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The love of all things English begins at a young age in non-English-speaking countries, promoted by pop culture, Hollywood movies, fast-food brands, sports events and TV shows.
Later, with English skills and international education qualifications from high school, the path is laid to prestigious international universities in the English-speaking world and employment opportunities at home and abroad.
But those opportunities aren't distributed equally across socioeconomic groups. Global education in English is largely reserved for middle-class students.
This is creating a divide between those inside the global English proficiency ecosystem and those relegated to parts of the education system where such opportunities don't exist.
[...] It's unfortunate so many schools view an English-speaking model as the gold standard and overlook their own local or regional wisdoms. We need to remember that encouraging young people to join a privileged English-speaking élite educated in foreign universities is only one of many possible educational options.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:54AM (22 children)
No, for bad reason. Of course, when I think about it, despite having the ablative case, Latin is not bad as a lingua franca, despite not having a kappa. But English, being a bastardized German dialect, with no discipline on irregular formations and such, has nothing to recommend it beyond being the language of the dominate race: Americans. Of course, Americans do not actually speak English, but, then, neither do any of their subjects. The language is fucked up, imprecise, full of ambiguity, and Rupert Murdock. May it die a quick and painful death.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:08AM (17 children)
All languages have their own demons. Would you prefer German to be the global language with its weird article mess, where "the girl puts the milk on the table" is essentially "it puts her on him"? Or is French more your thing where the spoken language barely has anything to do with the written words?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:50AM (5 children)
Fun fact, Latin has that too. The article was originally based on which deity's domain the "thing" in question fell under. English is thankfully free of such nonsense.
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:42AM (1 child)
Thank God for that!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:26PM
Which one, though? There are so many to choose from, even if you limit yourself to Greek and Latin (Roman). Expand your horizons and there are thousands to choose from.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:00AM
In Greek we have articles. Very handy. Latin, not so much. Barbarian language, really. Interesting historical fact, when the first translated the Bible, or at least the Greek and Aramaic sections, into Latin, since is was the "word of God, and immutable", they had to find some particles to represent the Greek articles, since one does not simply
walk into Mordorleave out the immutable word of god. Nearly unreadable, those early translations were. But on the on the other hand, incomprehensibility is the first requirement for a "sacred text".(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:36AM (1 child)
I didn't think Latin had articles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @06:13AM
It doesn't. Read more carefully. The pronouns are very important, when you do not have articles. Especially with multiple genders.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:52AM (5 children)
That's minor quibbling, a native German may cringe if you mix them, but won't get confused.
And I think is well preferable to English, where the youngsters still engage in spelling bees close to the age of sexual maturity [bustle.com] (up to the age of 15). Fer God's sake, isn't anything better to do for the young minds than to ask them to rote learn how to spell their native language?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:45AM (3 children)
For that all you would have had to do is evolve the written language along with the changes in the spoken one. When you look back in the history of the English language, you'll notice that it was once actually closer to what is written. German has simply done that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:12AM (2 children)
A good part of the Anglosphere is yet to ditch the old imperial unit system and there's big resistance to that. Can you imagine the amount of resistance against changing the spelling? Will take many generations of rotten by rote brains until English gets a logical spelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by nostyle on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:01PM
The reform of spelling of English in America has actually been tried, most notably around 1906 with the "Simplified Spelling Board" spearheaded by Andrew Carnegie and endorsed by executive order of president Teddy Roosevelt (who used that spelling system for the remainder of his life). The effort did not succeed, although many government communications employed that system during Roosevelt's tenure.
Such undertakings fail to notice that there is a
perfectly / ˈpər-fik(t)-lē /
wonderful / ˈwən-dər-fəl /
system / ˈsi-stəm /
for denoting, phonetically, English words, which is nearly universally understood, and instantly accessible to web-enabled folk via online dictionaries.
So why don't we simply use that wonderful system? I suppose it is because some folk like me develop an odd affection for the warts in the spelling of English. (exa: I thought I brought enough dough to get through to tomorrow.) One gets used to it and learns to appreciate it.
And no matter how pure a language system you start with, there will always be those wish to introduce gotchas so as to distinguish the erudite from the plebeian - kind of like the co-worker who touches a file named "-rf *" into one of your working directories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:48PM
Some of the Imperial units are just better.
An inch = natural distance apart you hold thumb and finger
A foot = natural distance apart you hold hands
A yard = meter (stride length)
A pound = a handful
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:57PM
It would be funny to see Chinese kids do spelling bees in Mandarin. On the plus side, most words only have two characters. On the downside, most characters have multiple radicals.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:55PM (4 children)
Esperanto says hi.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:58PM (2 children)
You might as well just say Ni Hao. You are more likely to find a person that understands that greeting, albeit somewhat depending on where in the world you are. Esperanto is just one gigantic failure of a language.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:42AM (1 child)
One thing it got wrong was genders. Yes, it has masculine and feminine. You get the feminine from the masculine bu adding a suffix. To get the common-gender word, you add a prefix. This establishes masculine as the unmarked gender. As a result, speakers tend to use the masculine word in common-gender situations. So if you're talking about ducks, you tend not to bother putting the common-gender prefix on, and you end up using the masculine form even when the ducks are female.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:43AM
Should have said I was talking about Espreanto.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:58PM
Jen nia mondo.
That's all I got.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:30PM (3 children)
Its dominance is a result of British hegemony from the previous centuries, though American dominance in the 20th century is basically its continuation.
Anyway, its imprecision and ambiguity are what make it fun! How many puns, jokes and general humour are a result of deliberate misuse or wilful misinterpretation of the language? A goodly-sized fraction of them. Or should that be bigly? Having a dozen ways to say the same thing with very subtle differences in emphasis are what make it interesting. In comparison, other languages seem so literal they are dry and boring in comparison. Whereas in English you can imply one thing while actually saying something completely different. Being exact is fine in its own way, but it doesn't really open up the imagination, or permit abuse of the language in regular conversation just for the hell of it. English might be a bastardised language which freely steals from other languages, but it's very expressive and very flexible. There is a good reason we didn't stick with Latin (or French). How many other languages use double or even triple negatives in normal sentences, leaving people confused if you take them all out and just state things exactly?!
Language is intrinsically tied to thought. I read about some South American tribe which doesn't have any conception of mathematics because their language has no words for numbers higher than (IIRC) six. Their mental model of the world is intrinsically constrained by the lack of abstraction in the literal way they perceive the world and the language they have to express it. It does make you wonder how much this constrains our thinking as well. Do stricter and less flexible languages also constrain our thought processes, making it less likely for being able to conceive wholly new ways of thinking and doing?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:45AM (2 children)
Let me submit
as a literal translation from Esperanto.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:27PM (1 child)
Interesting! What was the original intent? "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" or similar?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:49PM
Yes.