GrantE

http://mithridates.blogspot.com/2009...ranca-not.html

GrantE

Oh, and BTW: 恭喜發財!

Cape Blue

All he seems to be saying is that English, as in the Queen's English, will continue to morph.

Isn't American just a "version of the language unsanctioned by these native speakers" ?


Edit:The chap seems top be some sort of Frenchie promoting a language called "occidental" which coincidentally seems very close to .... French. The French have always been a bit pissed that English is more succesful and spend a lot of energy trying to protect their language.

jimf

French upset again and the rise of "globish" ie pidgin english.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...nt/7844192.stm

Oakvillian

Not going to happen? Too late, we're already there. Putting up a rearguard action by claiming that the "English" spoken in international second-language contexts is somehow a different language to that used by native speakers is a nonsense.

I work for an Indian company that does a lot of business in Latin America and China. Sure, some of the conversations I have with my colleagues use grammatical constructions and vocabulary that HW Fowler or Peter Roget would probably raise their eyebrows at. Spanglish, Hinglish, Chinglish - there are several variations of this kind of English-based global speak.

But that's one of the beauties of the English language: it is an evolving organism, in a state of constant change and drawing inspiration from all over the world. There's a sound reason why there's an Académie française in Paris but no state-sponsored guardian of the English language in London. And I believe it is this very flexibility and openness to change (as well as the historical accident that English is the official language of the biggest 19th-century empire-builder and its major 20th century trading power) that has enabled English to come to dominate international communication.

Call it what you will, the lingua franca of international commerce, academic research, tourism and intragovernmental business is recognisably English.

Mithridates

Hi there, I see there's a discussion on my post. Nice to see you all. A few corrections, Cape Blue:

No, I'm saying that it will morph without the sanction of L1 speakers, which is a crucial difference; that is, into a global jargon or a pidgin. See the formation of Tok Pisin and Bislama for an example of how it works.

American is like Quebecois French in how isolation and a different view of the world produced a different language, but the people that 'created' the language were L1 speakers. Apples and oranges.

Nope. I'm from Calgary, and my French still isn't all that good. Correct about the promotion of Occidental though.

dbd33

Hasn`t this already happened in Toronto, where a minority of people speak English as a first language?

The sort of phrasing that emerges is like this:

usable to buy fruit, but inadequate for conveying subtle concepts. This adapted English is the global language but a thing of beauty it aint.

Oakvillian

I don't think comparison with Tok Pisin is really justified. That's a recognised creole that many users now have as a genuine first language. I haven't heard that this global English-based language you're trying to find another name for is likely to become a first language for any of its speakers. A pidgin, yes, but Tok Pisin is no longer classified as a pidgin.


... which reiterates the point - for a comparison with American English or Quebecois French to be invalid, so is one with Tok Pisin or Bislama, both of which have significant numbers of L1 speakers. American English has been influenced in a different direction to British English precisely because of the contributions of L2 speakers to its development.

I'm curious. Why promote Occidental when English serves perfectly well? What difference does it make to a L1 speaker if he has to moderate the nuances of idiom, emphasis or colour to make himself understood by diverse L2 speakers? Or that those diverse L2 speakers don't care about the intricasies of grammar or syntax? It's still English, and it still works as a lingua franca.

Mithridates

Yes, I meant the very early stages of Tok Pisin, when it was still just a jargon. I was just heading off to bed last night so didn't have time to write in much detail. I actually don't believe that it will happen because of the strengthening of other strong regional languages that will keep English from being the one second language of the world (The British Council itself says that this will happen), but if we are imagining a situation with English in that situation then yes, it would eventually become a pidgin.


Right, kind of like Quebecois French, with contributions from different sources and sometimes a lot more linguistic unity (fewer dialects) than the Old World. It's not comparable to the development of a pidgin however, which is a kind of complete breaking down of a language and then rebuilding it up in a different way - that usually means articles vanish, vowel sounds reduce to about five to seven, tons of homonyms, etc.


The difference is when you have a language that is used 95% of the time by L2 speakers and only every once in a while by a native speaker; when that happens the native speaker ceases to become an authority on the language and merely a nuisance, because the other people are communicating perfectly fine in their own way without him or her. When one is an L1 speaker it's easy to kind of raise the level of the people you're talking to on the phone or in person, but often when one of us isn't in the room the English level drops dramatically and it turns into something quite different. For the moment we still have control of it but that won't happen forever.

Re: Occidental: one reason is that a language like English just doesn't have the momentum to completely penetrate into the area where I live, Korea and Japan and I suppose China to a certain extent. Most people study the language for much of their lives but few become fluent, and I don't see a critical mass approaching any time soon. At the same time no other languages are stepping up to bat as a serious contender, and I like the idea of using a language that doesn't necessitate throwing away the effort people have already put into English and other languages, without grammatical complications and at the same time without any L1 users (not yet) from which the language would be taken from.

I don't think Occidental is ready to be the world's second language right *now*, but given a large enough community it could. I sometimes translate content into the language like President Obama's weekly address for example.

nooka

No one uses created languages. You just have to look at Esperanto to see that. Living in London and New York I have met, worked and spoken with people from many many countries who all speak English as their main second (or third or fourth!) language. Occasionally there are confusions, but amazingly rarely. Australian, New Zealand, American, Canadian and British English have small variations of spelling, grammar and vocabulary, but not that much more than dialects within England (I still find pure Brummie the hardest to understand!). I had no great problem traveling in India, and the Chinese are also learning English in droves. The only other languages with a likely spread and dominance I suspect are Cantonese/Mandarin.

I'm not sure who imagines that there has ever been any great "control of the development of the English language" it is already full of words from all over the world, and has certainly changed a lot from Chaucer's days, or even Shakespeare. Some of the article seems to be more a complaint about the appearance of buzz words. Certainly ubiquitous is not a particularly obscure word in my lexicon, whereas I haven't felt the urge to use the term unbeknownst to for some time...

Mithridates

Ahem.

German also technically counts as a created language, as it existed as a mere written standard for quite a while before finally becoming a spoken language. Without that German would be more like Plattdeutsch with two genders and no cases.

Right, living in London and New York. Compare that to the level of English in Saga, Japan for example. Living in an English environment keeps these people proficient.

The control over a language by a native-speaking population is far different from that of a purely L2 population. The former slowly changes the language over time; the latter first breaks the language down into a jargon, then into a pidgin, and then only after that does it become a fully functional language again. It's an entirely different process.

Oakvillian

This discussion has got me intrigued, now. It's a long way from any area of study or expertise for me, so forgive me if I'm missing a fundamental point, but I find myself disagreeing with almost everything Mithridates has said...

What, ahem? The article you link to has a long section on the history of Hebrew as a spoken language before the Babylonian exile, and its continued use in literary and commercial environments as a living language (albeit primarily in written rather than oral form) up to the 19th century, developing, as all languages do, through the introduction of new vocabulary and the changing of fashions of grammatical usage. I don't see how you can possibly define it as a "created language."
Again, how is that a technical definition of a created language? I'm no linguistics expert, but you seem to have defined a process of normalisation of a group of Germanic languages into a single entity spoken by a larger number of individuals, as became necessary through the growth of trade across central Europe. That's evolution, not creation. By your argument, English could be said to be a created language, since there was no uniformity of grammar or spelling, and a large number of regional dialects some of which had different inflected endings for number and case, until a process of normalisation which began with the invention of the printing press and is probably still going on today. French underwent the same process, too, didn't it, with a grand committee appointed by Richelieu that became the Academie?

What about Nooka's assertion that travelling in India presented no difficulty in understanding English? What about a company that, say, delivers IT services from locations in India, China, the Philippines, and several South American nations, primarily in English, most of whose employees have never travelled outside their home nations (and of which I have a certain amount of daily experience)? Certainly, there are some instances of English words being used in no particular context because the sound makes a good brand name, but that's not the same as using a language. English brands do the same - sometimes to great comic effect (Chevy Nova, Ford Pinto, anyone?)

I can't quite get to grips with your assertion that there's a difference in the language used by two L2 speakers as compared to that used between one of those L2 speakers and an L1 speaker. In my daily dealings with Indian colleagues, I hear some (to my ears) awkward use, or non-use, of definite articles and pluralisations. There is some unfamiliar vocabulary (my favourite so far is "prepone" for bringing a meeting forward in time). But in no way is this so far from "standard" English usage as to have become a different language. It's part of a global evolution of English that isn't "controlled" by anybody - it's a natural process. As I said earlier, one of the huge advantages of English as a global lingua franca is that it doesn't have a controlling body, and is free to evolve to suit the purpose to which it is put.

jimf

I tend to agree with you oakvillian.

Does Steve Mclaren speak "Dutchlish" now?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/foo...interview.html

Mithridates

That's okay, we don't have to agree. It's my favourite subject though so I might end up tiring people out as I can write about it forever (we do that on a group called Auxlang pretty much every day).


Hebrew before it was revived was in a state somewhere between Latin we have today and Indo-European, in that it had a fairly large corpus as with Latin but was pretty bereft of modern terms and needed to be filled in and changed a great deal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_Hebrew_language

I don't believe in dividing languages into constructed and natural languages, but if one does believe that then there's no way to class Hebrew but as a constructed/revived language. It's certainly not a simple continuation of the language that existed thousands of years ago.


English is certainly the most useful in getting around when travelling somewhere, sure. What I'm talking about though is a global 2nd language, one that the majority of the people in the world are perfectly comfortable with, will pass down to their children and so on. I for example can make out pretty well if a group of French travellers were to ask me for directions, but I still wouldn't consider myself close to fluent.


Well, the way it works is this: if there is a native speaker always on hand to make sure that the English usage is mostly up to par, then the mistakes are going to remain pretty minor. The native speaker's influence usually prevents any real degradation from happening. What's interesting though is when you have a situation with a large group of nations interacting in English but without any native speakers present. Imagine for example that this is the subject:

http://www.today.az/news/society/50313.html

"The following was revealed under the court and criminality studies of bones, held on January 24-26 of 2009 with participation of the scientists of the National Academy of Science and leading specialists of the medical expertise and pathological anatomy of the Azerbaijani Health Ministry..."

so the subject is this so-called "criminality studies of bones" (it's a meeting of forensic scientists, we'll say). None of the people there are native speakers so they all pick up on this sort of terminology, and now they're talking about and exchanging information on the subject, using terms like the above, along with "residuals of people" instead of "remains", now the word "damage" is being used as a countable noun - "numerous damages" instead of "much damage" - and all the rest...but they're still getting the information they need and the conference is a success.

Now let's say you're the only native speaker at this conference, and you're being asked a question about the "criminality studies of bones". Do you decide to correct the speaker and everybody else, effectively turning a conference on forensics into a grammar class, or do you just go along with it and answer the question even though it's grammatically incorrect? This is the pressure I'm talking about that comes with being a native speaker in the extreme minority, and it's worlds apart from simply encountering a different type of English in another country like the US or Australia. The difference is that in this conference they have kind of seized onto these terms because they look correct and it's the term they've decided to use at the moment to convey the information they need, whereas in a country that uses English as an L1 the terms used are known by everyone that knows the language. That is, if you ask anyone in Canada what Saran Wrap is they'll all give you the same answer, but if you ask a group of L2 speakers about whether a certain term is correct or not they won't all respond in the same way, because they're not sure.

Oakvillian

The sense of what that article conveys is pretty clear, though, isn't it?

I wouldn't (indeed, haven't) turned discussions into grammar classes. The kind of thing I hear on a daily basis might be "we need to do some more researches into situation. We still need to speak day after, or maybe tomorrow. Can we prepone our next meet to tomorrow itself, second half?" I don't think it's at all unclear what is meant by that, and when talking to colleagues for whom that is a natural construction of English I find myself dropping (or sometimes adding) articles and using different vocabulary. The structure of that language won't change much if at all if there isn't a native speaker on the phone - since there are so many first languages in play English is the only common ground.

However, colleagues also occasionally ask how a native English speaker would put something if they are struggling to get their point across. As a Brit in Canada working for an Indian company doing a lot of business in the US, I have to choose my idiom carefully to ensure as little as possible is lost in translation - but I don't think that diminishes the fact that the universal language is recognisably and functionally English.

I suppose it's a little different in my situation because almost the whole company, regardless of their nationality of origin, is educated to degree level, overwhelmingly at English-speaking institutions in India and elsewhere. It undoubtedly helps, too, that English is the language of official communications in India. I can see that it would be different when talking about southeast Asian populations who have no daily context for the English they're using, but not, I don't think, to the extent that the language breaks down into a jargon or a pidgin (I had to look up what the difference is between those - I could waste many an otherwise productive hour reading a lot more on this topic!)