Ginting Munte

Prologue

This writing consists of three ‘stories’ of English, all of which are narrated from the historical point of view. Each of the stories, in an orderly turn, will present very briefly ‘word order in English’, ‘the emergence of stress as a phoneme in English’, and ‘the inconsistency of the English spelling system’. I really hope that this writing can serve as a very short introduction to the understanding of English, as a language, seen from its experiencing the linguistic time-and-space continuum. Though presented separately, it does not mean that each story stands alone in its owned fixed point. They three are correlated one to another. Some elements of one story may show significant effect to the development of its counterpart.

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Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old – it is the new combinations that make them new.

(Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories)

Popular Culture

Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, had postulated that mechanical reproductions of copies, such as photography and works of art, confront the uniqueness of the genuine (1969: 221). Let us take Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Monalisa as an example. Thanks to the technology that now people all around the world have the access to the image of the painting without having to go to a certain museum. The technologies of photography and printing have made copies of Monalisa possible to be reproduced in diverse forms and contexts. One now may enjoy the ‘aesthetics’ of (copies) of Monalisa in T-shirts, postcards, advertisements in billboards, etc. For some conservative people, this act of commercialization is a proof positive of the ubiquitous culture of consumerism. Nonetheless, there are also others who consider this phenomenon, the displacement of the genuine from its distinguished position, as something celebrated as a challenge to binding traditions (check: Cavallaro, 2004: 368-369). Continue reading

Prologue

Daisuke Takahashi, a Japanese explorer-researcher, has spent more than a decade seeking for the exact place where a Scottish seaman, Alexander Selkirk, had build his hut when, in 1704, got stranded in an island now recognized as a part of the territory of Chile. Considering Takahashi’s vehement enthusiasm to Selkirk, one might come up with a question: what is so special about this poor seaman? Some people apparently believe that Selkirk is a model-character of one of the world-wide popular canonical texts of English literary works: Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). To that reason, the island where Selkirk was drifted ashore, spending four years and four months living alone, is now named The Island of Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk was ‘discovered’ by two English vessels, which stopped to reload the ships with clean water and timber. Interestingly, when the captain saw Selkirk for the first time, he described him as, “A man clothed with goat leather, who appeared to be more savage than his goat.”[1] Continue reading