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Britain | How long have you had that goitre?

Phrasebooks are dying out

It is the end of a revealing literary genre

[20221029_B]
Oct 27th 2022
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The phraseBOOK had looked so helpful. When Eric Newby, a writer, set
out to walk in the Hindu Kush in 1956, he knew he would be visiting
places no Englishman had been since 1891. Nonetheless, he was hopeful
of communicating. In his bag he carried "Notes on the Bashgali
Language", a phrasebook published in Calcutta in 1902. Opening it one
afternoon in the high Himalayas, his hopes faded. Whereas most
guidebooks explain how to order a small glass of red wine or a
coffee, this offered phrases of more opaque utility.

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"Ini ash ptul p'mich e manchi mrisht waria'm" ran one which, it
explained, meant: "I saw a corpse in a field this morning." That was
followed by "Tu tott baglo piltia" ("Thy father fell into the
river"); "I non angur ai; tu ta duts angur ai" ("I have nine fingers;
you have ten"); and "Ia chitt bitto tu jarlom" ("I have an intention
to kill you"). Some struck a more conversational tone, such as "Tu
chi se biss gur biti?" ("How long have you had a goitre?"). But on
the whole the book left him with "a disturbing impression" of
Bashgali life.

Newby's guide was an eccentric but by no means unique example of a
neglected literary genre: the phrasebook. These began in antiquity,
gathered pace with medieval pilgrimages and flourished in the age of
empires and, later, of aeroplanes. Once they were essential. Now the
internet and machine translation are rendering them obsolete. Figures
from Nielsen Book Research, a market-research firm, show that sales
in Britain have fallen by 40% in three years. The phrasebook is
dying.

Few readers will mourn them. The conversations they mapped out rarely
ran so smoothly in life as on the page. But for historians they are
invaluable. Newby thought his phrasebook was revealing about the
Bashgalis; in truth such books reveal much more about their
English-speaking authors. To sift through old phrasebooks is to study
an unparalleled source on the assumptions made by Britons abroad. It
is an archaeology of othering.

Two things quickly become clear. The first is that travel was seen as
a troublesome, even perilous, pursuit. The other is that the now
familiar form of the genre--books offering sentences that are
practically and predictably useful--took some time to develop. The
1900 English-Welsh phrasebook "for the use of Travellers and
Students" offers "Have you any apples?" and "Where is the butter
market?" before adding the more unexpected: "They have cut off his
arm."

The savour of national stereotypes can be tasted on almost every
page. J.B. Leek's 1928 English-Italian Conversation Handbook shows
that Italy has long been seen as a land of aesthetic indulgence. A
section on hair care ("Shave my mustachio/ Kindly twist up my
mustachio/ A little pomade on my mustachio") follows a lengthy
section on food. "Give me a bottle...of red wine/ of white wine/ of
claret/ of Burgundy..." it runs. "Give me some Brie cheese/ some
Camembert/ some Gruyere..."

The consequences of eating are of abiding interest to British
travellers of old. After the food, Leek's Italian offers the
regretful: "I feel qualmish, sick." No destination is without its
particular intestinal anxiety. "After vomiting his food," explains
one physiologically intriguing entry in an old Korean manual, "his
constipation was relieved." A 1903 medical phrasebook for Luganda, a
Bantu language, offers the unexplained but authoritative: "Keep
everything you vomit."

To judge by these publications, the Briton abroad must have cut a
strange figure. Many position themselves as aids to conversation. The
1909 "Manual of Palestinian Arabic", for example, explains that its
sample sentences "will, it is hoped, be useful to the traveller in
his hotel" and "may conceivably be of use in daily life". The word
"conceivably" is working very hard in that sentence. The book's
phrases include: "We reached the precipice and saw him fall down";
"He died before we found him"; and the gnomic "Gargle twice daily."
Conversation will have hung heavy in the foyers of Jerusalem.

Books from the colonial era are unintentionally telling. History
books tend to concentrate on the obvious moments of imperial
brutality--on war and rebellion. Phrasebooks offer the chance to
eavesdrop on quieter colonial cruelties in the drawing rooms of
empire. "Hold your tongue!" barks one phrase in a 1908 "Hindustani
Self-Taught" manual. "Beat that lazy boy" snaps an entry in another
guide.

Many phrasebooks remained in use for a surprisingly long time. When
Elisabeth Kendall, the mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, studied
Arabic at Oxford University in the early 1990s, she did so using
grammar books that dated back to 1859 ("The cow's tongue is long" was
a typical phrase). She retains a linguist's affection for their
methodology. Some phrases may have lacked practical utility but often
illustrated "a grammatical construction in the simplest possible
way"--and they were memorable. Steven Pinker, a professor of
psychology at Harvard University, agrees. A language, he says, "is
not a list of phrases". The impracticality of some entries may have
been intentional so "speakers would not be locked into canned
expressions in stereotyped situations".

The fading genre of the phrasebook is unlikely to be missed. But
something will be lost when it is gone. Poetry, Robert Frost
supposedly said, is what gets lost in translation. Read these books'
dislocated phrases and poetry can be found in it, too. "Owing to the
road being slippery I nearly fell / Ten years ago / Come here," runs
one T.S. Eliotish section in a 1894 Tai-Khamti Grammar. The last
words go to entries in an English-Kashmiri manual: "I am now
composing a grammar/ I don't exactly comprehend this.../ It is time to
conclude." #

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition
under the headline "How long have you had that goitre?"

Britain October 29th 2022

  * Rishi Sunak, Britain's new prime minister, starts on the
    defensive
  * The Bank of England has seen off several threats
  * Boris Johnson's return to British politics crash-lands
  * Where did all Britain's 50-somethings go?
  * Phrasebooks are dying out
  * Rishi Sunak's first job? Clearing up the mess he helped make

It's not just inflationIt's not just inflation

From the October 29th 2022 edition

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