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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the intelligence!=wisdom dept.

The Conversation:

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.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by loonycyborg on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:52AM (8 children)

    by loonycyborg (6905) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:52AM (#1034825)

    International community deserves a better language than English. Ridiculous spelling rules exist just to create more pitfalls for the unwary, which only creates more inequality. Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift [wikipedia.org] make it needlessly hard to read for people with any other language as native, even those using Latin alphabet too. And it has lot of loan words from French while keeping French spellings which work in a significantly different way yet.

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  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:22PM (7 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:22PM (#1034950) Journal

    Other countries have reworked their writing systems to remove inconsistencies and historical baggage and make them easier to learn. China did it in the 20th century, Japan in the 19th century, Korea and Russia before that. No English-speaking country has yet attempted it. (Though there was a rumor that BMW had a plan to do it for us...)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:14PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:14PM (#1035020)

      As to Russia's present writing system, it is not much closer to the actual pronunciation of standard Russian than the UK's one is to standard English. As to China, the hieroglyphs are unrelated to pronunciation at all; a good thing too for CPC, politics-wise, as Mandarin, Hokkien and other such "dialects" are further apart than French and Spanish.
      The only language I know of where you actually can infer the (standard) pronunciation from the spelling, is Spanish. Here is why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:01PM (1 child)

        by shortscreen (2252) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:01PM (#1035046) Journal

        I never said they had a 1:1 correspondence between pronunciation and spelling. Nobody expects that to happen for English in the first place, people in Texas would end up spelling differently than people in New York, let alone London. The difference between English and the languages that I mentioned is that for the latter, a central authority re-engineered or cleaned things up to various extents. That hasn't happened for English. It's just a field of weeds allowed to grow as it will. English doesn't have any counterpart to a Royal Spanish Academy.

        Ambiguities in Russian spelling are mainly around stressed vs. unstressed syllables, which gives a couple different options but is still much less chaotic than English. You are quite wrong about Chinese, the characters are very much linked to pronunciation. They can have a consistant reading within a language, even if they don't have a consistant reading across different languages. As to Japanese, there is some debate about the relative importance between a character's phonetic association vs. its semantic association, but a study showed that Japanese readers were less sensitive to erroneous characters in a text which had the expected sound but a wrong meaning.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @06:18PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @06:18PM (#1035686)

          Ambiguities in Russian spelling are mainly around stressed vs. unstressed syllables,

          Those are only the tip of a very sizable iceberg. Add consonant devoicing and voicing, cluster simplification, and the opposition in writing between "шь" and "ш" (both the same sound; palatalized "ш" is "щ", not "шь"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology [wikipedia.org]

          which gives a couple different options but is still much less chaotic than English.

          When you have to learn the pronunciation and the spelling by rote anyway, what your "less chaotic" does even mean, at all? Russian has a set of reading rules, with exceptions; English has a set of reading rules, with exceptions. In English, you choose a spelling based on the word's meaning, from a set of homophones; in Russian, the same thing (while the longer words make for less homophones in word stems, there is homophony in common verb endings; the bane of Russian schoolchildren and adults, "-тся" vs "-ться").

          You are quite wrong about Chinese, the characters are very much linked to pronunciation.

          Wow. To which one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese#Vocabulary [wikipedia.org]
          LOL.

      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:34AM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:34AM (#1035313) Homepage Journal

        Spain has its Royal Spanish Academy; France has its Academie Francaise. (sorry, no accents on my keybpard.
        But the main function of the French one seems to be to maintain obsolete spellings ad infinitum.

      • (Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:52AM (1 child)

        by loonycyborg (6905) on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:52AM (#1035462)

        Well with respect to Russian you'd have to actually justify this. As it is I see you as blatantly wrong since I know Russian and English.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:28PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:28PM (#1035640)

          As it is I see you as blatantly wrong since I know Russian and English.

          Из этого я вижу, что ты по-глупому врёшь. Не делай так больше.
          What are the consonant sounds in "солнце"? The vowel sounds in "корова"? Do "код" and "кот" sound different? Where is the stress in "замок"?
          You are welcome to inform yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology [wikipedia.org]
          Или здесь, если удобнее: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Русская_фонетика [wikipedia.org]
          If you profess to "know Russian", you should know its quirks. And if you do know of them, do not pretend they are not there.

    • (Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:04AM

      by ChrisMaple (6964) on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:04AM (#1035302)

      Years ago, the U.S. Postal Service tried to force simplified town name spelling, e.g. Peterboro to replace Peterborough. The USPS lost.