My premise at least, that the state of a nation is reflected in the state of its language(s), is a respectable one. But I hope that, despite my suspicious background, it will be acceptable for me to make some observations about South African English.
My private conclusion was that the calling had something to do with language and literature both, but that we preferred to work with Latin and Greek because that way nobody knew or cared if we were getting anything right.
A few years ago I attended a conference at Harvard entitled "What Is Philology?" where philologists tried to define what it was they did. I am not a professional linguist I am trained as a philologist, whatever that is. Nowadays I hear how much everybody hates "Ja-well-no-fine," a reply that seems to show painful confusion about authority. " Authoritarian thinking was plain in this tic, they said. In 1994, during the months around the first multiracial elections in South Africa, while I was settling into a university teaching job in Cape Town, buying a home there and looking for a publisher, several people apologized to me for using the phrases that commonly introduce advice: "What you must do, you must.
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