What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

In an interview some years ago Mavis Gallant mentioned an operation she underwent. She awoke from general anaesthesia in a state of mental confusion. For several minutes she couldn’t remember any details of her identify or of her life, not her name or her age or what she did, not where she was nor why she was there. An amnesia that was complete—except for this: she knew she was a woman and that she was thinking in English. Inextricably linked to the faintest glimmer of consciousness were those two identity traits: sex and language.

Which says how deep language goes. It becomes part of our biology. Our lungs need and are made for air, our mouths and stomachs need and are made for nutrition; our ears and noses can hear and smell and, lo, there are things to be heard and smelled. The mind is the same: it needs and is made for language, and, lo, there are things to be said and understood.

I am no champion of any particular language. Every language, from Afrikaans to Zulu, does the job it is required to do: map the world with sounds that conveniently identify objects and concepts. Given a little time, every living language spoken by a sufficient number of people will match any new object or concept with a new word. Have you heard the notion of how the Inuit are supposed to have twenty-six words for snow, while we in English have only the one, “snow”? Well, that’s nonsense. Ask avid English-language skiers and they’ll come up with twenty-six words or compounds to describe snow.

Just as there are many cuisines on this earth, many styles of dress and many understandings of the divine, each of which can keep the stomach content, the body smartly covered and the soul attuned to the eternal, so there are many different kinds of sounds with which we can make ourselves understood. Each language has its own sonority, cadence, specialized vocabulary, and so on, but it all evens out. Each of us can be fully human in any language.

But since you are a native English speaker, let me champion English in this letter as an introduction to the latest semi-monthly book I am sending you. The English language has by far the largest vocabulary of any language on earth, well over 600,000 words. French, by comparison, is said to have 350,000 words and Italian, 250,000. Now right away, before I get jumped upon by those from my native province and all my Italian-speaking friends, this exuberance of vocabulary is largely irrelevant. Just 7,000 words represent 90 percent of the root vocabulary the average English speaker uses.

And let’s not forget: the voluble Italians showed no reticence in launching—and thoroughly enjoying—their Renascimento with their fewer words while the reserved Britons sat in their dark and dank island idling away the hours of pouring rain by wondering whether they should adopt the Italian word for that explosion of optimism and sunshine or call it the Rebirth or the Renaissance.

How did a local-yokel language spoken on an island—truly, an insular language—came to span the globe? The explanation can be summarized in two words: invasions and counter-invasions; that is, colonialism. The Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons was immeasurably enriched by a number of invasions. In linguistic terms, the Christianization of Britannia was a beachhead, the Norman invasion of 1066 was a flood, and the Renaissance was a flourish. After that, the verbally-empowered English set out to conquer the world, a great plundering that made them wealthy not only with other people’s gold but also with other people’s words.

English is a hot stew of many ingredients. In it can be found words that have their origin in Arabic, Breton, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Gaelic, Hindi, Inuit, Japanese, Latin, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Welsh, to mention only a selection. And that’s only vocabulary. English usage—how people speak their English—is also extraordinarily varied.

And that’s the reason for my gift to you this time: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. It’s a modern classic, a great story, one that will make you love lawyers, but it’s for the usage that I chose it. Rural Alabama English of the 1950s as spoken by children is something else. And yet it is English, so you will understand it without a problem. That is the rare privilege of those who speak English: in reading untranslated books from every continent they can feel both at home and abroad.

Bonne lecture!

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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