28 September 2004

Lingua Franca

There was a time when the people came from the East and all the world spoke with one tongue, though there were few words. All the people could communicate. A wife from the most distant province could scold another's husband right in the capital of Babylon Humankind was united, and if there were not so many words, there was not so much to talk about.

The people settled in the fertile land between two great rivers. They cultivated grain to make bread, and captured the honey of the bees to ferment into rich drink. They gathered the mud beside the dark waters and formed it into blocks and burned them in the fire. They made mortar from bitumen, and placed the bricks upon one another in lines to make stout houses.

There was no need for many words, since the business of tilling and forming the mud took only a few, as did the longing glance of a comely face or the look of quiet desperation in the old.

The people between the rivers prospered and they built a fine city with the mud bricks. The leaders met, men alone, and decided that to gain honor for the city a tower should be erected that would reach to the sky itself, and make God proud. They set out about burning more bricks, and piling them in a massive ziggurat in the middle of the city. As the great pile rose, ramps were constructed, and donkeys pulled carts piled high with bricks ever upward.

The masons toiled upon the heap, piling course upon course, level upon level, ever upwards. New words were required to describe the great work, and in the marketplace the people struggled to learn them. Stupendous . Gigantic. Gargantuan.

''Presently the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built while the women looked on dubiously. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people! They have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing will now be impossible for them. Therefore, I shall confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."

Then the people were scattered over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel , because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth. - Genesis 11 .

That is the story, anyway. The ziggurat wound up just inside the perimeter of a jet fighter base called Talil, and a dictator who proclaimed himself the son of the sons of Nebucanezzer, and the tower was decorated by MiGs. Some of the other people wound up on the shore of another brown river, and there they piled up bricks and called it the J. Edgar Hoover Building

I know something of Babel . In my wanders around the big blue marble I picked up phrases from ten languages. I made it a point to know how to ask for more beverages and find the men's room, and above all, the magic words of please and thank-you.

I love to thank the Ethiopian at the register in Amharic, or politely greet the Korean grocer in her own language. But of course that is about all I can do. I blundered a little further in French, which had a reasonable chance at becoming the new lingua franca, and managed to irritate actual francophones quite successfully.

I chatted with a cab driver last week, after he completed his prayers on the grass next to the car. He complemented me on my accent, in English, of course, because I had swiftly run out of phrases. Zout alour, I thought.

The FBI has run out of phrases, too. According to an investigation- conducted in English, of course- the Bureau is deleting wire-tapped conversations of the terrorists because they have no place to store them. You will recall that the Bureau has traditionally viewed computers with suspicion and disdain, and the situation has not improved dramatically since the war of terror began.

Terror-related audio recordings are supposed to be reviewed within 12 hours of interception, according to official Bureau. The leaked part of the investigation found that deadline was missed in 36 percent of nearly 900 cases reviewed. In fifty of the terror cases, it took a month for the F.B.I. to translate material.

Part of the problem is the way the Bureau is structured. The real power is located not in the headquarters, but out in the Field Offices. If you can imagine, the individual offices are doing their own translations. It is not enough that we have thrown up the J. Edgar Hoover Building, but we have a dozen or more additional towers out in the hinterlands, a great institution divided into individual fiefdoms.

The 9/11 Commission despaired of making the intelligence and law enforcement agencies speak with one tongue, but the problem is much deeper. The Bureau itself is one institution divided, like England and America , by a common language. The investigation at the Field Offices found that computer problems and the shortage of qualified linguists have created a huge backlog in translating terrorist-related material.

The F.B.I. is still drowning in information. More than 123,000 hours of audio recordings made under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act have not been translated since the attacks on New York and Washington, and nearly half a million hours of audio tapes has not even been reviewed at all.

Not needing any other tongue to get around America , there is no reservoir of low-demand linguistic skills available to listen in on the terrorists. Except, of course, for the people driving cabs outside. We have even tapped that precious resource, with the predictable results. I don't know how we fix a system that cannot even perform such an in-depth analytic function as reading a local newspaper. If you have a good idea, you might want to drop a note to the Bureau, though I could not direct you to the proper Field Office.

We need a lingua franca, a common tongue. We have added so many words to the English language alone that it is hard to keep them all straight. Senator Kerry apparently has the resources to acquire an inordinate number, and he should loan some to the President.

I may be able to order a beer in ten languages, but I find that I cannot even speak politics in my native tongue.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra