Postfazione


As Maria Carreras describes in her introduction to this CD, following the outbreak of the war in Iraq last year, Bologna University's School of Interpreting and Translation in Forlì decided to dedicate a week of classes to analysing the languages of war. This CD, which reproduces and expands some of the work done that week, is a testimony not only of personal concerns for peace, but also of professional involvement in world affairs by an institution focussed on the study of language and language use.

Linguists are not political scientists. It is not our task to explain or justify war. But it is surely part of our task to explain how wars exploit and corrupt the most central part of our cultural heritage - language.

President Bush's address to the nation on 19 March announcing the war on Iraq began with the words:

"My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger."

If you do a search for defend the world on the Internet, in documents published prior to the date of Bush's speech, you will find that this expression is above all used in reference to videogames. In other words, to defend the world you shoot at green aliens from other planets to score points.

Is this a linguistically appropriate (and hence ethically appropriate) way of describing the real war begun a year ago? Bush - perhaps understandably - did not use the word "war" to describe America's actions, choosing instead to talk of "military operations" (only Saddam was described as having the ability to "wage war"). The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that war comes from the Old English werre, as does the adjective worse. So peace (which the dictionary describes as "absence of war") is defined by the English culture as intrinsically better than war. Bush in fact went on to declare that America would "carry on the work of peace" - a description, like so many others we have been given over the last year, that arguably distorts the meaning potentials of our language.

Analyses like these may provide a means to interpret speech events, but they cannot readily determine them. Why else, if we look up war and peace on the Internet, is war three times as frequent?