Top 10 Language Stories of 2008

[Tom Zurinskas]

I live in S Florida.  Shoppers have come up to me and asked if I speak Spanish so I could help them with English in the grocery.  New renters next to my condo natively speak French from Quebec.  I played golf with one of them and we got paired with another French speaking couple. Wee.  But to me they did speak some English, thankfully.  And thankfully English is the linqua franca of the world.

Of interest to me is that there need be 1. a new English based phonetic spelling for our dictionaries as a standard that 2. one simple enough to be used to teach children to read and help with phonemic awareness and accent reduction, and 3. one useful as a standard translation guide notation.  Truespel is the first to have this goal of integration.

If English folks don't develop this, perhaps Spanish folks will.  Of interest is spelling reform for Brazil and Portugal.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7807116.stm

Of the languages that are dissappearing (some say 2 or 3 per month), be glad to say goodbye, because folks are learning more useful languages for better communication.


Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
Learn truespel in 15 minutes at http://tinypaste.com/76f44










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> Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 08:18:02 -0500
> From: djmetevia at CHARTERMI.NET
> Subject: Re: Top 10 Language Stories of 2008
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: David Metevia
> Subject: Re: Top 10 Language Stories of 2008
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>
> 2. As for protecting languages that need no protection, a Federal judge
> in Wichita ruled that a private school had broken no laws when it
> declared English the school's official language and banned students from
> speaking anything else. The ban on foreign languages was instituted to
> combat bullying, but the school's principal didn't indicate whether she
> would outlaw English as well if students bullied one another in that
> language.
>
> comment. The point is to communicate. I have no problem with this.
>
>
>
>
> If the point is to communicate, then there is no need to ban the
> speaking of other languages. In fact, I propose the more languages
> available to the students, the greater the ability to communicate.
>
> DJM
>
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