Amazing thing about languages. If you’re like me and want to learn every single one on Earth, it’s really frustrating to see someone just rattling away in the target language. They just rattle away—zero effort! And you feel so stupid that you can’t do it like them. After all, they’re human, like you. You can speak, possibly pretty damned well, so why can’t you speak their language as well as them? It’s all illustrated by a favorite line I came up with years ago . . . “Milton Nascimento: Why does He Sing in Portuguese? Doesn’t He Realise that English is So Much Easier to Understand?”
I’m quite pissed off that my 6-year-old son speaks far, far, FAR better Japanese than me in the twenty years I’ve been speaking it. And what’s with the girlfriend’s French? Okay, you may be French and have spoken it fluently since birth, but what’s the deal with using it daily with vendors, merchants and close friends? Why not just use English? It’s so much easier to understand!
(Check out my $400/hr seminar in irregular verbs!)
Your argument is strangely compelling. Of course everybody else should use English. They all speak it in private anyway, and it's just perverse of them to publically pretend that they don't.
ReplyDeleteOne of the very best aspects of the English language is that if you speak very s-l-o-w-l-y and deliberately any foreigner will understand eventually. And in the unlikely event that doesn't work then just repeat the above but LOUDER. That should do the trick. I repeatedly see my fellow Brits communicating in this fashion on the European continent. Why would they do that if it didn't work? I rest my case.
Assisi,
ReplyDeleteOf course, I was being extremely facetious. It’s damn lucky for me (and maybe you, and all the English speakers on the planet) that it’s the predominant planet-language, but even though I am naturally ethnocentric about it, it being my language after all, it’s not right to expect the rest of humanity to use it as the lingua franca. That being said, however, I think that even if I were Finnish or Japanese, I would appreciate a common language that prevailed throughought the world. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be English! I’ll never forget speaking to an Iranian in Japan who couldn’t speak a word of English . . . so we happily spoke Japanese! And understood each other perfectly. It was truly a bizarre experience. But it’s an experience one sees the world over. Who would expect, after all, to come across a Mongolian in Ulan Bator who spoke French? Dunno whether that’s a good situation, but it happens to be reality. Simply, more people speak English throughout the world than any other language—to other people whose language is not their own!
I don’t know why English has been such a dominant force. It may be its incredibly rich historical underpinnings, but when one looks at Japanese, for example, one finds a similar amount of history . . . it’s very difficult to understand why almost everyone in the world wants to be able to speak English. I won’t politicize it, but could it be that everyone recognizes it as the premier language of the free world? Dunno, and like I said, politics are strictly forbidden around me. I’ve lived many, many years of my life in French-speaking countries and I can easily see a world where that language would be the common language of the world. In fact, is was, for many years! And indeed, the staus quo may well change, but I think all in all, the world has decided that to speak to each other with no hassles, they might as well use English. Right or not, that seems to be the case . . .
Esperanto died a well-deserved death. And it was such a noble experiment! As was the attempt to simplify English spelling.
But as exasperating as English must be for foreigners (I was an English teacher for many years) it’s apparently easy enough to learn that an incredible amount of European Union speakers have not only mastered it, but speak it almost without an accent. Damn, go to America and see for yourself how many Americans can’t even master their own language, let alone another (and I’m American!)
So, in lieu of another language being the language of the sea and the sky (legally, anyway) it’s pretty much a crapshoot as to which one should predominate. Right now, it happens to be English. However linguistically biased I am, I somehow can’t see an air traffic controller in Frankfurt addressing an Ethiopian pilot in Chinese . . .
But the upshot of my thinking is that I think every human on the planet should learn many languages. The more the better! It should be a civic duty to speak at least two others than one’s own, at least at a functional level. But as I said (facetiously) English is so much easier to understand! (Me being an English speaker, that is!)