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L O W L A N D S - L - 12 April 2011 - Volume 01<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gd"><span style="color:#5B1094">M.-L. Lessing</span></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gi"> </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="go"><<a href="mailto:marless@gmx.de">marless@gmx.de</a></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gi">LL-L "Language use" 2011.04.11 (04) [EN]</span><br>
<br>
</span><span style="font-size: 13pt; font-family: times new roman,serif;">Dear Ron, </span></p>
<p style="font-family: times new roman,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.0pt"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: times new roman,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.0pt">I had been hoping for the
profound insights you can give, thank you! </span></p>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in; font-family: times new roman,serif;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:13.0pt">I don't say English is a model of
logical orthography :-) A language one already knows seems often easier than
a new one.I think Italian has a pretty reliable orthography and
pronunciation. And it is easy to learn (well, I had Latin in school :-))
It would make a fine lingua franca. -- And then there is Esperanto. -- But
history isn't that logical. </span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:13.0pt">Tonality: Another mystery for me. That means that
a syllable differs in its meaning depending on the height of the tone it
is spoken with (relative to the "groundline" of the speaker's
intonation),right?So the same syllable can mean "ja"or
"nein" when intonated differently. (They will not take downright
opposites like "ja" and "nein", or will they?) So if I
want to say "yes" and my friend Klaus that moment pricks me in
my side (I am very ticklish) and I utter the syllable in a squeak, I may
have said "no" instead of "yes"?<br>
Now this makes speaking more tricky, and I think it should be a hindrance
to individual intonation,emphasis etc. Is it? -- But wouldn't it,
theoretically,give you a chance to make writing more simple?At least if
you constructed a new language like that. You could express everything with
even lesssounds, that is: with less letters. But the chinese uses all
sorts of sounds despite its tonality, hm?So tonality is another thing to
learn extra.</span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:13.0pt">I don't attribute the faults of the chinese
government to the language (nor do you, I know). I rather pity the honest
Chinese who love their language and literature in defiance of the nowadays
government. A language can be a fine thing quite independently from
a government. We had governments in germany that could have
brought lots of shame on our language if that was possible. Still German
remains a fine language, hm?</span></li></ul>
<p style="font-family: times new roman,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.0pt">Hartlich!</span></p>
<p style="font-family: times new roman,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.0pt"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: times new roman,serif;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.0pt">Marlou</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.0pt"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;">From: R. F.
Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank"><span style="color:navy">sassisch@yahoo.com</span></a>></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;">Subject:
Language use</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;">Hi, Marlou!</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;">There was a
time when I would have agreed with you <i>in toto</i>. These days I am no
longer so sure. Mostly, however, please let me play the devil’s advocate here.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: navy;">(1)</span></b><span style="color: navy;"> Impractical? The Chinese script is
pictographically based, though many characters that were developed later do
have phonetic references based on Middle Chinese. By and large, though, the
script is “abstract,” so to speak. In theory at least, you could pretty easily
use this script for any other language. In fact, Japanese, Korean and
Vietnamese do or did indeed use it, though with added devices to suit their
morphological needs. So you may argue that the Chinese script, being largely
independent of sound, is very well suited as a <i>litteratura franca</i>. To communicate in writing about
contemporarily relevant matters, a person needs to learn a good three thousand
Chinese characters. While this may sound like a lot, I can assure you on the
basis of personal experience that it is not as difficult as it sounds. (Reading
Classical Chinese literature is a different matter, requiring far more characters
and being based on a very different language.) However, these days many words
are <i>composites</i> of two or more characters.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: navy;">(2)</span></b><span style="color: navy;"> While you can learn the Chinese script
independently from a spoken language, these days it is paired with and
morphosyntactically based on the Modern Mandarin language. Again, “Chinese” is
internationally considered a very difficult language to learn, and this
assumption is largely based on partial knowledge about the script and about the
fact that all Chinese languages (“dialects”) are tonal (i.e. have phonemic
pitch distinction, as to some degree or other do Indo-European languages such
as Panjabi, Norwegian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian and Limburgish – and
these days Japanese and Korean have been shown to be to some degree tonal (i.e.
bi-tonal), too – not to mention scores of African and American languages). In
reality, the difficulty of both script and tone is wildly exaggerated. Standard
Mandarin has four tones, and they are easy to learn (at least in <i>my</i>
experience). Besides, I have met many non-Chinese who did not master the
Mandarin tones and still managed to function at least adequately while living
in China.
Furthermore, many of my fellow-students in Beijing
were from various parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, most of them with no
Chinese studies background and with no particular interest in China either;
yet, most of them were quite fluent after about one year, and among them many
acquired functional Chinese literacy. <br>
Personally, I find Russian—one of the world’s most significant <i>linguae
francae</i>—no less challenging than Mandarin, perhaps even more challenging
because of its rather involved phonology and morphology. <br>
Please allow me to add that I am fairly educated about Chinese ethnic and
linguistic minorities, and this includes personal encounters. China has
minorities that speak very different types of languages, such as Tungusic,
Mongolic, Turkic, Tibeto-Burman and Austronesian ones, not to mention a large
Korean minority, as well as smaller communities of speakers of Indo-European
languages (Wakhi, Sarikoli and Russian). Most of their members these days are
proficient in Mandarin as well as in their ancestral languages, and this is due
to them being formally educated as Chinese citizens and being exposed to Chinese
(entirely or including Mandarin).</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: navy;">(3)</span></b><span style="color: navy;"> While English is morphologically
relatively simple, it makes up for that in terms of lexicon, idiom and
orthography. The English lexicon contains a very rich accumulation of
Germanic-, Romance- and Greek-based items, many of which at first glance seem
synonymous but are in fact not entirely so, differences being mostly contextual
or stylistic. English has an abundance of idiomatic expressions, complicated by
use of the aforementioned mixture of lexical source material. English
orthography is based on 15th-century language varieties’ pronunciation. While
it has etymological relevance, the average foreign learner of English needs to
put a lot of time and effort into English literacy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: navy;">So I’ve thrown this into the discussion as intended food for
thought. Please understand that I do not advocate Chinese world domination
(certainly not under a regime anywhere like that of China <i>now</i>).</span></p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal">----------</p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From:
R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank"><span style="color:windowtext">sassisch@yahoo.com</span></a>></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject:
Language use</p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal">Hi, Marlou!<br>
<br>
In tonal languages, intonation and phonemic tone seem to operate on different
levels. In Chinese languages, for instance, intonation is mostly based on
raising or lowering the baseline voice level. Instead of stress, a word has
tones, and this is independent from intonation. In Chinese languages, each
syllable has a tone, though Mandarin has developed neutral tones that can be
likened to unstressed syllables. European tonal languages (e.g. Ancient Greek,
Lithuanian, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian) have distinguishing tones only on
the stressed syllables of words. All of it sounds more complicated than it
really is. As I mentioned earlier, a good percentage of the world’s language
are tonal.</p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal">I was not trying to intimate
that English is not a suitable world language. My point was that <i>any</i>
language could serve as an international lingua franca. None of them is
“perfect.” Italian, for instance, uses written stress symbols inconsistently,
while Spanish and Portuguese, both of them major international languages use
stress symbols consistently. French has a challenging orthography, yet the
language is used in large regions of Africa and also in Polynesia.
English has managed to become the foremost lingua franca, and that despite of its
orthography. Aside from native English dialects, a more neutral universal variety
has been developing. It has been serving us well, in my opinion, and, as more and
more people throughout the world use it, it seems to discard the colonial aspects
of its image, becoming increasingly neutral with regard to culture. Had historical
events turned out a little different, Dutch might have taken on the role English
has now.</p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal">Personally I am not in favor
of constructed languages, despite their supposed neutrality. Esperanto and Interlingua
and even Mondlango (whose creators are Chinese) are anything but neutral; they are
based on dominant European languages. Similarly, Volapük is based primarily on German,
English and French and in addition uses sounds (/ü/, /ö/) that are difficult
for speakers of many other languages to pronounce.</p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal">Regards,<br>
Reinhard/Ron<br>
Seattle, USA</p>
<p style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="MsoNormal"> </p>
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