(This is a long one)
Remember the letter to Ricoh Geoff Pullum copied to LINGUIST objecting to their advert?
Here's Ricoh's response, and Pullum's response to that:
FROM RICOH:
Dear Professor Pullum:
On behalf of the Ricoh Family Group of companies worldwide, please consider that the advertisement to which you refer in your recent letter was not intended in any way to derogate the Khoisan people or their complex, beautiful language.
Ricoh, as a culturally sensitive organization, had been assured by our advertising agency that a noted South African anthropologist was employed to advise it during the production of this campaign. The anthropologist, who has worked with this tribe for a number of years, made sure that they were being depicted accurately and in a positive light.
In the advertisement, Ricoh intended to present Chief Obijol's use of his language as an example of efficient and effective communication, and used the word "simply" to highlight this. While there are many interpretations of the word "simple", we used it to mean "readily understood". We hold simplicity as the gold standard in communication, because, to us, it stands for easy, clear, and effective interaction. The advertisement, part of a campaign entitled "Experts", is intended to highlight and celebrate people who have learned that the most important ideas can be more powerful when shared directly and effectively. We are sorry if you did not take this message away from the advertisement.
We are alerting our parent company, Ricoh Company, Ltd., the originator of the campaign, of your concerns and your letter. I would like to thank you for taking the initiative to bring this matter to our attention.
Sincerely,
Jim Ivy
cc: The Linguist List, The Economist
FROM GEOFF PULLUM:
Dear Jim,
Thanks for your eloquent letter of January 13. I fully accept your claim that Ricoh meant nothing derogatory. My concern was only that the ad I referred to had inadvertently lent support to an insulting myth.
The general public does seem eager to believe that at least somewhere in the world there are incredibly primitive people with languages that are almost subhuman in their simplicity (or, else preternaturally complex, as with the hopelessly exaggerated stories about the Eskimos' having hundreds of words for subtly different types of snow). And many sources obligingly supply suitable stories for the credulous.
Your advertisement brought back to me my experiences in the early 1970s, when I used to advise Norris McWhirter, the editor of The Guinness Book of World Records (it used to be less dumbed down, and included an interesting page of records and superlatives concerning natural languages). Several times over I had to warn Norris off repeating nonsense he had picked up about "primitive languages". In the early 1960s, the book actually had an entry for "Most Primitive Language" (the honor went to Aranda, an Australian Aboriginal language on which in fact there was a well-known literature describing amazing complexities). Then the book picked up something from Time about a primitive language called Taki-Taki (it's more usually called Sranan, and everything Time said about it was wrong, including some nonsense about it having only 300 words).
I spent hours and hours on correspondence aimed at persuading the editors to keep such insanities out of their book. But when Norris and his brother Ross were invited on a trip to South Africa, they came back with stories of yet another primitive language myth: that the `Bushmen' had a language that was entirely composed of a few dozen clicks and grunts. I had another grass-fire of ignorance to stamp out.
Your advertisement's phrase "a series of simple clicking sounds" brought it all back thirty years later! But I am fully prepared to believe you when you say that the implication was completely unintended, and I thank you for your thoughtful letter, and for sharing its content with the many linguists who read The Linguist List.
Sincerely,
Geoffrey K. Pullum
Professor of Linguistics
