Let Us Not Allow Political Correctness Destroy Language

Over time I have had to accept living with the anathema of one of the most prevalent and deliberate violation of grammar rules; the use of plural pronouns instead of singular one in the name of seeking gender equality! Who said the use of he is exclusively male? Mankind, does this exclude the very existence of women?

Descriptivists will argue that he isn’t gender neutral, as if that is not enough they will also tell you that having to write he/she or s/he is cumbersome. Perhaps if English was like French we would not have to deal with such quagmires in language. The purity of the French language is the responsibility of L’Academie Française; English lacks such an authority! English like Wikipedia takes anything from anyone! Like Gelernter I’ll ask, “can we afford to allow virtual feminists to elbow our way like noisy drunks into that inner mental circles where all your faculties(such as they are) are labouring to produce decent prose(or speech for that matter!)? I am not against feminism in any way, I don’t understand why they say they are fighting for gender equality. This sounds like a paradox! Aren’t they trying to fight a virtual misogyny? One that they have created for themselves to such an extent that they have changed feminism into some form of misandry! L  (Let’s not deviate from language, reserve this debate for another page)

“The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a "con."...As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement.” ― Robert Sheaffer

Back to matters of the heart, language. Since time immemorial, he has been known to represent male and female genders just like man has been used to refer to all human being, irrespective of their sex. Mankind does not assume that women do not exist! Come to think of a phrase like “man breastfeeds his young.” Biologically man refers to all the members of the species Homo sapiens. Out of biology, “Every man for himself, god for us all,” so what about women? Don’t create a fuss about it, they are covered. I can bet if one is a feminist and does not believe in god then he/she must be baying for my blood after seeing that phrase (he/she? Yes, you can be a member of the male sex and a feminist). But then there’s a funny trend by feminists where we’ll only hear them battle for chairperson instead of chairman(which does not prescribe that it has to be a male) and don’t want to recognize that words like conman or manhole may be demeaning to members of the male sex. If you are really fighting for equality it’s only fair that you recognize even what may demean your counterparts!

Pronouns he, she, his, her, they, their; in no way can they be used to refer to a singular. Consider a sentence like “everyone has their rights” given that everyone is singular, this construction is not grammatically correct! When we are told to be our brother’s keeper, does it imply that we should let our sisters to the hounds? It is so ridiculous that we’ve seen feminists suggest herstory instead of history! The epitome of this dispute is as seen in Pauwels (Women Changing Language) work where feminists have tried to re-spell the word woman by removing the man part and giving bizarre suggestions like womyn, wommin and wommon. At this point I feel tickled, someone give these people morphology classes! As if that is not enough they go ahead and change the stress pattern of a word like chairman to make sure stress does not fall on –man. As a result they have [tʃɛər ′mæn] instead of [′tʃɛərmən]. I thought feminism was about equality and not man hating!

 “Professors often advise every student to buy their own book” to whom does they refer to here? Is it that professors want students to buy books they have written or are they asking that each student has his/her own book? Why don’t you just spare your audience this kind of ambiguity by following a simple rule of grammar? If indeed we are looking for a gender neutral pronoun, one that will clearly include both genders indiscriminately using plural ones as singular is not the solution. In fact, English has a gender neutral pronoun it! As such saying that we are looking for gender neutral language is misleading. Unfortunately that cannot be a solution, it is used to refer to inanimate objects and animals; not human beings.  Scholars have further argued that the unknown gender (neutral) is not the same as the aspect of being either masculine or feminine. Let us not allow political correctness pollute the aesthetic beauty of language. 

For a solution, if you won’t accept he to represent all genders, then try avoiding constructions that require pronouns where you can. Try using one and oneself where possible but in no way should you go the wrong route of “pluralizing”. Otherwise when I tell you to list the great men in Kenya’s history be sure to have Wangari Mathai as the first one on that list, if I say I am my brother’s keeper I don’t mean that I don’t care about my sister. I don’t think I need explain what I mean by “man has a gestation period of nine months.” All in all, apart from wrongly painting men as villains and women the victims, feminism has raped the English language!

                     Let us not allow political correctness pollute the aesthetic beauty of language

Your Accent Betrays You

I still have issues with ‘Kenyan’ English, even if I am as guilty as accused (I’m the prosecutor, the judge and the lawyer here!). You’ve heard of Kenyans who visit France for a week and come back with an American accent? African countries are known to have peculiar accents, but hey let’s give Anglophones a break here; listening to the heavily accentuated French spoken in the francophone Africa and comparing it to what would be considered as standard French will leave you wondering why we didn’t develop our native languages into one regional language in Africa(say Swahili or Yoruba).

Back to the Kenyan dialect of English, one of the distinctive features of this dialect is its multiple accents. Unlike in Britain where they are obsessed with accents given that they are native English speakers, in Kenya accents are involuntary! This is where your accent betrays you and not your name; in fact had one Kalonzo Musyoka known this he would have spared himself the ridicule of being labeled tribal. Supposedly, Kenyans should be speaking in the Received Pronunciation (RP) which is regarded to as the standard accent of Standard English, however this is not the case. One of the most sought after Kenyan linguists (and purist), Prof Okoth Okombo attributes this to our first teachers of English. His scathing remarks about them are better not quoted here. Among the most notorious sounds for Kenyans are the post-alveolar affricates /tʃ/ and /dƷ/ the post alveolar fricatives /ʃ/ and /Ʒ/ and the /r/! Those who miss the R either produce an L or a plain aahJ. If you thought the R troubles are with people from the mountains, engage the Samburu who roll their tongue when trying to utter the R. What is the letter H called? I can bet 98% of you got this wrong, H is the only letter that doesn’t have the sound it represents in its name. Don’t call it heich, it’s an eich! Our Swahili (which isn’t any better) has also taken a heavy a heavy toll on our pronunciations, especially the vowel sounds so that each of the vowels is pronounced with one standard sound. You realize English spoken out of a classroom does not recognize the existence of short and long vowel sounds and does not distinguish monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs.

At least everyone speaks with an accent, we can actually narrow it down to beyond where you come from. Fortunately sociolinguists are at our defence! The primary function of language is communication. If your accent doesn’t inhibit communication then it should be the last thing you should think about before you speak. But we all want to speak in a refined standard language, don’t we? Well, I personally do!

If you do, try listening to BBC, Maina Kageni will take you nowhere with his endless relationship issues if you’re seeking to learn language! Seek to speak in RP and not British English, if you seek the latter, you will end up with many other accents from the United Kingdom while the former is the queens dialect.

One of the most obvious features of RP is non-rhocity in that the R occurring at the end of a word is always silent (I bet this isn’t a problem with Kenyans). Learn the vowel sounds in English; learn that ‘a’ in certain words like bath and dance is long like that of father, that it is rather “scheewpid’’ than “stoopid” for stupid, it is “epitemy” and not “epitome” for epitome this list is endless. I can promise you this won’t be a walk in the park with a language like English whose pronunciation is very irregular and unpredictable, did I mention it is “tirany” and not “tairany” for tyranny? Learn the intonation of the language (the French are very particular on this), what is the correct intonation for statements and question?  Know that produce the verb and produce the noun can only be differentiated by which syllable you stress! Learn to drop the Ts where you can in such a way that we won’t accuse you of ‘twenging’, instead block the air with your tongue at the end of the first syllable before expelling it at the beginning of the second syllable. Try practicing that with 'battle'. Suffice it to say, the only way out is by speaking, listening, living, walking and talking proper English. Oh, I almost forgot, you also need to invest, invest in a pocket dictionary!

if i had a British Accent I'd Never Shut, but then I Am Ever Talking!

The 'Advent' of Kenyan English

Finally, the first Kenyan blog on language!! With sociolinguists insisting that a distinct variety of English is slowly developing, (yes, you guessed it right, Kenyan English!!) although we purport to be speaking British English. That doesn’t mean you should start minding whether each word you utter is British or American; in fact one of the features of Kenyan English, (un)fortunately is that it is confused in that it doesn’t mind whether it is American or British. This is of course to the detriment of the purity of the English language, the “standard English” if you like.

                                      Kenyan English, a mishmash of British and American English

Apart from heavy borrowing from vernacular languages (especially the Bantu languages) and Kiswahili, one distinctive feature of Kenyan English is redundancy which will be what our first blog post will be aboutJ.

Trust me this is the most annoying feature! It can’t get worse than appearing in motivation letters, you don’t want to wait for feedback forever from your ‘would be employer’, do you? So let’s examine the phrases worst hit by redundancy!

         i.            Me, I don’t like….. : occurs mostly in spoken language, Nairobi ladies are the worst hit, right? No offence :-D . Do I really need to emphasize how wrong repetition of the subject is? Just say ‘I don’t like….’ And spare yourself the trouble of saying me and making a grave grammatical mistake.

       ii.            Write down these notes: even teachers of English (not English teachers) are culprits here! If something is written, hasn’t it been taken down? Take down some notes! Write some notes!

      iii.            Repeat again! Do I really need to say anything about this! It is not only wrong but also rude. Mostly occurs in the spoken language in the imperative.

     iv.            Few in number: what else can something be few in apart from number? Few already shows we are speaking about number thus in number is redundant.

       v.            Enter in: please consult your dictionary and tell me if you will see in in the definition of enter. Besides, you cannot “enter out”!

     vi.            Add something additional: only do this if you are looking for repetitions and alliterations in poetry!

    vii.            End result: results only come at the end and never the beginning, end is thus repetitive.

  viii.            Final outcome: isn’t this synonymous to end result? The same explanation thus applies!

     ix.            Still remains: what remains is what is still there. Still is evidently redundant.

       x.            Although they are friends, the have nothing in common with each other.

Although they friends, they have nothing in common.

Adding “with each other” to “in common” is superfluous!

     xi.            Return back: returning is taking back, back is thus very unnecessary.

    xii.            Postpone to a later time: we need to get serious now, can something be postponed to an earlier time?? So this phrase does not make sense. Postponing is late enough! Don’t make it later.

  xiii.            Protest against: protesting is usually to express opposition, against is redundant. Kenyan members of the fourth estate are as guilty as charged here!

  xiv.            An unexpected surprise: if it is expected then it cannot be a surprise, so once you say surprise we already know it was unexpected. Spare yourself the pain of being redundant.

   xv.            Plan ahead: it’s as if people plan ‘back’, no further comment about this one.

  xvi.            Foreign import/local export: an import is implicitly foreign by virtue of coming from a different country, and an export is implicitly local!

xvii.            Invited guests: 90% of speakers and entertainers in Kenyan ceremonies are guilty here. A guest is an invited person, that makes invited redundant in this phrase. Saying invited guests is as ridiculous as saying uninvited gatecrashers.

xviii.            Basic essentials/fundamentals: the three are more or less synonymous, thus choose to say basics, fundamentals or essentials, otherwise you will be accuse you of being redundant.

  xix.            I have….of mine: of mine is evidently redundant.

   xx.            The reason why……was because….: when you start a sentence with the reason why be sure to use that instead of because to avoid being redundant.             

I know having to read such a list might not be your cup of tea, so I stop there. It’s worth reading though. And that is just a tip of the iceberg, there are many other 'mistakes' unique to Kenyan English as well as phrases that lack a "semantic bearing" (NEVER start a sentence with a conjunction, though I just did). There is a plethora of common redundancies, the list is inexhaustible.  As a Kenyan I am not to the same mistakes brought by Kenyan English, so correct me!

Have a great weekend ahead, won’t you?