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Abstract
This paper critically examines one particular issue against the background of changes in South Africa's higher education system consequent upon the advent of a non-racial democracy – the possibility of implementing multilingual instructional polices that include indigenous African languages in its universities. Currently, a great deal of applied linguistic work is being carried out on the creation of word lists and dictionaries, via translation and term creation. This paper concurs that this is a necessary step in language adaptation for the task envisaged. It uses Saussurian semantics to show that translation and/or creation of terms is not a relatively transparent activity. An examination of Saussure's notion of ‘semantic value’ leads to a post-structuralist concern with use and function. This orientation to language is considered further in light of the discourse-oriented work of M.A.K. Halliday and J.R. Martin on the language of science in Writing Science, Literacy and Discursive Power, published by Falmer Press in Citation1993. Such discourse unfolds within a community of practice. The practices required for a translated science involve semiotic inculcation, and can be compared to the efforts of 19th-century Christian missionaries who worked on expanding Xhosa for religious purposes. These efforts show the complexities of developing Xhosa as a possible language of science, which any language planner will have to face.
Acknowledgements
I thank the University of Cape Town's Research Committee for funding this research. I also thank the participants at the conference, Ana Deumert and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for thoughtful feedback.
Notes
1. A version of this paper was given as a keynote lecture at the Conference for Languages and Education in Africa at the University of Oslo in June 2006.
2. One university (Port Elizabeth) was officially designated a dual-medium white university.
3. The official languages are the previously official Afrikaans and English, and nine African languages: Zulu, Xhosa, North Sotho, South Sotho, Tswana, Swati, Ndebele, Tsonga and Venda.
4. By ‘ideological clarification’, Fishman refers to discussions and decisions by communities and their leaders regarding the need for, and desirability of, stabilising and maintaining a language that is in danger of disuse.
5. On the other hand, this does not prevent ifiva from acquiring an artificially created scientific meaning closer to the English source. (In English, lay use of flu is closer to ‘cold’ than to medical use of the term, and the same applies in German to Grippe in the lay and medical sense – Ana Deumert p.c. September 2006.)
6. According to Williams, the word isono is first used in Bennie's manuscript (Matthew, ix, 2) in the 1820s. In this section, Saussure's term le langue refers to the language system that underlies individual acts of speaking or parole.
7. Xhosa and other Bantu languages have a further, more literal, kind of grammatical metaphorisation in what may be termed ‘noun-class shift’, when a noun of one class may be transferred to another class by taking on the prefix of the new class. Such shift serves the stylistic function of changing the status of the person or entity so described either upward (personification or honorific usage) or downward (depersonalisation or downgrading of status) – see Louw (Citation1983).
8. I replace the word world in the original, which I take to be a typo, by the word way here.
9. Or in any other language – see Kraft in German, whose meaning in physics is disconnected from its everyday meaning (Ana Deumert p.c. September, 2006).
10. This is what happened, after all, in the eventual switch from Latin to English as the language of scholarship in England. For reasons of space, the terminological issues involved in making a humble and barely-standardised language of 17th to 18th century England fit the mould of science has not been addressed (see Halliday & Martin, Citation1993). For the relatively late rise of German as a language of science, see Pörksen (Citation1989).