On to University

At the beginning of 1951 I enrolled at Auckland University College as it was then called. Universities in New Zealand were only two then: The University of Otago and the University of New Zealand. 

The University was divided into several colleges: Auckland, Victoria and Canterbury. No-one had thought of Waikato, or of Lincoln or Massey as separate tertiary institutions. 

My official graduation photo 1954

It would be tedious to relate a lot of detail about my studies. It is enough to say that I spent three years gaining a Bachelor’s degree in Arts: three years of English and French, and a year each of Latin, German and History. 

In the fourth year I completed seven papers for a Master’s degree in English, four papers in language, two in literature and one in research methods. 

In 1955, while at Training College, I took the first three papers for Diploma in Education. By that stage I was pretty sick of studying; I was glad to get out into the real world by 1956. 

The main thrust of my tertiary studies was Language and Languages. Literature was incidental to that. I was fascinated by the way language works, and the differences between languages. And, of course, once I got into the subject, the similarities between them. 

I think it is a great pity that more students do not tackle this subject. Once many years ago I asked an inspector how many Heads of English Departments in Auckland High Schools had degrees in English. The reply was: “Two or three”. We would not expect our children to be taught by rank amateurs in other subjects, but there seems to be an attitude that “anyone can teach English”. Surely at last the HOD should have English qualifications. 

And more of them should have Language qualifications, not just Literature ones. The extreme version of this point was made by a friend of mine, also many years ago, when he said: “Literature is what I read for fun, for relaxation, and for entertainment. I do not regard it as adequate academic discipline. For that you need to study the language.” 

Fortunately now our curriculum includes a lot of language analysis in the senior years at school, but with such a dearth of language graduates it is hard to see that it is well taught. And it is possible to argue that to analyse English competently one needs to know something of French, and Latin, and probably German or another Germanic language as well. Even a North Indian or Celtic language, or Russian would help. Better still would be a language which had no similarity to English; the stark differences would throw English structures into high relief. 

So language was my specialism. I could have enjoyed post-grad study into modern systems of language analysis, such as those based on frequency of use of words or structures. I toyed with the idea of travelling to, say, Chicago University, where they had a Ph.D. linguistics programme. But the pull of India was too strong. 

However I have since continued to read books and articles about the various approaches to language. The best-known of these is by Noam Chomsky, but there are several different schools. 

One exercise I did for myself comparatively recently was to analyse the proportion of words of Old English origin in the writing of various authors, poets and dramatists: and they ranged from Lloyd Geering (around 35% non-English origin vocabulary) to Robert Frost (4%). This was only a small sample of each writer, and the study would have to be repeated using a greater variety of their styles, but along with other measures this could be used to build a profile of the language which could identify each writer as accurately as a fingerprint. 

But again, such work would require a wide knowledge of languages, or the researcher would have to spend so much time with an etymological dictionary the job would be interminable. 

Even in school days I had tried to pick up a smattering of Italian, and Esperanto. Maori was always around, at least common words from Maori vocabulary. And when I began theological study after I left Training College, I started to learn Greek and Hebrew. In India I learned Bengali pretty thoroughly, and to decipher the Sanskrit script. Later, when Audrey took Russian at University, I learned a bit of that, at least enough, again, to decipher the script.  

No-one ever succeeded in explaining to me any credible theory about how language developed. Someday the neurologists and anthropologists may work it out, but so far it is a mystery.