Esquire Awards

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

HenryM wrote:
> 
> What is it with the Franco(phono)philes? Very defensive in France and
> Canada. Nobody speaks French anymore. Nobody reads French or eats French
> Food. Reminds me of the USA South, where they say "The South's Gonna Do It
> Again." What? Lose? Get over it!
> 
> Keep cool, but care.
> 
> AsB4,
> 
> Mu

In the last twenty years or so we have learned a great deal
about language, languages in contact and the impact such
contact has on culture.  The future importance of English
may not be in abolishing other languages or in preserving
its current structure for spoken purposes among native
speakers, but in serving as the "lingua franca" of the "New
World Order." But it is very difficult to predict what will
happen. 

It's always interesting to look back 50 years or so:   

 I. A. Richards (W.W. Norton: New York, 1950) translation,
Iliad:

 "The chief general interest of the Iliad is that we can
find in it the ancestors to very important things which are
still characteristic of European or 'Western' culture....The
Iliad is in the most eminent degree world literature.
English is at present [1950] the nearest thing there has yet
been to a world literature. I have let regard for those
whose only access to the Iliad will be through the English
they have learned as a second language weigh fairly heavily
in my choices....The Iliad, if it is made linguistically
accessible, concerns all who need to understand the culture
of which it is -- along with the Bible and Plato-- a
principal source. Understanding a culture, in this sense, is
no theoretical matter. It is understanding the behavior and
attitude of those who live by the culture....The public
which needs to understand the Western culture contains, for
every present English speaker, five or six people who know
no English as yet. A considerable proportion of these are
fated (cataclysms apart) to learn to read some English
before the century ends." 

Yes, I chose I.A. Richards to add a little irony and humor
to a discussion that can easily forget to respect the living
and the dead. Nothing is more demeaning to language, culture
and scholarship, than dragging the bodies of defeated heroes
from  "post" this or that high horses not "privileged." 

The other day Mr. Greenspan testified in Washington. He
noted that the economic boom has left many behind. "How do
we solve this problem," a congressperson from Washington
state asked the old man. "Education," he said, and something
like, "people need to be trained, educated, and they need to
learn and improve their english. The gap between those that
have a HS diploma and those that don't is growing, the gap
between college educated and those with HS diplomas is
growing, the gap between L1 and L2 speaker of english is
growing. So while the questions of language and culture are
very complex, for most people it comes down to economics. 

  1.Virtually every UN meeting conducted without translation
takes place in  English. This is particularly true of UN
work in
telecommunications standards and practices. 

  2.The world's scientific and technical community is
becoming increasingly English, with a rapid rise in
English-based scientific and
technical neologisms which roll into other languages without
alteration. 

  3.Computers and networks are gradually shifting human
communications to written
    form even for conversation. Written language comes
without local accent, and
    enables, for example, Japanese speakers of English to
communicate  with German
    speakers of English when they are barely intelligible to
each other in person.
    
  4.English is a highly structured and hierarchical language
with a very  small symbol
    base and well-understood (if open-ended and complex)
syntax, meaning that
    English can not only be parsed with computers, but it
can to an  increasing
    extent be processed and manipulated with computers. It
is hard to imagine
    any other language with similar computer elegance
replacing English because of
    some large political or cultural shift in power. If the
West gives way, it will be to the East, with ideographic
languages that computers are not so adapted to.  Indeed, it
is more likely that if the East overcomes the West, it  will
be through appropriation of English rather than replacement. 

  5.As a result of the above, the world's financial
community, representing  the largest  single world-wide
market, operates increasingly in English. As  the atomic
bomb has likely rendered the future fall of empires to rest
on  economic rather than
military terms, we can expect that the falling of empires
will also be conducted in English.