Media: Ricoh Ad in The Economist/An open letter
| Submitter: |
Geoffrey K. Pullum
|
| Submitter Email: | pullum@ling.ucsc.edu |
| Media Body: |
Re Linguist 13.3309: Linguists and Advertising Geoffrey K. Pullum has sent the following letter to the Ricoh Corporation. December 30, 2002 Executive Vice President Jim Ivy Ricoh Corporation 5 Dedrick Place West Caldwell, NJ 07006 Dear Mr Ivy, The Ricoh Corporation's advertisement on page 2 of The Economis Technology Quarterly [insert following page 48 of The Economist, Dec. 14--20, 2002] shows a picture of a Khoi tribal leader named Chief Obijol. The legend reads: "With a series of simple clicking sounds, he can teach a force of 200 men to hunt, to treat an illness, even how to find an appropriate mate." This is not the first time I have read racist nonsense about the hunters of the Kalahari desert just clicking and grunting at each other rather than using a proper language with sentences like the res of us. Your corporation and its advertising agency should be ashamed of repeating such stupidness. The ad makes an unobjectionable point: for explaining traditions and skills to a couple of hundred people in the face-to-face context of a hunter-gatherer tribe, oral communication in a human language "works exceedingly well," it says; but for the kind of communication involved in running a large modern business one needs document and image sharing of the sort Ricoh offers. The trouble is all with the unnecessarily demeaning and offensive way the first part is put. I makes Khoi-speaking people sound more like exotic animals than like human beings speaking a human language. The Khoi people of Southwestern Africa do not communicate in "a series of simple clicking sounds." Their languages are ordinary human languages with the same kinds of complexities as are found in English grammar. It's true that Khoi languages have velaric suction consonants that are informally described as sounding like clicks, bu they are merely consonants, and they occur with vowels and more ordinary non-click consonants in syllables, words, phrases, and sentences as in any other human language. To refer to Chief Obijol's speech as "a series of simple clicking sounds" is as stupid as calling your own speech "a series of simple uh sounds." I will be sharing this letter with the 16,500 linguists who subscribe to The Linguist List (<www.linguistlist.org/>) as well as the editor of The Economist. I very much hope you will share it with the people at your advertising agency who did this to you. Sincerely, Geoffrey K. Pullum Professor of Linguistics </body> |
| Issue Number: | 14.5 |
| Date Posted: | January 07, 2003 |
