LL-L "Language policies" 2004.04.25 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

======================================================================
L O W L A N D S - L * 25.APR.2004 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
http://www.lowlands-l.net * lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net
Rules & Guidelines: http://www.lowlands-l.net/index.php?page=rules
Posting: lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org or lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net
Server Manual: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8c/userindex.html
Archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html
Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8) [Please switch your view mode to it.]
=======================================================================
You have received this because you have been subscribed upon request.
To unsubscribe, please send the command "signoff lowlands-l" as message
text from the same account to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or
sign off at http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
=======================================================================
A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
=======================================================================

From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at pandora.be>
Subject: Language policies

Beste Brian,

You wrote:

>I have a friend, John Minford (one of the greatest Chinese-English
>translators ever), whose solution to the EU's translation problem is
for all
>official documents to be written in Classical Chinese.

>It's not so daft as it sounds - this was never a spoken language: like
>Modern Standard Chinese in its written form, in order to accommodate a
whole
>bunch of mutually unintelligible tongues (let's not go into whether
>Cantonese, Shanghai Huan, Hokkien etc are languages or dialects, just
for
>the moment), the old written language was dialect-free. Speakers of
>Cantonese read it in Cantonese, speakers of Mandarin in Mandarin, and
so on.

>Now, John's idea is that bureaucrats will simply learn the
mother-tongue
>reading of each word, and encode it into Chinese: readers will then
decode
>into their own mother tongue. So each character will have a German
reading,
>a French reading, a Danich reading, and so on.

>He wasn't alogether joking: it could work. Within the Chinese culture
>province during what we think of as the Middle Ages, Classical Chinese
was
>routinely written and read by speakers of Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese,
>Mongol, Tibetan, etc., and messages were routinely passed between the
>different language communities.

>Imagine the fun we could have trying to get that through the Eu
parliament!

>:)

>brian

This is one of the best proposals that I've heard in ages. Now that the
European Union seems to look eastward again...why not go all the way?
Finally paying tribute to this country that discovered the world in 1421
AD, roughly a century before this other Eurasian fellow Magellan
circumnavigated the globe, seventy years before Columbus reached America
and three hundred and fifty years before Cook stumbled across Australia.

If this global society wants to spread democratic values, it cannot
ignore those 1 212 560 000 speakers.

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

================================END===================================
* Please submit postings to lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org.
* Postings will be displayed unedited in digest form.
* Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
* Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l") are
  to be sent to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or at
  http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
======================================================================