プラタナス2 の山 10 月 2 週
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○Television is(感) 英文のみのページ(翻訳用)
Television is by far the most powerful agent of linguistic change the world has ever known. In this function it has already, in the few years of its existence, outstripped both literacy and universal compulsory education.
This may seem a gross exaggeration. Yet consider: both literacy and universal compulsory education bear primarily upon the written language, which even in these days of widespread reading and writing accounts for less than ten per cent of our total communication. Television bears primarily upon the spoken tongue, which is communication's primary tool, to the extent that almost ninety per cent of all communication uses it as a medium. One may quibble about the relative importance of the content of written as against spoken communication. One may even reasonably advance the claim that the sort of communication that really counts, and is therefore embodied into permanent records, is primarily written; that "words fly away, but written messages endure," as the Latin saying put it two thousand years ago; that there is no basic significance to at least fifty per cent of the oral interchange that goes on among all sorts of persons, high and low. But there are equally cogent counter arguments. Today, permanent records may be inscribed on discs and tapes, to be stored away and repeated at will, and even combined, TV-style, with a lifelike picture. This means that words no longer "fly away." In fact, they may be blended with the image of their speaker, to endure as a perennial record both of the speaker and of what he said.
But this is only a side issue, like that other recent discovery of the outside world (the professional linguists had known it for decades) that each individual's recorded voice, traced visually on a spectrogram, is as distinctive as are his fingerprints, and constitutes just as sure a means of positive identification. The point that concerns us is that at no time in history prior to the present has there been so powerful and swift-working an instrument of linguistic change as the one supplied today by TV, flanked by two other recent innovations that share some of its characteristics, radio and film.
The younger generations of all countries, exposed to a steady, inexorable bombardment of the standard national language dispensed by movie actors, radio announcers, and, above all, TV newscasters, anchormen, advertisers, and feature actors, are well on the way to discarding all the dialectal features of their parents' speech and adopting the standard tongue they hear on their favorite programs, spoken by people who have in their eyes the highest prestige.
Let me illustrate. Italy is a land of numerous and persistent dialects. Even where the Italian speaker is thoroughly educated and speaks with full command of both grammar and vocabulary, it seldom fails that his local intonation shines through and acts as a dead giveaway of his regional background. I left my native Italy in 1908, at the age of seven; returning for the first time in 1921, at the age of twenty, and landing in Genoa, I was a bit surprised to be told by a Genoese student: "You're a Roman, aren't you?" My native intonation had given me away.
But that was in pre-TV days. In 1959, riding a Naples bus with a Neapolitan friend, I was surprised to hear a group of young people on the bus speaking a correct, unidentifiable general Italian from which all features of local intonation were absent. I asked my friend whether they could be tourists from central Italy. "Not at all," he replied, "they are local boys and girls." "But what about the Neapolitan accent, which no Neapolitan has ever been known to lose, no matter how educated?" "Is that so?" came the answer. "Wait until we get home and you'll find out."
When we arrived at my friend's apartment, I made the acquaintance of his three children, aged eight, ten, and twelve. All spoke in the same unidentifiable general Italian I had heard on the bus, Papa and Mamma kept on speaking, as they had always done, in their own cultured Neapolitan.
"This" said my friend, "is what is happening all over Italy. The youngsters don't take their language from their parents and relatives any more. In part, they take it from the schools. But we had schools, too, in our days. What really makes the difference is films, radio, and, above all, TV. Those are the speakers who carry prestige in their eyes, and whom they consciously or unconsciously imitate. If this sort of thing goes on for another fifty years, there won't be a trace of a dialect left in Italy. All Italians will be speaking the same flat, monotonous, colorless national language. Maybe it's a blessing, maybe a curse. There won't be so much local color, but everybody will be able to understand everybody else, which is more than could be said of our generation."
Even before this revelation, I had been conscious of the same phenomenon in the English-speaking world. I had noticed how, with the first spoken British films, much of what was said was unintelligible to the American ear. Then we got used to the British accent, as they undoubtedly got used to ours. But don't imagine for a minute that it is all pure passive acceptance. There is also an insensible active merging of the two pronunciations. Our speech becomes more British, as the British speech becomes more American. If one day, a century or so from now, the two mainstreams of the English language, which began to diverge with the founding of the Jamestown and Plymouth Bay colonies, converge again into a single mighty river, to film, radio, and especially TV will go the power and the glory.
What happens internationally happens also locally. If you want to hear the general American of the future, Hollywood and TV-studio based, go to California and listen to the speech of the California-born though in their younger generation (not, of course, to the immigrants from other states, who will carry their local intonations with them to their dying day). Do you recall how in the Presidential campaign of 1960 Kennedy's ahsk and Africar stood out like sore thumbs, while Nixon never drew a lifted eyebrow? Nixon spoke the general American of the future, an American shorn of all local peculiarities. A couple of years ago, Miss Arkansas became Miss America. Brought up on a diet of films, radio, TV, and one or two eastern colleges, she addressed the TV audience in a general American that bore absolutely no trace of Southern influence. Then Papa and Mamma were asked to say a few words. Arkansas honey simply dripped from their lips as they spoke. One thing is certain. Miss Arkansas's future children, brought up under modern conditions, will be using their mother's general American, not their grandparents' Southern intonation.
The omens are clear enough for what concerns individual national tongues. They are being and will be standardized and unified by our modern communications media. Whether all traces of local dialects will finally be obliterated it is difficult to prophesy, but certainly they will be driven more and more into the background. The time will come when it will require a real expedition into the Appalachian fastnesses to get a recording of the Ozarks speech, and when the last surviving speakers of Brooklynese will be hunted down by the linguists for recording purposes in the wilds of Greenpoint and Flatbush as were the last speakers of the dialect of Veglia in the Adriatic at the end of the last century.

★なりふりかまわず(感)
 【1】なりふりかまわず生きているとき、人間はまだ文化を持っていない。生きるなりふりに心を配り、人にも見られることを意識し始めたとき、生活は文化になる。喫茶のなりふりを気遣えば茶の湯が生まれ、立ち居ふるまいの形を意識すれば舞踊が誕生する。【2】文化とは生活の様式だが、たんに惰性的な習慣は様式とは呼べない。習慣が形として自覚され、外に向かって表現され、一つの規律として人びとに意識されたときに、文化は誕生する。
 【3】ところで何かを意識し表現することの極致には、それを論じるという行為がある。舞踊が高度化すれば模範が芽生え、規範を意味づける主張が生まれ、やがてその延長上に舞踊論が成立する。【4】どんな生活習慣も掟を生み、掟は法に高まって法理論を形成する。文化が生活の意識化の過程だとすれば、その最後の到着点には文化論がなければならない。【5】文化論は文化についての後知恵ではなく、文化そのものが自己を完成した形態なのである。
 古代ギリシャに政治文化が目覚めたとき、プラトンの国家論が世に出た。ギリシャ悲劇が完成したとき、それを評価するアリストテレスの演劇論が生まれた。【6】ルネサンスにも近代工業の黎明期にも、人間はそれぞれの同時代論を書き、それを書くかたちで自分を文化的存在として完結させてきた。
 そういう観点から見たとき、二十世紀は旺盛な時代でもあり不毛な時代でもあった。【7】この百年ほど人間が自意識を強め、同時代論に関心を深めた世紀も珍しい。シュペングラーからジョージ・オーウェル、リースマンからダニエル・ベルと、世紀の前半にも後半にも優れた現代論が続出した。【8】しかし反面、二十世紀はこの自意識の鬼子ともいうべき思潮、内容的には正反対の二つの思潮が猛威をふるい、文化論の深化を妨げてもいたからである。
 【9】一つはもちろんマルクス史観であって、これは経済の立場から歴史の法則なるものを設け、その法則を尺度に文化を善悪二つに分類した。進歩的と反動的に二分された文化は、その本来の多様性を認められる道を失った。【0】もう一つの弊害はこの一元主義とは逆に、蛸壺的な専門化の思潮から襲ってきた。人間の問題を考えるのに総合的な人間像を忘れ、学問の方法ごとに部分だけを見る努力が∵重ねられた。ここでは文化は本来の有機的な脈絡を失い、生きることの意味づけ、時代批評としての文化論も道を狭められた。
 当然、人間の生きる姿勢、文化活動そのものも二つの方向に歪められた。生き方は一方で粗雑な政治主義に傾き、他方では視野の狭い「専門ばか」に堕した。芸術のような意識性の強い文化活動はとくに象徴的であって、「人民に奉仕する芸術」と「芸術のための芸術」が対立した。皮肉なことに両者は共通して党派的であって、後者もそれぞれのジャンルの方法論、その純粋性を守るために戦闘的になった。非マルクス的な芸術が「前衛」を自称し、この百年つねに方法論のうえで「進歩的」であったのは、最大の皮肉だろう。
 だがそれとは別に、この文化的な自意識を根本から覆し、政治主義も「専門ばか」も無差別に押し流すような力が、世紀の初めからひそかに用意されていた。従来あまり関連を指摘されていないが、商業主義と文化相対主義の暗黙の連携である。ラジオや映画やテレビの繁栄、そして文化に無記名の人気投票を行う大衆の台頭が背後にあった。それは自意識と規範の弱い文化の興隆であり、いわば文化論抜きの文化の圧倒的な普及であった。
 文化相対主義は前世紀の人類学に始まり、民族文化の価値を平等視する思想として誕生した。やがて、これになぞらえて階層文化を平等視する主張が現れ、ハイ、ポピュラー、サブといった文化区分を相対化する思想が広まった。論者の主観的な意図とは別に、これが商業主義の席巻を助けたことは確実だろう。漫画と文学、ファッションと美術の区別なく、売れるものが文化を支配することになった。同時に、つねに現在を重視する市場原理の結果として、ベストセラーがロングセラーの存在を難しくしてしまった。
 これに止めを刺すかたちで、前世紀末に芽生えたのが「デファクト・スタンダード」を容認する気風である。理由もなく、意識することさえなく、流行したものは正しいとする風潮である。国家よりも市場が、文化運動よりグローバルな消費動向が優越するなかで、明らかに時代を批評する現代論の傑作も乏しくなった。しかし機械∵仕様の事実上の標準はやむをえないとしても、本来、意識化の産物である文化がこのままでよいはずはない。党派性や階層差別は乗り越えながら、個々の文化活動、自分が生きる時代を批評する精神を復活しなければならない。それぞれの「私」が生きるなりふりの表現として、自己の文化的な規範を論じなければならない。人間にデファクト・スタンダードがあるとすれば、動物的な本能か、文化以前の惰性的な習慣のほかにはないからである。

(山崎正和「二十一世紀の視点」より)