shavian characters and none of them resemble Latin letters. (You can download a Shavian keyboard and play with them.) Shavian looks like the kind of fake script that special effects artists paint on the control panels of alien spacecraft; but there’s a method to its madness. Once you know the deep logic of how the characters were designed, you can actually deduce the sound of one from another—to know, for example, that if 𐑑 corresponds to the English “t” sound, then 𐑛 means “d;” and if 𐑒 maps to “k,” then 𐑜 will map to the hard “g.” In theory this deep logic makes Shavian easier for non-English speakers to learn. It certainly eliminates a lot of clutter: “knowledge,” for example, becomes 𐑯𐑭𐑤𐑦𐑡. One of the design goals was that each character can be drawn with a single stroke of the pen, that is, without lifting the pen from the page. This is less important these days when we all type, but originally it made for a clever bridge between standard writing and shorthand. A skilled practitioner should be able to write very quickly in Shavian.

There is a Shavian dictionary, because one of Shaw’s and Read’s goals was to allow for local variation in exactly how one expresses the sounds, for instance the “a” sound in “at” (spelled 𐑨𐑑 and rhyming with “ado”), while preserving a standard spelling. This would make all words recognizable, enabling internationalization, while conveying the actual sound (corrected for dialect). I’m not sure this actually works, because the “mid-Atlantic” accent (easiest to find in the film work of actor Richard Burton) is supposedly “neutral” or “pure” English; yet it would likely sound out “at” as 𐑩𐑑 rather than 𐑨𐑑 (thereby rhyming with “ash,” not “ado”). The ability to spell words as we hear and say them is crucial if we imagine Shavian as a tool for writing English, but English that is from somewhere.

Writing From Somewhen

If the standardization of English spelling is a subtle reinforcer of the “view from nowhere,” then Shavian is its not-so-subtle cure. I find Singaporean and Newcastle geordie accents equally impossible to understand; it’s an advantage that one speaker can write to the other in Roman characters and spelling and both understand one another. It would be great, though, if we all learned Shavian in school as well and could seamlessly slip from Latin to it and back again. This would allow us to listen to one another’s voices on the page or screen—and thereby, to remember that the person whose words we’re reading is from somewhere.

While I love Shaw’s idea, I have a lot of problems with Shavian as an implementation of it. The fact that many of its characters are mirror images of one another may have made sense from a design standpoint, but in practice, I suspect no dyslexic could read it.

Secondly, the spelling of English words may not make sense if you’re coming to it cold, but once you know that our spelling preserves and showcases the history of the language, in all its borrowings from French and German and Scandinavian languages, what looked like errors become a window into England’s past. Knowing that our spelling is crystalized history also helps you deduce the probable spelling of a word you’ve only heard, if you have some sense of its familial origin. Something would be lost, I think, if we abandoned this complex layer—perhaps, a feeling of our “when” as well as our “where.”

Incompleteness As Design Technique

This post is the start of a kind of triangulation approach to discovering a new vision of what it means to be “from somewhere.” My approach is deliberately indirect. We’re trained not to speak until we know what we’re saying, but Nagel might say that by sounding sure of ourselves, we adopt the mantle of the “objective observer,” which lends authority to what we say. We attain to being “the voice from nowhere.” To admit uncertainly is frowned upon; but consider this: maybe it’s frowned upon because to speak uncertainly is to reveal that you are speaking from somewhere.

One deep principle of design thinking is to embrace incompleteness—seek it out, even. In this case, I’m pulling on a thread to see if the sweater comes unraveled, unsure of where this triangulation leads, but instinctively sure that there is more to being from somewhere than merely advocating for where you live. I feel like something true and powerful is hiding in plain sight; sneaking up on it involves shifting strategies and approaches—for instance, dismantling writing itself, questioning how and why we use it.

This is how I think; it’s similar to the Foresight technique called strangemaking. Do you do this kind of defamiliarization when you’re thinking through new ideas or possibilities? Or, do you start with premises and work toward conclusions that you can defend? —Because that is not what I’m doing here.

I’ll be looking askance at the problem of being from somewhere in different ways, in future posts. I expect a fully developed, original idea to result. I’ve done this many times in the past; this time around, you get to watch or participate.

Is there something about the world that you can only glimpse out of the corner of your eyes? —Something you know is there, but can’t quite put your finger on? If there is, consider allowing yourself to approach it indirectly, analogically or metaphorically. Embrace uncertainty.

And don’t be afraid of expressing unfinished thoughts. They might just be from somewhere.

—K

---