The New York Times,
July 2, 1989
On Language
Haven Maven
By WILLIAM
SAFIRE
A PUNDIT
CARE-less with his usage wrote this about the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, the Beijing dissident who is now a house guest of the United
States: ''You can send him and his family a welcome note care of the U.S.
Embassy in Peking, where they are
holed up under our protection. The asylum granted him has infuriated the Deng
regime. . . .''
As soon as I saw this in print, I barked, ''Gotcha!''
despite the fact that the offending pundit was me (not I). This is a
manifestation of Writer's Self-Flagellation Syndrome. One's own words always
seem different in print; a writer reads himself with a touch of disbelief
because the words stand proudly out there on their own, more respectable and
permanently independent than the author. That's why some of us get a perverse
kick out of finding mistakes in our own work; it makes the creator feel smarter
than his smugly frozen creation. Asylum was not quite the right word. Nor
were Fang Lizhi and his family granted sanctuary, strictly
speaking; better to say they were granted refuge. Splitting hairs? Hardly;
in the synonymy of haven, we are stepping into a sensitive field of
international law. A call to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of
State meets with a stiff rebuff; in this case, the normally instructive Judge
Abraham D. Sofaer won't say a word about choosing the right word. With legal
eagles seeking maven-haven, let us approach the subject linguistically.
Haven is the oldest and broadest term. The noun is related to the Middle
High German habene, ''harbor,'' and its early English use about a millennium
ago referred to an inlet for safe anchorage. Now the word's figurative extension
carries it beyond a safe port in a storm to any safe place for people in
trouble. Harbor, on the other hand, has taken a sinister turn in its verb
form: you can offer haven to the hunted, thereby winning sympathy as a
protector of the persecuted, but you harbor a criminal or a suspect on the
run, thereby abetting a crime. Asylum is rooted in the Greek asylos,
''inviolable,'' from a-, meaning ''not, without,'' and sylon, meaning
''right of seizure.'' The right of asylum in a sanctuary is ancient,
going back to Egypt's Temple of Osiris and Greece's Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
But frequent abuse of this right, and the decline of the secular power of
organized religion, led to its curtailment in modern penal codes.
To
provide for the extradition of fugitive criminals, nations sign treaties
voluntarily limiting asylum - making it clear that the ''right of asylum''
belongs to the state to offer, and is not an entitlement for the individual to
claim. (Another sense of the word, as a place where care is given to an
unfortunate -as in orphan asylum or insane asylum - is no longer used.)
Refuge today has a more temporary and less legal connotation. Rooted in the
Latin fugere, ''to flee,'' it first appeared in ''The Canterbury Tales,'' as
a captured knight tells the ruler Theseus: ''Yif us neither mercy ne refuge,/
But sle me first.'' (''Give us neither mercy nor refuge,/ but slay me first.'')
Refugee, which was used in America as a word for marauders in the
Revolutionary War who claimed British protection, in 1914 gained the meaning of
''someone displaced by war or driven from home by fear of death or
persecution.''
For the difference between asylum and refuge, let
us turn to Duke Austin, a press officer of the United States Immigration and
Naturalization Service: ''It depends on the process and place of applying, and
the formal status received. To get asylum in the United States, you must be
within our territory when you apply. Also, you must be able to prove a
well-founded fear of persecution based on your race, religion, nationality or
membership in a social or political group.''
How is a refugee
different? ''Refugees must also establish that they will be persecuted,'' says
the immigration official, ''but a refugee applies outside the United States and
is examined by an I.N.S. examiner -- no judicial review, no appeal, though you
can ask for a reconsideration based on new information.'' Sanctuary? ''We
recognize no such concept; no one is above or beyond the laws of the United
States, whether in a church or hospital or whatever.''
Presumably, then,
Fang Lizhi sought refuge in the United States Embassy, and
may now be seeking asylum, since he is under our protection and is obviously
in danger because of his political beliefs. However, the Beijing ''authorities''
(a more neutral term than ''blood-spattered regime'') have ordered his arrest on
criminal charges, and remind us that we do not harbor criminals. That's why
State clams up on definitions.
Associated terms are safe conduct and
safe convoy, by which a person in legal limbo in an embassy is permitted to
leave the country. This began in the Middle Ages, according to Robert of
Gloucester's 1297 chronicle of a nobleman let out of England. Sanctuary was
short-term; fugitives could stay in sanctuary but not leave without being
arrested.
To get around this, a process of abjuration was designed --
from abjure, ''to swear away, to renounce under oath'' -- requiring a
renunciation of citizenship and a promise to leave the realm. This was the way
the impasse of the state, the sanctuary and the persecuted was resolved. As part
of an agreement of abjuration worked out among the United States, the Vatican
and the Hungarian Government, Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty was allowed to depart
Hungary after leaving the protection of the United States Embassy in Budapest in
1971.
That may or may not be the route taken in the case of Fang Lizhi and his family. In any event, the vocabulary of haven will be
in the news, along with the name that Americans will not find easy to pronounce.
Is it fong lee-DZUH, as I have advised readers, or fong lee-JER, as we hear on
television? That final syllable gets the emphasis, and some of us pronounce it
like the French je, while others add an r. Chinese officials in
Washington don't use the r, to my ear. According to Norman C.C. Fu, chief of
the Washington Bureau for the Taiwan-based China Times, ''There's a sort of
r sound at the end, but it isn't completely sounded.''
This is
disputed. ''Pinyin spelling looks funny,'' writes John S. Major, a senior editor
of Book-of-the-Month Club, ''but its rules are reasonably consistent. The
initial consonant cluster zh is pronounced exactly the same as an English
hard j; thus, for example, Zhou (as in Zhou Enlai) is a homophone of
Joe.
''I as a final vowel following c, s or z is
pronounced 'uh,' as in huh; as a final vowel following ch, sh or zh,
it is pronounced 'ur,' as in urgent. Therefore, zhi in Fang
Lizhi is pronounced 'jur' -- approximately a homophone for the start of
journalist, spoken with a New York accent.''
That makes the
pronunciation of Beijing bay-JING -- with the j as in Joe or
jingle -- rather than bay-SHING.
Copyright 1989 The New York Times Company