[Air-l] languages, carnival of air-l

[Denise N. Rall]

What impressed me most about my travels in Europe as a
child was that almost all educated Europeans I met -
and this would be in Germany and Denmark, because
that's where we traveled, and Spain as well - spoke
some English. They had studied English in primary
school and high school. 

However, this made for a comic situation in the caves
at Alta Mira (Costa Brava), my father translating from
Spanish to English, where a Danish man hovered by his
shoulder translating the English into Danish for his
kids. Talk about 'chinese whispers' !

The English-centric perspective is derived from (at
least) these three factors:
1) the spread and dominance of the British empire
throughout the world
2) the refusal of the English-speaking peoples to
learn other languages (although this may be changing)
3) the analytical power of English (rather than the
inflected languages of Latin derivatives and German)

The analytical power of English allows for working
vocabularies of 100-500 words to be useful in
communicating with others - fewer than any other
popular language spoken today.

Where I read that - I think it was in a critique of
Esperanto as an international language. Esperanto
picked a format like Latin and Spanish (inflected) as
I recall the discussion.

Naturally the spread of the British empire is strongly
linked to commerce, and political might, etc.

Cheers, Denise



--- Samuel Klein <sjklein at hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:

> limited period (a week? a few days?) accept posts
> in a number of 
> > languages, for example the working languages used
> by the European


Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted, School of Environ. Science,
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA
Tuesdays: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 233 344
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html
Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html