Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Traditions, Neologisms, and Ways of Thinking

A list of conversations / lectures which took place in my creole class (in which everyone other than me is well over forty) yesterday and were not about creole:

  • Everyone else in the class agreeing that it's ridiculous that "mademoiselle" (the French equivalent of "miss") has been deemed inappropriate and now you *have* to call young women that you *know* aren't married "madame" (the equivalent of Ms. or Mrs.).
  • Everyone in the class emphatically agreeing for the MILLIONTH time that le français inclusif (a modern reform of French proposed to make it more gender inclusive by mentioning both the masculine and feminine in neutral addresses rather than masculine serving as the neutral) is a TOTAL CATASTROPHE, not because it's dysfunctional or because it doesn't resolve the fundamental problem of the gender binary imposed on the language, but because TRADITIONS CANNOT CHANGE EVER.
  • Everyone else in the class emphatically lamenting that it's an atrocity that YOUTHS use SHORTCUTS and NEW IDIOMS to text each other, which means that they clearly will never be able to ~properly~ write in ~proper~ French. This last one was all the more ironic because it immediately followed the professor's lecture on how new neologisms needed to be created in creole, because it isn't "rich" enough.
As you can probably tell by the tone of my written descriptions, these conversations fairly discomfited me, not only because it would be impossible for me to defend my positions without seeming like the defensive youngster, but also because it would be useless to defend my positions with the tone of my comrades was already so dismissive. All that, without mentioning that the professor THEN proceeded to dismiss my opinion that his prescriptive position that the practice of repeating morphemes for emphasis in creole was "undeveloped" and needed to be replaced with new words was in fact a paradox à la Foucault, since his normative ideas of what makes a "developed" language is informed by colonialist perspectives.
Now, people in general and older people especially can be dismissive any time or place they please, and I have certainly observed such behavior in many places other than Martinique. However, the way I experience it, this type of close-mindedness reigns here more than anywhere else I've been, besides maybe my hometown.
And it's driving me nuts.

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