04 November
the career of English
Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when
Our Swedish friend again. This time he's in India looking at recently collected information and extrapolating in into the near future. Does this sound right to you?
You were asked to think about these issues
This idea of 'English - the Businessman's Friend' - may be what is really distinctive about the spread of this language.
Is it necessarily a good language for business, or is it a convenient tool to use for business?
If we compare English to the other languages that have achieve world status, the most similar - as languages - are Chinese and Malay ... (all three) have Subject-Verb-Object word order and very little in the way of verb or noun inflexion ... The peculiarly conservative, and hence increasingly anti-phonetic, system is another facet of English that bears a resemblance to Chinese ... spelling has not been revised to keep up with changes in pronunciation.
What about GHOTI?
(In America, the) settlers' attitude to the Indians was to attempt to coexist peacefully until they needed to disposess them to provide more land for their expanding community ... It might have held for the whole of the rest of Mexico, but eventually decided it was too heavily populated with foreigners ... This was the English way with the natives of America, and it was repeated over and over again. It was essentially an exercise in distancing and exclusion.
How does the "sweep-aside" theory sound to you?
The incoming Anglo settlers, resident for five or six generations, have clearly established English as dominant; but the Spanish-language community is not dying out. Indeed, it is still growing.
Again, you Anglophones, are you worried?
English has been, above all, a worldly language ... In our age, Arabic is for foreign learners the language of the Koran, English is the language of modern business and global popular culture.
Maybe. Maybe not.
an idea for the day
