[Corpora-List] 'Standard European English' ?

[Geoffrey Sampson]

I don't think Tadeusz Piotrowski's analogy with native v. non-native
German is quite correct, with respect.  The thing about "European
English" is that nowadays, within the European Union, English is being
used by non-native speakers but in ways that often carry governmental
authority:  so that what seem to us native speakers to be "foreigner
mistakes" can't always be treated as mistakes exactly.  For several
years I was responsible for producing the ELSNews quarterly newsletter
for the European network for human language technologies, which
naturally often discussed developments in EU research funding and
suchlike.  I remember on one occasion trying to edit copy I was given
because some morphologically-derived word in it, though it looked as if
it ought to exist in English, in fact was completely unknown in our
language -- we would have put the idea differently.  What I was told,
and I accepted this as a good answer in present circumstances, was that
now this word did exist in European English, it was frequently used in
official EU documentation and took its validity from that, and it really
could not be changed.  (I wish I could remember the specific word in
question -- it wasn't one of the ones already discussed in this
correspondence.)

It seems to me that German is not in this situation:  there are no
organizations composed largely of non-German speakers who are taking it
on themselves to create new ways of using German, nobody other than
German-speakers and German-speaking institutions are seen as in any way
authoritative for what counts as German.  I used to think it an
advantage for us Anglophones that our language happened to have acquired
its international role, but it seems to me nowadays that there are two
points of view about that!

Geoffrey Sampson


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      Prof. Geoffrey Sampson  MA PhD MBCS CITP ILTM

      author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"

      Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
      Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, England

      www.grsampson.net     +44 1273 678525
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