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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: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:49PM (3 children)

    by Nuke (3162) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:49PM (#1035008)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:41PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:41PM (#1035037)

    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.

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:54PM (#1035116)

      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

        by rleigh (4887) on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:38PM (#1035493) Homepage

        "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.