When you click onto the opening page of this website, you see a little statement about the importance of place. Consider your own relationship to place: To home or homes, hometown or current town, schools or workplaces, social gathering places, and religiously or spiritually significant places. Typically, we do so in the context of daily life, but sometimes we reflect, noting nostalgically our relationship to some places and fearfully our relationship to others. Reflecting on the nature of places past can give any of us a new perspective on places present. With that and before I begin, I ask you to make an audio or video message for future generations to hear. You will understand why in a few minutes.
There’s a hotel in Hobart, Tasmania, called Doctor Syntax Hotel that was built in 1846. It derives its name from a famous nineteenth-century racehorse born in 1811. Winning three dozen races from 1814 through 1823, and euthanized in 1838, “The Good Old Doctor” was as well known in his time as were Secretariat, Native Dancer, and that other educated horse Dr. Fager in their times. The famous horse carried the name of a character in a long, serialized poem by William Combe. He wasn’t an especially big horse, standing about the size of an Arabian at 15 hands, and thus, shorter than a thoroughbred. Nevertheless, he was so successful and popular that he garnered the concern of the racing public when he fell after winning his last race. Fortunately, the concern was unnecessary because he hadn’t suffered any life-threatening injuries. Anyway, back to the Doctor Syntax Hotel where one can see a painting of the horse, and I assume, one can speak the vernacular like a native, use slang, invert subject and verb and direct object, and slur speech while ordering a vegemite sandwich. “One of those vegemite sandwiches and a Boag’s Draught I’ll have.” Doctor Syntax Hotel isn’t about syntax.
Without any historical knowledge of the hotel’s name, a visitor might think, “This is a place in which only standard formal English emanates from staff members’ mouths” and where people say “I shall” instead of “I will,” as in “I shall have a vegemite sandwich.” From a distance of 10,020.78 miles on a Great Circle between Pittsburgh and Hobart, I know that thought occurred to me when I saw the establishment’s name. “Wow!” I initially thought, “an establishment made exclusively for English majors and the literati. And Down Under, even closer to the snowy wilderness of Antarctica than the outback. Imagine that.”
Now, this is not an advertisement for the hotel. I am not a travel agent, have not been to Hobart, and cannot envision a time when I will book a room there. Nor is this an indictment of twenty-first century languages, dialects, and vernaculars. And it casts nothing against the hotel, Hobart, or Tasmania. No doubt they all have their charms: A 175-year-old quaint hotel with its own restaurant and a new menu introduced during the pandemic with clean, but, as shown in online pictures, rather stark rooms that offer modern amenities located in an Australian state with great scenery and a 40,000-year human history, the last eight millennia of which have been defined by its isolated position and indigenous people. Yeah. Eight thousand years separated from the rest of humanity. You can guess they didn’t have much in common with Europeans.
The peoples of Northern Hemisphere countries literally knew nothing about Tasmanians until the Dutch, French, and British began sailing around the world discovering and claiming lands for Thrones and merchant companies, and in the process subjugating and exploiting native populations. It was because of those explorations that the King’s English spread over the island of Tasmania. English syntax had arrived, and with it the tie to everything British, including favorite racehorses. As in most human endeavors, there’s was a downside though not so much for the British. Brits decimated the native populations whose vulnerabilities included inferior technologies and tribal units. Tasmania was the Americas in miniature.
Having been isolated for so many thousands of years, the native Tasmanians fell to disease and cruelty, the last of the native population being shipped off to Flinders and their language dying with a quintet of women named Truganini, Sal, Suke, Betty, and Fanny Cochrane Smith. As in the loss of so many languages, the syntaxes of the various Tasmanian dialects were largely lost to the ravages of the invading British. Tasmania, after its long isolation, was a changed place. Fortunately, Fanny Cochrane Smith made recordings of her native Tasmanian language, preserving some of it for posterity. *
The story of Truganini is an especially sad tale, but it is also one of endurance. She lost her family. Sailors killed her mother; a soldier shot her uncle. Slavers kidnapped her sister. Lumberjacks killed her fiancé and abused her. But she survived, and since her death Truganini has been an off-an-on focus of many people over the last century, including those who wrote plays, songs, articles, and books about her. She is also the namesake of at least two racehorses and one ship, a nineteenth-century steamer called Truganini. The place where she grew up, suffered indignities, married, and birthed has changed dramatically. Today a physical memorial recognizes her and her people, the Nuenonne people of a place now known as Bruny Island that Truganini called Lunnawannalonna.
Although Bruny Island and the rest of Tasmania have undergone notable changes since their discovery by Europeans, apparently one unchanging characteristic of humanity persists in place. Her bronze memorial has been vandalized several times, an indication that any place, regardless of the changes it undergoes, provides a venue for human depravity. How might the place where you currently live have once been the site of similar inhumanities? Fortunately, the local historical society keeps coming up with the funds to restore the memorial and possibly even more fortunately, both Truganini and Mrs. Smith have been memorialized in the place we call the Web, where damage repair, should it be needed, is less costly. That I should have need to mention Web vandalism, only serves to underline the continuing characteristic of human cruelty that altered the places and destroyed the lives of so many indigenous Tasmanians.
Syntax, if you recall your English lessons, is word arrangement. Each language has an idiomatic one though related languages share syntax, such as where verbs normally go in relationship to subjects and objects. English, a Germanic language, uses a slightly different syntax from its German parent which places past participles at the end of sentences. “The English had established penal colonies on Tasmania” becomes “Die Engländer hatten Strafkolonien auf Tasmanien errichtet” auf Deutsch. That past participle errichtet finds itself at the end of the German sentence separated from its auxiliary verb hatten. In all languages, native speakers acquire a sense of word order. Example? Easy. How about that last group of words? Acquire word sense in native all a languages order of speakers. Bad syntax equals meaninglessness.
Now think of taking a trip for an overnighter in The Doctor Syntax Hotel. If you speak any English, you’ll probably have no difficulty communicating with staff or other guests. Not so for Truganini or Fanny Cochrane Smith if they were still alive. Their land would be a foreign one. But then, almost everywhere anyone lives is a land foreign to a displaced or extinct indigenous people—even your current residence. Old neighborhoods give way to new ones just as forests and farms give way to new developments; houses once occupied by original owners are now the domains of another generation. Ethnic neighborhoods gradually succumb to time and mixing and to population thinning as an ensuing generation leaves for the grass on the other side of the fence and to population expansion as others move into the area.
There’s a high probability that you are not the first occupant of the land on which you reside. There’s also a high probability that previous residents would have difficulty understanding some, if not all, of your expressions, especially those associated with technology, like smart phone, 5G, social media, trolling, EV, or even emoji. You are in the process of changing not only place, but also language. Your text messages might even alter syntax as so many texts alter punctuation, spelling, and grammar. And globalization, begun long ago by those intrepid and often inhumane explorers, has introduced into your language new words and phrases and slight, but gradually effective tweaks to your grammar and syntax. That’s nothing new, of course. One need only look at the many Latin words and roots that filtered into English to see how the culture of one people can influence, or even replace, the culture of another. Remember that the Romans, and after them the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes occupied Celtic Britain, subjecting the locals to the same kinds of treatment the Brits were later to perpetrate on the indigenous Tasmanians.
Not to worry about change to your place or language. You’ve made a video that records what you sound like and how you talk. You are a present-day Fanny Cochrane Smith, and you’re leaving a memorial like the bronze head of Truganini. In making your video, you are leaving something behind for posterity to puzzle over as they sit and chat in The Doctor Syntax Hotel, many of them using a language you might find quite unfamiliar, possibly even unintelligible. Make that video. Your grandchildren three generations removed from now might be curious about you and the place where you once lived.
*If you are curious about how Franny Cochrane Smith talked and sang, see https://aso.gov.au/titles/music/fanny-cochrane-smith-songs/clip1/ Accessed February 15, 2021.
There’s a hotel in Hobart, Tasmania, called Doctor Syntax Hotel that was built in 1846. It derives its name from a famous nineteenth-century racehorse born in 1811. Winning three dozen races from 1814 through 1823, and euthanized in 1838, “The Good Old Doctor” was as well known in his time as were Secretariat, Native Dancer, and that other educated horse Dr. Fager in their times. The famous horse carried the name of a character in a long, serialized poem by William Combe. He wasn’t an especially big horse, standing about the size of an Arabian at 15 hands, and thus, shorter than a thoroughbred. Nevertheless, he was so successful and popular that he garnered the concern of the racing public when he fell after winning his last race. Fortunately, the concern was unnecessary because he hadn’t suffered any life-threatening injuries. Anyway, back to the Doctor Syntax Hotel where one can see a painting of the horse, and I assume, one can speak the vernacular like a native, use slang, invert subject and verb and direct object, and slur speech while ordering a vegemite sandwich. “One of those vegemite sandwiches and a Boag’s Draught I’ll have.” Doctor Syntax Hotel isn’t about syntax.
Without any historical knowledge of the hotel’s name, a visitor might think, “This is a place in which only standard formal English emanates from staff members’ mouths” and where people say “I shall” instead of “I will,” as in “I shall have a vegemite sandwich.” From a distance of 10,020.78 miles on a Great Circle between Pittsburgh and Hobart, I know that thought occurred to me when I saw the establishment’s name. “Wow!” I initially thought, “an establishment made exclusively for English majors and the literati. And Down Under, even closer to the snowy wilderness of Antarctica than the outback. Imagine that.”
Now, this is not an advertisement for the hotel. I am not a travel agent, have not been to Hobart, and cannot envision a time when I will book a room there. Nor is this an indictment of twenty-first century languages, dialects, and vernaculars. And it casts nothing against the hotel, Hobart, or Tasmania. No doubt they all have their charms: A 175-year-old quaint hotel with its own restaurant and a new menu introduced during the pandemic with clean, but, as shown in online pictures, rather stark rooms that offer modern amenities located in an Australian state with great scenery and a 40,000-year human history, the last eight millennia of which have been defined by its isolated position and indigenous people. Yeah. Eight thousand years separated from the rest of humanity. You can guess they didn’t have much in common with Europeans.
The peoples of Northern Hemisphere countries literally knew nothing about Tasmanians until the Dutch, French, and British began sailing around the world discovering and claiming lands for Thrones and merchant companies, and in the process subjugating and exploiting native populations. It was because of those explorations that the King’s English spread over the island of Tasmania. English syntax had arrived, and with it the tie to everything British, including favorite racehorses. As in most human endeavors, there’s was a downside though not so much for the British. Brits decimated the native populations whose vulnerabilities included inferior technologies and tribal units. Tasmania was the Americas in miniature.
Having been isolated for so many thousands of years, the native Tasmanians fell to disease and cruelty, the last of the native population being shipped off to Flinders and their language dying with a quintet of women named Truganini, Sal, Suke, Betty, and Fanny Cochrane Smith. As in the loss of so many languages, the syntaxes of the various Tasmanian dialects were largely lost to the ravages of the invading British. Tasmania, after its long isolation, was a changed place. Fortunately, Fanny Cochrane Smith made recordings of her native Tasmanian language, preserving some of it for posterity. *
The story of Truganini is an especially sad tale, but it is also one of endurance. She lost her family. Sailors killed her mother; a soldier shot her uncle. Slavers kidnapped her sister. Lumberjacks killed her fiancé and abused her. But she survived, and since her death Truganini has been an off-an-on focus of many people over the last century, including those who wrote plays, songs, articles, and books about her. She is also the namesake of at least two racehorses and one ship, a nineteenth-century steamer called Truganini. The place where she grew up, suffered indignities, married, and birthed has changed dramatically. Today a physical memorial recognizes her and her people, the Nuenonne people of a place now known as Bruny Island that Truganini called Lunnawannalonna.
Although Bruny Island and the rest of Tasmania have undergone notable changes since their discovery by Europeans, apparently one unchanging characteristic of humanity persists in place. Her bronze memorial has been vandalized several times, an indication that any place, regardless of the changes it undergoes, provides a venue for human depravity. How might the place where you currently live have once been the site of similar inhumanities? Fortunately, the local historical society keeps coming up with the funds to restore the memorial and possibly even more fortunately, both Truganini and Mrs. Smith have been memorialized in the place we call the Web, where damage repair, should it be needed, is less costly. That I should have need to mention Web vandalism, only serves to underline the continuing characteristic of human cruelty that altered the places and destroyed the lives of so many indigenous Tasmanians.
Syntax, if you recall your English lessons, is word arrangement. Each language has an idiomatic one though related languages share syntax, such as where verbs normally go in relationship to subjects and objects. English, a Germanic language, uses a slightly different syntax from its German parent which places past participles at the end of sentences. “The English had established penal colonies on Tasmania” becomes “Die Engländer hatten Strafkolonien auf Tasmanien errichtet” auf Deutsch. That past participle errichtet finds itself at the end of the German sentence separated from its auxiliary verb hatten. In all languages, native speakers acquire a sense of word order. Example? Easy. How about that last group of words? Acquire word sense in native all a languages order of speakers. Bad syntax equals meaninglessness.
Now think of taking a trip for an overnighter in The Doctor Syntax Hotel. If you speak any English, you’ll probably have no difficulty communicating with staff or other guests. Not so for Truganini or Fanny Cochrane Smith if they were still alive. Their land would be a foreign one. But then, almost everywhere anyone lives is a land foreign to a displaced or extinct indigenous people—even your current residence. Old neighborhoods give way to new ones just as forests and farms give way to new developments; houses once occupied by original owners are now the domains of another generation. Ethnic neighborhoods gradually succumb to time and mixing and to population thinning as an ensuing generation leaves for the grass on the other side of the fence and to population expansion as others move into the area.
There’s a high probability that you are not the first occupant of the land on which you reside. There’s also a high probability that previous residents would have difficulty understanding some, if not all, of your expressions, especially those associated with technology, like smart phone, 5G, social media, trolling, EV, or even emoji. You are in the process of changing not only place, but also language. Your text messages might even alter syntax as so many texts alter punctuation, spelling, and grammar. And globalization, begun long ago by those intrepid and often inhumane explorers, has introduced into your language new words and phrases and slight, but gradually effective tweaks to your grammar and syntax. That’s nothing new, of course. One need only look at the many Latin words and roots that filtered into English to see how the culture of one people can influence, or even replace, the culture of another. Remember that the Romans, and after them the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes occupied Celtic Britain, subjecting the locals to the same kinds of treatment the Brits were later to perpetrate on the indigenous Tasmanians.
Not to worry about change to your place or language. You’ve made a video that records what you sound like and how you talk. You are a present-day Fanny Cochrane Smith, and you’re leaving a memorial like the bronze head of Truganini. In making your video, you are leaving something behind for posterity to puzzle over as they sit and chat in The Doctor Syntax Hotel, many of them using a language you might find quite unfamiliar, possibly even unintelligible. Make that video. Your grandchildren three generations removed from now might be curious about you and the place where you once lived.
*If you are curious about how Franny Cochrane Smith talked and sang, see https://aso.gov.au/titles/music/fanny-cochrane-smith-songs/clip1/ Accessed February 15, 2021.
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