The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Fall/full-McWhorter-Fall-2009.html

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

35 20 17 years ago

wglb• 17 years ago

This oddly relates to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909449 where we are concerned about increasing concentration in "centers" where in the other article the "center" is the cities, and here the "center" is dominant languages. And in both cases, there is the desire on the part of some to stop this increasing coalescing.

arihelgason• 17 years ago

Preserving a language requires a very proactive approach. In Iceland (Icelandic is spoken by not much more than 350,000 people) there is a committee tasked with ensuring that new words are formed for new items, ideas or concepts.

In Iceland, rather than letting the English word 'computer' catch on, a linguist combined an old word for a witch (völva) with the word for number (tala) to come up with 'tölva' which is now the word for computer. Today, engineers often come up with clever new words for technical concepts.

With a proactive approach even declining languages can be revived (eg. Basque or Gaelic in Ireland).

Small tribes unfortunately lack the impetus or resources to proactively maintain their languages in this way.

blue1• 17 years ago

The Vatican does this with latin too. It became a dead language nonetheless.

English always absorbed lots of words from many different languages. I suspect that this is a better recipe for language vitality than the "National bureau of new words" approach.

zemoo• 17 years ago

The Vatican started doing that millenia after there were no native populations of latin-speakers left.

huherto• 17 years ago

Latin lives on in Spanish, Portuguese, et al.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

"number-witch"?

They didn't have a word for calculate or compute that could have been made into a noun?

sp332• 17 years ago

Prestidigitization!

decode• 17 years ago

I think you are mixing two unrelated concepts: "language purity" and "language preservation". Places like France (and apparently Iceland) are very concerned with excluding foreign loan words, but not because it makes more people become native speakers of the language. As far as I can tell, it's purely for aesthetic reasons. On the other side of the fence, you have the Germans, who find most attempts at "Germanizing" foreign words laughable.

lg• 17 years ago

This must be common; in Israel they've got somebody or other who comes up with Hebrew words to replace the imported ones, and they even teach them to hapless students like me, who go and use them and get laughed at.

FleursDuMal• 17 years ago

The example of Gaelic here in Ireland is a poor one. The attempt to preserve the language has been badly handled. It is compulsory for every child to learn Gaelic through first and second level education, and never spoken afterwards (except for one or two areas totaling less than 1% of the population).

Many people end up resenting Gaelic after being forced to learn it for no practical purpose. This is a shame because it is a beautiful language to read and speak.

Ras_2• 17 years ago

Finland comes close. Swedish is compulsory here from primary to tertiary education. It is only used in coastal Finland, not at all elsewhere.

Of course there is more practical purpose with Swedish than with Gaelic, but nevertheless it does not affect majority's day to day life. It is equally resented because learning is forced.

catzaa3• 17 years ago

> What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation.

Here I differ with the writer. Culture and language are completely intertwined. I personally think that as globalization happens, culture is disappearing. We are left with just a bad copy of American culture (as exported by Hollywood).

A good example of culture and language being intertwined is my first language. Culturally you are taught to have respect for people older than you, better educated or more senior. You are not supposed to use the word “you” towards those people but use another word (to signify respect). This cultural view is completely lacking in English and especially in the English world view.

> English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go.

English may be not be as difficult as some languages - but it is definitely not the easiest. English is a bastard language which is built from many languages – therefore it is not that consistent.

req24• 17 years ago

Language reflects cultural views, not the other way around. (Note how master and mistress were gendered but equivalent terms, and how many similar divergences occur, as with sir and madam.) Using "sir" in English can serve some of the same respectful roles as an usted in Spanish, but there are many other things as well.

Sapir-Whorf is a long discussed issue [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity] and John McWhorter [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter] is well versed in the background.

catzaa3• 17 years ago

Language is a product of culture. A lot of things can be expressed in English – but it is not normal to do so. For an Israeli Jew Hebrew isn’t just “another language”. It never is – language is part of your inherently part of your cultural and personal identity. Your culture shapes language – not the other way around.

You can’t just anglicise and magically keep your culture and all other cultural influences out. I have seen this in my own group – with Anglicisation come American culture, norms and values. The dominant culture will always drive out other cultures.

You can perhaps argue that it is theoretically possible for a culture to remain during this process. But in practice it never happens. Another problem with culture is that due to democracy in a multi-cultural environment the dominant culture will always impose its values on a less dominant culture.

Ras_2• 17 years ago

TED Talk: Jay Walker on the world's English mania (4 mins) http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_...

Summary:

2 billion people are currently trying to learn English.

In China you are required by the law to learn English beginning from the 3rd grade.

China will become the largest English speaking country in 2009

quant18• 17 years ago

I've always thought that a world where English was every country's sole official language would be better for preserving small minority languages. Typically, if you're a minority Kneebonian in Elbonia, you have a "triple burden":

1. You want to learn English or some other regional "useful language" to get a good job in an international company

2. You may want to learn/maintain your command of Kneebonese --- a "useless language" economically, but it gives you ethnic pride and access to Kneebonian community "social capital"

3. Your government forces you to learn equally-useless Elbonese in the name of "national unity", e.g. by making it mandatory for high school exams. But learning it won't actually give you access to Elbonian "social capital", because of discrimination.

In practise, a significant proportion of Kneebonian parents relieve their kids of the "triple burden" by speaking Elbonese to them. Then 10-20 years later, you get a lot of Kneebonian kids who feel they have no other means to "prove" their ethnic identity, except demonstrating fierce "Kneebonian PrYDe4LyFe bro!" at every opportunity --- usually in the form of anti-Elbonian prejudice.

So losing the language doesn't necessarily kill the culture, but it does mean that it'll get twisted it increasingly ugly shapes by kids trying to overcompensate for the loss of a big part of their heritage.

The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

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