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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: 4, Interesting) by jb on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:05AM (14 children)
I think you've missed the point.
We should instead go back to all academic literature, teaching & exams being in Latin.
Why? Firstly because Latin is a far more precise language than English (which makes it far more suitable for academic use). Secondly because it's much easier to learn as a second language than English. And thirdly because choosing something that is nobody's first language puts every student on an even playing field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:42AM (1 child)
I wouldn't want everything taught in Latin, but it's well worth learning. It was available at my high school in the 80s, and it's probably still available at prep schools. The Catholic Church allowed Mass in something other than Latin in what, the 1960s with Vatican II? Among Catholics I've known, I seem to recall hearing that Latin Mass was still performed not that long ago, and probably still is.
I'm willing to wager that places like Notre Dame University and Georgetown with strong Catholic roots probably still have a strong Latin language program. Let's not forget all the medical and legal terms too. Latin is still entrenched!
The point being, it wouldn't be that hard to transition higher learning back to Latin... not that we should necessarily do that. What's interesting to me is how many of the "SAT words" I learned had Latin roots. I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to pick up if I really had to do it; but to reiterate, no thanks.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:47AM
Mass in Latin is still permitted. But the controversy about it deals with the use of the *old* Latin ritual instead of the official *new* Latin mass.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:59AM (1 child)
Eh, everyone here is required to learn either Latin or French as a third language in school, yet I don't think I've ever met anyone who found it easier to learn than English. Additionally, you'd run into considerable trouble trying to express modern concepts in a dead language unless you first create some bastardized, mock version of it (that would undoubtedly import much of the imprecision and ambiguity innate to all things modern).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:03AM
Not Latin, BTW. But who these days could tell?
(Score: 5, Informative) by FunkyLich on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:58AM (8 children)
Esperanto was designed to be a language for exactly that purpose.
Yet, my vote goes to Lojban - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban [wikipedia.org] - as the language that in an ideal world, would be the language that all need to learn.
A synthetic engineered language, it has been thought and designed to be the best tool for the job. After all, the job of any language is as the medium of transport of ideas and information. And Lojban seems to be so very efficient in many directions at that. It has relatively short words and easy to pronounce. The writing is phonetic based, so when you read you have WYSIWYS (the last S being "speak"). It has a beautiful logic and well defined grammar which virtually avoids ambiguities of meaning in a sentence (eg: "I poked the man with an umbrella." Did I use an umbrella to poke the man, or did I poke the man who had an umbrella? The grammar of the language simply does not allow the existence of sentences like this example).
I wish I had come across it years ago. I'd have studied it for fun when I had so much more free time.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday August 11 2020, @12:23PM (6 children)
Esperanto failed because the name itself sounds Spanish. Was it beyond them to think of a neutral name? If they fuck up even getting its own name right to start with, how many more fuck-ups there must be along the road.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:45PM (1 child)
IMHO Esperanto failed because so many words end in 'j'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:57PM
Actually no, they don't. Unless you have problems with “many” English English words ending with -s.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:49PM (3 children)
I just took a look at some sample Esperanto text. It was clearly doomed to failure in that it uses accents. IDK about devices in countries that do use accents, but in the English speaking world at least, keyboards just don't have accented letters on them, and it would have been even worse in typewriter days.
Someone no doubt will explain to me how to get accented letters on this keyboard by some key combination, but I would not want the faff. It seems that some accented letters in Esperanto are simply to save using another letter eg "u" with a circumflex is pronounced "w", because the latter is not used in Esperanto. That's just fucking stupid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:41PM (2 children)
And yet English has had no problem adopting accented words into the language: résumé, façade, fiancé/fiancée, naïve, and Noël, to name a few. (Strictly speaking, the dieresis should be used more frequently in English than it is, but I assume writers got lazy. Without the dieresis, words like "cooperate", "coordinate" and "reelect" should be pronounced starting with "coop", "coor" and "reel", respectively.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:54PM (1 child)
Accents don't exist in English, when a word is stolen from another language that should have accents they are dropped and we just pronounce it however we want. For you list of words, I have never seen naive or facade accented in any context. Noel generally has accents on decorations to look cool, never in and normal context. The others are sometimes used to look more formal, but again not generally. No English class would ever teach you what an accent means so there is no point in complaining it does not follow another languages rules, it is just another weirdly pronounced word.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:38PM
"Accents don't exist in English"
Absolutely untrue. They might get omitted because of laziness, but all the above examples are completely correct. You've never seen "café"? It's all over the place, and it's the correct spelling. "Naive" is wrong, and is correctly spelled "naïve" What about "coöperate"? Not as common nowadays, but it's in plenty of 20th century writing. That's not an umlaut, it's a diaeresis. Accents are not commonly used in English, it's true. But that's not to say they are unused. Quite a number of words require accents to be strictly correct.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:54PM
I looked at it too but I don't like its grammar and syntax. I would prefer free word order with synthetic or agglutinative grammar.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:14AM
Latin, having been frozen, would have to have an immense number of new words gerrymandered into the language.
Also, the various conjugations and declensions in Latin are spurious and arbitrary, making memorization a nightmare.
English has great range for nuance that is simply absent in Latin, just because there are so many English words that nominally mean the same thing, but don't really mean the same thing.