From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 13:01:38 MDT
On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 07:14, Dossy wrote:
> On 2002.05.16, Olga Bourlin <fauxever@sprynet.com> wrote:
> > On a related matter: Am I wrong in my observation that in the USA many even
> > "educated" adults can't even speak American-English very well?
>
> Even fewer can write or read it. It is appalling that people can
> make it out of school and not be able to form proper sentences or
> even spell.
It should be rather obvious that written American-English only has a
passing connection to spoken American-English. We don't write like we
speak. If you use written English as the metric for spoken
American-English, you are going to find substantial discrepancies. And
even among regions there is quite a bit of variance between various
sub-dialects. It is generally stated that the Pacific Northwest region
of the US has the purest dialect, probably due to the fact that many
parts of that region were populated almost purely with British
immigrants during its formative years.
However, I have heard the same things said of Mexican-Spanish by
non-native speakers that have become fluent in it, and I suspect that
there is more too it than a simple matter of literacy. The most likely
answer is that for native speakers there is so much shared cultural
context that a lot of short-hand is used in communicating in their
language. A great deal of precision is implied and extracted from nuance
rather than delivered as sterile words. Indirect evidence of this can be
found in the simple fact that written forms of the language tend to be
much more exacting and correct, since that medium loses all the other
out-of-band communication channels normally used in speech.
> I think it has to do with the fact that it is so trivially easy
> to "get by" with a very limited vocabulary in English (which is
> why America is so great for foreigners) so that the "natives"
> have no real incentive to learn. The only nuisance is the
> excessive use of idiomatic expressions in English which fouls
> up non-native speakers.
Most other languages, even bastardized ones like Tagalog, seem simpler
to get by in than American-English. Hell, I can barely understand native
speakers from certain other regions of the US and I'm a native.
One thing that is happening around the world is that less flexible and
fluid languages are slowly being phased out, even in countries where a
language is nominally the native language. The problem is that many, if
not most languages, used in the world today are too simple to deal with
rapidly changing concepts and technologies. My girlfriend is a native
speaker of one such language and she firmly believes (as do many others
of her ethnicity) that "her people" will be better off the sooner they
stop using a language that is clearly a hindrance in the modern world.
One useful feature of English is that you can easily create rather large
and specialized sub-languages within it for the purposes of working with
a particular specialized environments. This has made it very suitable
for use in the rapidly growing world of technology, but it turns out
that it makes a lot of high-tech engineering works nearly untranslatable
in many other languages. It would be useful from an extropian viewpoint
to make sure that everyone in the world understands a language which is
sufficiently powerful and flexible that they can absorb technology and
its implications with relative ease. The language doesn't have to be
English, but it should probably be something with a similar kind of
flexibility in practice.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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