A Language in Crisis: PUNCTUATION IS THE KEY TO DEVELOPMENT

Image: RFI

Several attributes contribute to the language deficit in Cambodia and other developing countries. 

First, these countries have a fragmented political history.  In the case of Cambodia, our political history is disrupted every 20 or 30 years...

Second, these countries have a poor education system...

Third, the policymakers in education tend to function in a developed language (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, German, etc), usually English, and thus their entry point into education policymaking is too advanced... 

The local elites who are policymakers tend to be knowledgeable of either English or French, and unconsciously, fluidly use the second more developed language for higher education and refined thinking...

Similarly, the donor representatives of USAID, the European Commission, UNICEF, UNESCO, et al, tend to have multiple advance degrees and be fluent in at least English, French or both.  Their entry point to the issue of basic education is within their developed language context of 600 years of punctuation and text development, long enough for all of them to believe that punctuation has always existed.

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3rd Commentary in Series A Language in Crisis

A Language in Crisis

Punctuation is the Key to Development

Commentary by Theary C. Seng
Founding President, CIVICUS: Center for Cambodian Civic Education
20 February 2014

Cambodia has thousands of NGOs. A significant number of these focus on education. And they no doubt do good work by building schools and providing teachers, books, school supplies. But these, unfortunately, are surface-level solutions.

We must take a step back and focus on a more basic problem that is largely ignored: the local language.

The key to true development is punctuation.  Yes, you read that correctly. Bizarre as it may sound, punctuation is the key to the major issues debilitating many developing countries. 

Sarah Yost nicely summarizes the history and reason for the use of punctuation –   Punctuation marks are the stitches that hold the fabric of language together, the traffic signals of language, a courtesy designed to help readers  understand a story without stumbling,  written manners.

In short, punctuation is necessary for the development of an advanced language, which in turn is key to transmitting complex ideas. And those are the ideas that are necessary for development!

Written text is important – it is the vehicle for flourishing in all sectors of a country’s development, from formal education to governance to rule of law to reconciliation to business to health, so on and so forth.  Complex ideas simply cannot be expressed only through the oral form – they require lengthy sentences and secondary clauses, and the ability to look back through pages. There is a reason that university students in developed countries spend significantly more time in libraries reading rather than in lecture halls listening to professors.

Simply put, there can be no advanced content transmitted without a written language that allows for that transmission. And the content necessary for development certainly is advanced!

I.  Context of Cambodia and these Developing Countries

Several attributes contribute to the language deficit in Cambodia and other developing countries.

First, these countries have a fragmented political history.  In the case of Cambodia, our political history is disrupted every 20 or 30 years.  Since the lost civilization of Angkor, we experienced French colonialism, interrupted briefly by Japanese occupation, followed by the upheaval of independence and civil wars, leading to the republic replacing the monarchy, followed by the four years of near-complete decimation by the Khmer Rouge, followed by 10 years of Vietnamese occupation, before the past 20-plus years of the current fragile democracy of hodgepodge systems.  All to say, the discontinuity of Cambodia’s history could not and did not provide the right environment for language development.

Second, these countries have a poor education system, and thus have an extremely limited educated class and members of the intelligentsia  tend to be pulled into politics, are killed off or exiled, or are not in the field of language development.  Related, the diverse expertise of culture, linguistics and history needed for a committee to develop language rarely exist and certainly do not flourish with political disruption every other decade.

Third, the policymakers in education tend to function in a developed language (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, German, etc), usually English, and thus their entry point into education policymaking is too advanced. 

One of the development sectors normally associated with language is formal education.  Currently, when education policies in developing countries like Cambodia are developed and implemented they tend to focus on physical infrastructure of schools, books, transportation or access for girls and teachers’ salaries.  What is completely taken for granted and amiss is the focus on functionality, comprehension, and ease of reading of the local language.

Understandably so.  The local elites who are policymakers tend to be knowledgeable of either English or French, and unconsciously, fluidly use the second more developed language for higher education and refined thinking.  In many of these societies, Cambodia being the prime example, it is rare to have an educated Cambodian (or Laotian, etc) who only knows her respective language.  Higher education is always reliant on a second, more developed language.

Similarly, the donor representatives of USAID, the European Commission, UNICEF, UNESCO, et al, tend to have multiple advance degrees and be fluent in at least English, French or both.  Their entry point to the issue of basic education is within their developed language context of 600 years of punctuation and text development, long enough for all of them to believe that punctuation has always existed.

Fourth, the grammar of these local languages has never been scrutinized to the same degree of developed languages.  Or, in the rare occasion when punctuation is lightly raised in the context of the local language, it is quickly and confidently dismissed as contrary to culture or incongruous to that local language.  This confident wrong answer quickly ends any further inquiry as no one wants to be insensitive to another’s culture or identity.

And fifth, in Cambodia, like in similarly situated developing countries (oftentimes, associated with a huge NGO community), e.g. Laos or any African country where English, French or Portuguese is not an official language,  most of the materials in print have been translated and the quality of translation has been lightly, or never, scrutinized for accuracy, reading fluency and/or comprehensibility.

II.                Why Punctuation?

Everyone understands that learning (a combination of education and life experiences) requires broad READING.  And it should go unstated that by “reading” we should not have to deal with the mechanics of reading or anything else that disrupts our ease of directly reaching the content.  That is how we read in the more developed languages, e.g. English.

However, in Cambodia as with the other developing countries, at least three major obstacles hinder our reading.

First, these populations have to untangle the mangled language in order to decipher the content.  NO ONE can be made to enjoy reading if the mangled language frustrates and confuses them, giving them headaches from the burden and work of having to decipher and fight the printed page before they can get to the content.

Second, these populations have to read poor translations, not the original text.  Oftentimes in places like Cambodia where there is a disparately large aid community that functions in English or French, most of the reading materials were not first produced in the local language but are the result of translation.  Thus, the content is another layer of morass because of the messy or incorrect translation.

Third, these populations tend to experience deep trauma which impedes reading.  The migraine headaches from trauma disturb and disrupt any initiating of a reading habit.  I remember the sharp, persisting migraine headaches I encountered as a child whenever I’d pick up a book to read.  Relatedly, reading requires quietness and solitude and oftentimes traumatized people are afraid to be alone with their own thoughts.  Moreover, when these populations live in loud, crowded conditions without adequate space or lighting for reading, then the reading habit is difficult to take hold, even if books are readily available. 

III.             History of Punctuation

In light of the above-mentioned environment working against reading, it is even more of an imperative that we get the language developed, the first entry point toward developing a culture of reading.

And we start with punctuation.  For us who function in English or a more developed language already employing the full array of punctuation, we take it for granted that punctuation came with the language from time immemorial.  However, punctuation also had a beginning and had to be adopted and adapted into the various languages.

According to The Core Blog  punctuation itself – literally, the act of adding “points” to a text came into being in the third century BC, when Aristophanes described a series of middle (·), low (.) and high points (˙) denoting short, medium and long pauses.  The word space came centuries later, “when monks in medieval England and Ireland began splitting apart unfamiliar Latin texts to make them easier to read.”

Punctuation further developed dramatically with the rise of the printing press, the single greatest development in the history of written language. The introduction of moveable type, and the subsequent burst of printed materials, highlighted the need for a complex system of punctuation. Printed books, paired with globalization, meant that books traveled and punctuation was adopted into Hebrew, French, English, and other developed languages.

The takeaway here is that punctuation has not been around forever. But languages adapt, and developed languages adapted to incorporate punctuation. Khmer must do the same.

IV.             Punctuation leads to Flourishing

Cambodians with means or an opportunity to rely on another language rely on their second language for knowledge.

But for the MAJORITY of Cambodians who do not know a second language on a functional or advanced level, they have to fight the printed page and mangled language (of misspelling, of "creative" texting-style punctuation, or just run-on phrases) to get even a scant piece of knowledge.

Imagine only knowing English, and English being stuck in the place that Khmer is now. Do you think you would enjoy reading? Do you think you could understand complex content if you could barely make sense of the text itself?

I deeply believe EVERY CAMBODIAN can be habituated to love to read if given INTERESTING reading materials in correct, clear translations (if translated, which currently the majority of published materials are) that have PROPER, CONSISTENT, SUFFICIENT PUNCTUATION.

This, not simply more schools, is the key to education reform and development. As Stanford University professor Sean Reardon says, “The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.”

It is easy to look past the problem of language, simply give children books, and expect that this will lead to development. But that is skipping an integral step. First, THE CAMBODIAN LANGUAGE NEEDS A COMPLETE OVERHAUL. And that starts with PUNCTUATION.

3rd Commentary in Series A Language in Crisis