Now that the beloved daughter has started university (Go DUCKS!), I am reclaiming my desk that was formerly heaped with high school homework, dishes, etc. and the usual teenage accoutrements, and I'm going to call it the Stamp Nook, hence the name of this irregular column about the nerdiest of hobbies, Stamp Collecting.
I've often thought that if we had leaders who collected stamps from foreign countries, they might at least know a little more about countries before we start dropping bombs on them.
This time for the nook, I thought we'd have a look at bilingual stamps.
You probably noticed that the one of the obsessions of the nutter fringe of the conservative movement, besides guns, gays, and tin foil hats, is the supposed threat to the English language posed by immigrants, Democrats, and various other riff-raff. Take this example from National Review (9/24/14): Study: One in Ten Adults in U.S. Not Proficient in English. I’ll spare you the usual NRO xenophobic and racist comment section, save this one gem:
Our schools hire teacher's who speak their language to teach then IN their language.
Our "government" caters to them, gives the free stuff that WE have to pay for.. They have no real incentive to even bother learning or speaking English. Here's an idea. Won't learn OR speak English? ? LEAVE!!
Vraiment? Dude better get a U-Haul.
What can stamps tell us about the bilingual, or perhaps more accurately, diglossic countries?
Stamp 1, Ottoman Empire, first issued January 14, 1914.
Here's a stamp issued by the Ottoman Empire (Scott #269). It’s written in Turkish and in French.
Obviously French wasn’t a native language in the Ottoman Empire, but for correspondence abroad, French would be more readily understood. Note the cancellation is in Roman letters, and the date is the Common Era or Christian era date, not the Muslim year, and the stamp was postmarked at Constantinople, the ancient name for Istanbul, all of which point to strong domination of the Ottoman post office, at least in the capital city, by Western powers.
But the Turkish symbolism is still strong — it shows the fountain of Sultan Ahmed III built in 1728 in the imperial capital, and still standing to this day. Above the depiction of the fountain is shown the Sultan’s calligraphic monogram, called a tughra, which itself is deeply symbolic of the power of the Sultan and the empire. Of course, at this time, there were many languages spoken in the Ottoman state, including Greek, Armenia, Arabic, and Kurdish.
Stamp 2, Switzerland
Stamp 2 is from Switzerland, it is in Latin. Now, I know what you’re gonna say: “Hey, wait, I thought they only spoke Latin in Latin America!”
Au contraire, meine Freunde, for in Switzerland they have four official languages, French, German, Italian, and Romansh. All that’s gonna take up a lot of real estate on a stamp, so they picked a language for the stamps (and a country name, Helvetia) that no one speaks, Latin! Pro juventute means “for the children” and it’s a children’s charity in Switzerland. Every year since 1913, the Swiss post office has sold a special semi-postal issue to raise money for the charity.
Stamp 3, Ireland, design first issued in 1922-1923.
There are numerous instances of stamps being issued in a language not widely spoken in the country of issue. This of course is very common in the numerous former colonies of European empires, but it also occurs in in sovereign states.
Stamp 3, a lovely design, was first issued as part of the first set of Irish stamps in 1922-1923, and reissued from time to time after that. Every word on this stamp,which depicts a beautiful Irish cross, is in Irish, even though and perhaps because, that language was rapidly, and by then almost irretrievably being replaced by English, so much so that over 20 years before, the great playwright and poet John Millington Synge had had to travel to the remote Aran Islands to find a place where Irish was spoken on a daily basis by the whole population. But symbolism was important, and so the first stamps of Ireland necessary were in Irish.
Stamp 4, Yugoslavia (Scott #41, issued 1926-27)
Stamp 5, Yugoslavia (Scott #67, issued 1931-34)
Stamp 4 is from Yugoslavia, which at the time it was issued, was known as the “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes”, a pretty awkward title, which also managed also to not mention other non-Serbian nationalities living in the country, especially the numerous Albanians and Macedonians.
Stamp 4 shows a rather conventional profile of King Aleksandar I Karađorđević (for over 100 years, Serbia had two feuding royal families Karađorđević and Obrenović), and appears to bear the country’s name in two languages, above the portrait, Serbian, below, Croatian. In fact however, these are the same language, Serbo-Croatian, which is written either in the Gaj Latin or the Serbian Cyrillic alphabets, which have a one-to-one congruence between the letters.
In early 1929, Alexander I carried out his own coup against the government, established himself as dictator, and, among other things, renamed the country “Yugoslavia” (also spelled Jugoslavia) which means “Land of the South Slavs.” Stamp 5 reflects this change. Also note the change in the royal portrait, from the rather bland profile of Stamp 4 to a more humanistic, yet also imperious frontal view, looking slightly upwards. Alexander, who was called by some “the Unifier” engendered much opposition in Yugoslavia, particularly among the Croats.
As perhaps a harbinger of this, note that the designer names on Stamps 4 and 5, underneath the main stamp design, are not bilingual, but rather in Serbia alone — a mark of the domination of Belgrade and Serbia over the rest of the supposedly co-equal portions of the state.
On the other hand, Stamps 4 and 5 show the one-to-one letter correspondence in the alphabets used to write the Serbo-Croatian language:
Краљевина Срба, Хрвата и Словенаца
Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca
Југославија
Jugoslavija
Yugoslavia obviously represents a failed state. I can’t say whether this is due to invasion and occupation (1941-1945), Communism (1945-1989), religious hatred, or some other cause or combination of causes, but I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t language, or at least language alone, for as the stamps show, the major contending groups, Serbs and Croats, spoke the
same language. Other countries, such as Switzerland, and, although I did not include their stamps, Finland and Canada, have two or more well-established languages, and yet continue to succeed as states.
Ireland however has not been a truly bilingual country in modern times, yet it had its own civil war shortly after independence. The fact that both Scotland and England spoke English did not prevent the recent near-secession of Scotland. And of course the common English language prevented neither the American Revolution nor the American Civil War. This pattern could be repeated across countries and languages, with Czechoslovakia breaking into two countries despite speaking a common language, Spain being riven by civil war in the 1930s, and so on.
The simple fact is that a common language is not a predictor of national success, and in fact the insistence on use of a common language is often the mark of a crudely oppressive (and often unsuccessful) government, with the Chinese suppression of Tibet coming immediately to mind. Multi-lingual countries certainly have collapsed, such as the Ottoman and Austrian empires, but even in those cases, that occurred under the extraordinary pressures of world war.
Stamp 6 — 1066 the English language gets some big changes
Finally, it is amusing that the fetish of demanding that all speak the Queen's English over here in the colonies takes no account of the fact that English itself is a constantly changing language, and the changes can be large and unpredictable.
Had the English won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, as illustrated in Stamp 6, English might never have adopted the huge French vocabulary, as well as the French spelling conventions, and might have been more like Dutch or Friesian, perhaps even mutually intelligible with those languages. All those Tea Party signs might now say:
Engels is onze taal . Leren om het te spreken!