Intellectual profundity and journalistic bombast -- Is English King?

[Anonby]

How about language strength following on the heels of military strength? Aramaic gained world domination because of the Assyrian Empire; Greek on the strength of Alexander the Great; Latin because of the Roman might; English because of the American Army...

Stan Anonby
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: R. A. Stegemann 
  To: lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 6:59 AM
  Subject: Intellectual profundity and journalistic bombast -- Is English King?


  Yawn...

  There are those who pose questions, because they are looking for answers.
  Then there are those who pose questions, as if to convince you that they had the answers.

  Sincerely,

  R. A. Stegemann
  EARTH's Manager and HKLNA-Project Director
  EARTH - East Asian Research and Translation in Hong Kong
  http://homepage.mac.com/moogoonghwa/earth/
  Tel/Fax: 852 2630 0349

  On 13 Dec 2004, at 23:21, Harold F. Schiffman wrote:


    http://www.science-spirit.org/

    The Tongue Who Would Be King

    There are those who believe English could achieve what no other language
    has: global domination. But our linguistic history shows preeminence leads
    to resistance, then ruin--which means English should be looking over its
    shoulder.

    by Dennis Baron


    At every stage of its history, English has been a borrowing tongue. It
    adapted the Latin of Irish monks, the Norse of Viking raiders, and the
    French of Normans bent on regime change. During the Renaissance, English
    went on a word-coining rampage and swelled its hoard with terms from Greek
    and Italian. Modern English has absorbed words from just about every
    language its speakers have encountered: Arabic, Hebrew, Navajo, Yiddish,
    Polish, Hindi, Bantu, and Japanese, to name but a few.

    English also affects the languages it touches, and the fact that English
    is now an exporter causes fear and resentment in some quarters. In the
    1930s and 1940s, Germany sought to purify its language along with its
    population and banned English words. More recently, the French,
    historically one of Englishs biggest suppliers, enacted a law to protect
    their language from the inroads of English, particularly in the areas of
    commerce and technology, where English is so dominant. During World War
    II, Japan also tried to purify its tongue, but contemporary Japanese
    continues to absorb massive amounts of English without much fuss,
    nativizing the words it borrows, sometimes to the point where English
    speakers no longer recognize them.

    Japan has nego, for negotiation; kono, for connection; and sekuhara, for
    sexual harassment. Most cars in the country have English model names that
    are easily understood, like Toyotas classic sedan, the Toyopet, or the
    Daihatsu Naked, a far-from-daring minivan. The car names are written in
    English too, even though Japanese has three writing systems--including one,
    katakana, designed especially for foreign words. Sing at a karaoke bar in
    Tokyo, and native patrons will swoon over English smoothly and properly
    pronounced. And its not just Japan; around the world, more people are
    signing up for English lessons than ever before. Travel almost anywhere
    and you'll find English on signs, on T-shirts, on tips of tongues.

    Historically, however, the reception of English on the world stage has
    been mixed. If Shakespeare and the King James Bible solidified the power
    of English at home, it took the age of exploration and colonization to
    move English across the border. It was then that the real line was drawn:
    If you were a colonizer, bringing trade to the impoverished and
    civilization to the unwashed, English was the language of capital and
    enlightenment; if you were being colonized, English simply appeared as the
    language of oppression. While the first protests against English took the
    form of Brits out, today the ugly American still inspires strident
    graffiti of the Yanqui go home variety.

    In the eighteenth century, John Adams predicted it would be America, not
    England, that would catapult English to world-class status, but it wasn't
    until the twentieth century, after two world wars and the rise of American
    political and economic influence, that English finally took steps in that
    direction. Its success has led some to hope, and others to fear, that
    English may one day be the only language the world will need.

    Humans are hardwired to learn language, but we don't all learn the same
    language, and many of us learn more than one. Bilingualism is a fact of
    life for threequarters of the world. One Renaissance commentator, a Swede,
    even insisted that Eden was a polyglot paradise where God spoke to Adam in
    Swedish, Adam replied in Danish, and the serpent tempted Eve in French.
    And at least one contemporary theorist, French sociolinguist Louis-Jean
    Calvet, supports the view that humans are naturally bilingual animals and
    have been from the start.

    Still, at the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans considered
    non-English speakers to be less than human. According to a story recounted
    by the English language specialist Daniel Shanahan, a railroad president
    told a 1904 congressional hearing on the mistreatment of immigrant
    workers, These workers don't suffer--they don't even speak English.

    Such opposition to non-anglophones and bilinguals has never quite gone
    away. In June 1995, for example, a district court judge in Amarillo,
    Texas, accused a mother of child abuse for speaking Spanish to her
    five-year-old daughter, who would enter kindergarten that year. English,
    the judge ruled, was necessary to do well in school and without English,
    he warned, the girl would be condemned to life as a maid.

    In response to a national outcry over the cruelty of his decision, the
    judge sensed that some fence-mending was in order and apologized--to maids.
    He held resolutely to his English-only order, one that many well-meaning
    people might find appropriate. After all, ninety-seven percent of U.S.
    residents speak English, and non-English immigrants are picking up English
    faster than earlier generations did. The Amarillo mother spoke Spanish to
    her daughter because she knew that as soon as the child entered
    kindergarten, the girl would lose whatever Spanish she had acquired, and
    switch entirely to English.

    Around the physical and virtual world, English is spreading rapidly, which
    leads many to worry that other languages will decline. Clearly, English is
    the most powerful and successful language on Earth--synonymous with profit,
    multinational commerce, international relations, science, rock n roll, and
    most recently, the Internet. It makes sense that knowing English might
    facilitate fuller participation in society, might better enable a person
    to enter into the governmental, economic, academic, and scientific
    mainstreams.

    But even though about three-quarters of the world speaks more than one
    language, getting everybody to speak the same language--even with the best
    of intentions--proves problematic. Think back to any high school language
    class and remember how difficult it is to get large groups of people to
    learn a new tongue. Most people who willingly study English don't ever
    achieve fluency. Even in India, where English has official status, only
    five percent of the people actually speak the language. Then there are the
    psychological effects: Enforcing English on the national or global level
    sends a negative message, making non-English speakers feel both inferior
    and unwelcome. And finally, establishing English as the only language
    would mean deciding that the natural condition of the world is not
    bilingualism or multilingualism, but rather one language, for one and all.

    The biblical story of the Tower of Babel laid the groundwork, at least in
    the West, for the belief that a single language equals a united humanity,
    and that a reunified humanity might once again reach the heavens. While
    the search for a Proto- World language, the ancestor of all todays
    languages, has occupied philologists and theologians for centuries, it
    remains elusive. Perhaps there wasn't one single language that kicked
    things off for the human species, and its not clear that we should end up
    with a single world language either--English, or otherwise.

    English started as an obscure language on a small island off the coast of
    Europe. The nineteenth-century essayist Thomas De Quincey once sniffed that
    in its earliest form, English had a vocabulary of only 800 words, most of
    them having to do with wara nasty and brutish assessment, but a believable
    one to anybody who has slogged through Beowulf.

    Currently, however, English has the largest vocabulary of any
    language--close to half a million words. The number of English speakers is
    strong and growing. According to one estimate, 514 million people speak
    English as their first language. Yes, there are more than a billion
    speakers of Mandarin Chinese and another half billion who use either Hindi
    or Urdu, but none of those languages has the international reach of
    English, which enjoys widespread acceptance as a second or auxiliary
    language. English has official status in former British colonies like
    India and Nigeria, and all around the globe its the most common lingua
    franca, a third language to be used when two people who don't share a
    common first language need to communicate.

    About 400 million people speak reasonably fluent English as their second
    language, and as many as another billion have learned some English as a
    foreign language. In contrast, French, which not that long ago was the
    preferred language of diplomacy, war, and high society, not to mention
    haute cuisine, has only 129 million speakers today. There are fewer
    speakers of French in the world than of Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, or
    even Bengali. But real evidence of the decline of French is the fact that
    its orbit has shrunk: French remains a second language in some former
    colonies, but it has lost its clat in the councils of power, in the
    foreign language classroom, and even on the menu.

    Now English is the foreign language everyone must learn if they want to
    communicate beyond their borders, beyond their neighborhoods, or beyond
    their labs. Scientists around the world who don't read and publish in
    English risk becoming marginalized: They will be unable to take advantage
    of the latest findings in their fields, and their own work will go unread
    and unrecognized by the international scientific community. Writers in
    non-anglophone countries agonize over their own literary dilemma: whether
    to publish in their national or local language to reach their compatriots
    and keep their culture vital and productive, or to write in English to
    secure an international audience and the stature that may come along with
    it.

    For some, the fact that English is the international language of science
    is reason enough to promote it globally; the further advance of the
    language would be a natural and rational process. Agree or not, is it even
    possible for English to become the only language people learn, eventually
    displacing the other 6,800 languages currently being used and turning the
    planet into a monolingual Brave New World? By virtue of its global sway,
    could English push all other languages to the brink, much in the way that
    Wal-Mart drives out mom-and-pop stores?

    Using history as a guide, we know that every language that has so far
    qualified as universal has not been able to make the leap to world
    domination; rather, all of these languages have receded or disappeared.
    Latin, which came from a few dusty Italian farms and cities, was the
    language of politics and government, of law and education, of science and
    religion, from the time of the Roman Empire through the Renaissance. As
    late as the eighteenth century, to be literate meant to know Latin. If
    your universe was Western Europe, Latin was the universal language so much
    so that we still honor it on our money. We just don't speak it anymore.

    French, which actually grew out of Latin, had a brief turn as the world
    language, but in the end it was English that took Latins place as master
    of the linguistic universe. Of course, as nations continue to jockey for
    political and economic power, and the linguistic influence that flows from
    it, theres always the chance that English will share the fate of French
    and Latin. After all, no language has been the master of the universe for
    very long.

    Some are prepared for such a case, having already designated a replacement
    for English were it to disappear. Hawaiian has its supporters as a
    candidate for the next world language, as does Finnish. The desire to
    return to the pre-Babel days, when a single language was spoken and no
    translation was necessary, prompted several hundred visionaries over the
    years to invent languages that would be immediately understandable by
    anyone who encounters them. The most famous of these artificial languages
    is Esperanto, which claims about 2 million speakers worldwide. Its creator
    had two goals: to produce an auxiliary language that would let people
    communicate easily across cultures and to promote world peace.

    The creators of languages like Volapuk, Ido, Novial, and Solresol (the
    last based on the musical scale) were similarly optimistic about
    furthering international accord through mutual understanding. So far as
    international cooperation goes, however, the two Irelands, the two Koreas,
    and India and Pakistan (India's Hindi and Pakistan's Urdu use different
    writing systems but the spoken languages are mutually intelligible), show
    us that having a common language doesn't necessarily lead to either mutual
    understanding or peaceful coexistence. In any case, the small number of
    speakers adopting these artificial languages isn't enough to move the world
    toward peace.

    If sweet reason hasn't converted the world, let alone a single nation, to
    one language, neither has the use of force. For many years in America,
    young speakers of Spanish, Navajo, Chinese, and other minority languages
    were beaten, humiliated, or given detention if they used their first
    language in the classroom or on the schoolyard. Around the same time an
    Amarillo judge accused a Spanish-speaking mother of child abuse, a small
    Texas insurance agency fired two women bilingual in English and Spanish,
    hired for their ability to speak to Hispanic customers, because these
    women spoke Spanish rather than English to each other. Knowing English is
    one thing; forcing people to use it is quite another. As any student
    failing a language requirement knows, you cant make a person speak a
    foreign language.

    If English cant be enforced at home, it certainly couldn't be required
    abroad. For a good part of the twentieth century, Russia tried to force
    its language on a huge expanse of Europe and Asia, and we know how that
    turned out. Latin may not have fallen in a day, but with the rapid
    collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian lost most of its clout almost
    overnight.

    The truth is that when one language begins to dominate, and its presence
    is felt internationally, resistance movements stimulate a resurgence of
    local language vitality. The Internet provides a perfect example of what
    happens: In its first decade, Web life was almost entirely in English, and
    when computer users in other countries began to log on, they found an
    English monopoly. But this was only temporary; while its estimated that
    over half of all Internet Web sites are still in English, the percentage
    of other languages on the Web is growing as more and more countries
    acquire computer technology. On the world scene, language loyalty trumps
    the incursion of English every time.

    So while English plays an important role in the increasingly multilingual,
    globalizing world, global language is not following rapidly on the heels
    of multinational corporations. Rather than imposing a standard language on
    an unwilling world, English itself is going native, forming local
    varieties with distinctly local forms and flavors wherever it lands.
    Because of this, sociolinguists have begun speaking not of English, but of
    Englishes, the plural emphasizing the increasing diversity that English
    experiences as it shows up in new places and contexts.

    We call Latin a dead language because there haven't been native speakers of
    Latin for centuries, but the language didn't actually die. Instead, the
    Latin spoken in different parts of Europe gradually differentiated to form
    what we now call the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese,
    Italian, and Romanian being the most familiar. The process took several
    centuries. With English differentiating as it spreads across the planet,
    it could meet Latins fate and morph into new tongues. This kind of
    language birth isn't likely to happen though--in fact it hasn't happened on
    any large scale since Latin made like a noun and declined. The centripetal
    force of global communications and international travel works against that
    outcome. But if--or when, as some would say--the English-speaking world loses
    its political and economic hegemony to Europe or the Pacific Rim, the
    power of the English language will be relaxed and the worlds Englishes
    will be left free to diverge from one another.

    The future of English is tricky to predict. Will it unite the world and
    take us back to Eden, or divide the world even further and lead us to a
    new Babel? Or will it simply lose its vitality and shuffle off this mortal
    coil, leaving the stage to a yet-to- be-named player? For now, though,
    Finnish and Hawaiian must wait in the wings, for barring nuclear disaster,
    it looks as if English will remain the 800-pound gorilla of the worlds
    languages for a little while yet.

    Related stories:
    Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave
    Lost In Translation
    Something New Under the Sun




    2002 Science & Spirit Magazine. All rights reserved.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20041214/bcabbdfd/attachment.htm>