Speak English, Will U?

By David Simmons

The greatest lesson of history is that the future is utterly unpredictable. The evolution of language itself, the essential element of history, is one example.

Who would have predicted, centuries ago when the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Russian, German, French and even Swedish empires were vying for dominance that the Latin term lingua franca, which literally means "French language", would refer to neither Latin nor French but to English? Or that the continuing dominance of English would be maintained not by England itself but by its former colonies?

The English language has some strengths that make it useful as a lingua franca, but also some great disadvantages. Its great strength is its flexibility, and its ability to absorb and adapt useful terminology from other languages. Its great disadvantages are the complexity of its grammar and its diabolically difficult spelling system – or, more accurately, systems plural, for every dialect and sub-dialect has its own spelling quirks.

The first difficulty, its grammatical complexity, can be quite easily overcome in spoken form, which perhaps helps explain how English managed to take root in places as linguistically diverse as India, Nigeria and the Philippines. To express basic ideas, English is quite easy to use: If an uneducated African or Malay says something like "Want go home", he won't make much impression on the prospective publisher of his first English-language novel, but everyone will understand what he means.

Its phonological system is also reasonably simple. Tones and stress have little or no importance; most of its consonants have equivalents in most other languages; and while it has a somewhat intimidating array of vowels and diphthongs, which again vary widely among its many dialects, most of them can be approximated to simpler forms without making the speaker too difficult to understand if he speaks slowly and puts a bit of effort into it.

It is the written form of English that creates more serious problems for anyone striving for anything close to fluency – not only for non-native speakers, but for people born in Britain, North America or Australia. Would-be reformers have struggled for centuries to simplify and regularize English spelling, but the only one who achieved even moderate success was Noah Webster – and his reforms are still only accepted widely in his own country, the United States, and disparaged elsewhere as "Americanisms".

Two concurrent, relatively recent developments are exacerbating the disaster that is English spelling. One is the Internet, which has further driven the need for English literacy. The other is the rise of Asia, whose major languages are very different from English and many of which have their own writing systems that are completely alien to the Latin alphabet used by all dialects of English. 

It is too early to judge whether these two developments will enhance or denigrate the status of English as a global lingua franca. They must result in simplification and perhaps even regularization of written English, which would make it more useful to the great majority, but could also have the effect of weakening its ability to express complex ideas. 

At the same time, there appears to be no way to control the development of Web-based English. There are already indications that a generation is emerging that sees nothing wrong with using e-mailese terms such as "u" (for "you") in, for example, job applications.

The effects of the Asian influence are also readily observable. In most East and Southeast Asian countries that publish English-language daily newspapers, there is still concern about maintaining traditional standards, and depending upon the availability of well-educated local staff, most of them employ a phalanx of native or near-native English speakers as copy editors to maintain quality. But at some papers there is dwindling interest in such maintenance, partly because of the cost of employing foreigners, and partly because of growing acceptance of English usage, again driven by social networking and other Internet phenomena, that until recently was disparaged as "substandard".

And so one of the greatest languages the world has known, the supplanter of French the supplanter of Latin, continues its journey into an unpredictable future. Whether that future is better or worse, u will just have to wait and c.

Revenge of the Gekkos

By David Simmons

The 1980s Charlie Sheen film Wall Street opens with a panorama shot of Manhattan, dominated by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbols of the might of the US financial industry. Fourteen years after the film's release, the towers lay in ruins, but Wall Street itself was more powerful than ever, its excesses abetted by deregulation; Charlie Sheen was establishing his reputation as a premier comedy actor on Spin City, a TV show about New York City government.

Another 10 years have passed, and Ground Zero is still basically a hole in the ground; Charlie Sheen is ... well, let's not go there. Much more interesting is what's going on in Wall Street itself: protests against a system that has systematically shifted America's wealth to the top while ordinary working people lose their jobs and homes. Interesting, that is, to everyone but the US "mainstream media".

Or so goes the story. But who exactly are the "mainstream media"? Do they even exist any more? Can such an entity exist in today's interconnected world?

The growing crowds of protesters in Wall Street see the lack of coverage as a conspiracy – after all, the major media are all owned by the same corporations whose survival depends on the same system the protesters want to bring down, nostalgic for an alternative system that, they believe, once existed in the dim past and worked for the majority, not just a tiny elite.

In fact, however, news-coverage decisions are still made in newsrooms by editors and to some extent reporters; direct interference by corporate owners is extremely rare, and is heavily resisted when it is attempted. Corporations control the news indirectly, by appointing senior editors who agree with them, and paying them lots of money not to stray too far. Even so, there remains a lot of autonomy in news organizations that are not openly partisan such as Fox News.

So why aren't CNN, The New York Times etc covering the Wall Street "occupation"? For the same reason they aren't covering the bake sale at the senior citizens' centre down the road from your place: They don't consider it news.

"News judgment" is a difficult concept to define, and even more difficult to explain. Sometimes a story gets covered simply because it affects a reporter's family or friends. Homelessness and unemployment are under-reported largely because they are uninteresting to reporters, who themselves have homes (for the time being) and jobs. After they lose their jobs (and their homes), they of course are no longer reporters, and couldn't cover the story if they wanted to – except, of course, via the Internet, which has replaced the traditional newspapers and to some extent TV news departments as the real "mainstream". But Internet coverage is scattergun, undisciplined and unreliable, and its influence minimal.

The fact is, the Wall Street "occupation" is not a big story, at least not yet. Protests happen all the time in the US, and only become "news" when there is some interesting event attached to them, such as police brutality. Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna of the New York Police Department obligingly added that element with his liberal use of pepper spray on non-violent protesters, but as usual the real story of police involvement is either not reported at all or obfuscated by spin on both sides. There have been reports that the cop rank and file quietly support the protesters, as they too have been victimized by the looting of their pension plans and the bursting of the Wall Street–fuelled housing bubble that was at the root of the US economic meltdown.

Inside the plush offices of Wall Street itself (or actually Midtown Manhattan, where I understand most of the big banks moved their headquarters to some time ago), nothing has changed. As he did in 1987, Gordon Gekko still rules with his mantra "greed is good". Americans continue to tolerate the status quo even as their pensions are ravaged, their kids can't afford higher education, and decent jobs are shipped overseas. This has been going on for decades, death by a thousand cuts. But they're not marching in the streets in droves; on the contrary, they're voting for the Tea Party.

Meanwhile on the opposite shores of the two oceans America straddles, the real news stories are unfolding. Europe is in a much faster meltdown than the US. The euro experiment has failed, with Greece in near-anarchy as its government flails around with "austerity" measures that will benefit no one but the French banks that financed the largesse that bankrupted Athens. The people won't wear it, and there is talk of revolution or, probably more likely, another military coup. However the Greek tragedy plays out, the fears of "contagion" are real, with the far larger economy of Italy next in line, and the trembling not only in the European central banks but the International Monetary Fund itself is palpable.

Meanwhile, the bemused Chinese bide their time. Sitting on vast international reserves, the Communist government stands ready to rescue the foundering capitalist system. The result will be an even more dramatic shift of power than we have already seen from West to East.

It will be the first time in history that a system that makes no pretence about the fact that it is a dictatorship takes over the global economy from a system that pretends to be democratic. Way back in 1987, Gordon Gekko saw democracy as a sham, a system of tossing out a few scraps to the great unwashed so they would keep the wealth engines churning. But like all kleptocracies, Wall Street and its European clones found greed a little too good, and began to kill the goose that laid their golden eggs.

At least one thing will be certain after China rules the world: There will be no "mainstream media" to fret about.

Dream State

By David Simmons

In parts of Latin America, the vernacular verb for "sleep" is not the standard dormir but soñar, which literally means "to dream". It's easy to read too much into casual speech and slang, but it's tempting to think that among the poor (from whom I learned this usage), the most important thing about sleep is not rest but escape to a better world, a fantasy world.

Thailand likes to call itself the Land of Smiles, but it is also a land of dreams. Thais are dreamers, and foreigners come here to make their dreams come true. Sometimes they do come true, for Thais as well, but for the most part, life here is a steamy blur of illusion and fantasy that pervades all levels, including government. The solution to any problem is not to deal with it, but hope it goes away, and if it doesn't, pretend it never existed in the first place.

Ratchadaphisek Road in Bangkok is a long street full of upscale hotels and huge, neon-clad, glittering massage parlours. These aren't the "sex tourist" haunts you mostly read about in the sensationalist Western press; they cater mostly to well-off or well-positioned Thais, and to a lesser extent long-term Thai-speaking expatriates. Inside, you can get anything you want, including Alice. A number of tycoons have made their fortune off these places, and senior police have got fat safeguarding their operations.

In the most recent general election, former massage-parlour tycoon Chuvit Kamolvisit won a seat in Parliament. He has made a name for himself by denouncing the police corruption not only in the industry that made him rich, but in another big business in the same area: illegal casinos.

Thais love to gamble. In any village on any evening, you can find a card game, a source not only of good, clean, penny-ante fun, but "tea money" for the local police. The only legal gambling in the country is the state lottery, but even this spawns illicit spin-offs. In my neighbourhood in Bangkok, a numbers game based on the lotto is popular. I don't know exactly how it works, even though I'm on intimate terms with the lady who runs it. Say no more.

Everyone knows all of the above, including the politicians (some of whom are heavily invested in the legal casinos across the border in Cambodia, and therefore have no interest in seeing gambling legalized in Thailand). So it was extremely annoying to a lot of people when Chuvit started blabbing about it in Parliament. He even showed video evidence of the existence of the biggest casino in Bangkok, which reportedly hosts 1,000 high rollers every night and makes a cool US$500,000, every night.

What happened next was a great joke. Senior police lapsed into their dream state, pretending there was no illegal gambling on Ratchadaphisek, in the back yard of their Sutthisan police station.

Since then, the casino has supposedly been shut down, and a bunch of senior cops shuffled into "inactive posts". But no one believes any real difference has been made.

My wife is a great dreamer. A simple chat about my possibly semi-retiring some day and working from home immediately goes off on a tangent about how she's going to have a special office built for me with Wi-Fi Internet and satellite TV, with a side door out into the garden where she spends her time growing jasmine, and where I can take a break from work and stroll among the palm trees, yada yada yada.

Unlike most Thais, of course, she has hard evidence that dreams come true. Her dream was that a kind foreign gentleman of means would marry her and rescue her from a life of drudgery in the rural Northeast, and buy her a Honda CR-V and maybe a house. The house is now built and occupied by a couple of college girls who don't pay enough rent to make a dent in my mortgage payments; the CR-V is parked outside our rented townhouse in Bangkok. Now nine years old, it's in excellent shape, but she is eager to see the new 2012 model. "We don't need a new one," I say. "I can dream!" she replies.

I don't begrudge her that. But I grew up in a culture where practicality, not wishful thinking, was the key to progress. I believe Thailand is held back by its people's – and its leaders' – self-delusion and denial of reality.

But on the other hand, maybe existing in a dream state is what makes this a Land of Smiles.

Don't Mention the War

By David Simmons

The longest war of the world's greatest warmonger, the United States, is lost. The Taliban, whom the Afghan war was meant to destroy, are gaining strength by the day, now ravaging Kabul itself.

Most people in the West originally thought the US invasion of Afghanistan was justified, as it was allegedly harbouring al-Qaeda, blamed for the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and the Pentagon. That justification was shored up by the fact that the Taliban regime was extremely nasty, even though (or because) it had in effect been installed by the US Central Intelligence Agency in its campaign against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan and the leftist regime Moscow supported.

Now, of course, hardly anyone thinks the war is justified, not even the Americans themselves. About the only supporters left are the private contractors that have got fat off of bogus "reconstruction" projects, the arms industry, and the heroin traders. But all this was completely predictable, and not just because this war, and its twin in Iraq, was hatched by the neo-conservative puppetmasters of the George W Bush administration.

The fact is every war is a blood-soaked amalgam of lies and fraud. War is the ultimate evil, full of sound and fury and accomplishing nothing but even more evil. Apart from the death, pain and destruction it directly causes, its effects on surviving societies far outlive "victory", with wrecked economies, ruined families, and usually the installation of a dictatorship, puppet regime or outright kleptocracy that inflicts even more havoc, while the "victor" itself suffers from a reinvigorated culture of violence.

My father fought briefly in World War II, in the Royal Navy, until he was stricken by tuberculosis. My mother, meanwhile, served in the Women's Land Army, and survived the London Blitz. Neither spoke much about their experiences, and I never pressed them, or learned much about how they were shaped by that period. Both were very gentle people, and it's only in retrospect that I can imagine how surreal the horror of war must have been to them.

That war, my generation was brought up to believe, was far better than the alternative. But it, like all wars, was shrouded in secrecy and outright lies. Could it have been avoided? Many tried, most famously Neville Chamberlain, responsible for the redefinition of the word "appeasement" into something bad (much like "protectionism" today, or "socialist" in the US). Adolf Hitler was a tough nut to be sure, and the sell-out of Czechoslovakia by the British and French difficult to defend, now. But Hitler made it clear from the outset that he never wanted war with Britain, and in the end was defeated not so much by the deaths of millions of soldiers but by his own megalomania.

On the other side of the planet, the war with Japan seemed even more avoidable; it was after all not a noble battle to save Asia (about which no one in the West cared a hoot) but a clash of two Western empires against an Oriental one. It was the US attempt to cut off Japan's oil supply that triggered the attack on Pearl Harbor, not (as it would probably be spun today) Japan's "hatred of American freedoms".

We'll never know the whole truth of what happened in Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s. Maybe the Western version of history is right, and those conflicts really were justified, and accomplished lasting benefits not otherwise seen.

But the preponderance of evidence is that total, not conditional, pacifism is the only philosophy not imperilled by dishonesty, hypocrisy, or recycled violence and misery.

Eleven

By David Simmons

We all make history in our own way, but it is mostly irrelevant to all but a negligible few. Most often, we at best live on its periphery, or observe it from afar.

This is just as well, for historic events are almost by definition hugely dangerous, sometimes fatal. The closer we get to them, the more we are reminded of life's fleeting nature, and hence its preciousness.

This weekend, of course, we are all thinking about where we were when the Towers came down. Like the Kennedy assassination, it is one of the few historic events that etch themselves on our personal – rather than our much vaguer, general – memories. The sight of the second plane banking gracefully through the jewel-like blue sky into the South Tower and erupting into a grotesque fireball was a horror rarely matched in intensity, and we hated ourselves for our inability to tear our eyes away from the reruns obligingly rerun on television over and over again.

But it is the peripheral nature of our observation of history that is perhaps more interesting than the events themselves, for our brushes with cataclysmic events are what illustrate the tenuousness of our existence, if for no other reason than that they are so much more survivable.

Over the decades, I've had many such brushes, including with the World Trade Center itself, which I once stood on top of (an obligatory part of any visit to the Big Apple back then), as well as brushing the ash of Mount St Helens off my motorbike, landing in Athens just after an earthquake, riding in the back of a Sandinista army truck through mountains infested with Contra terrorists, getting swept off my feet by the great Indian Ocean tsunami, and now, riding in Bangkok taxis nearly every day. Such a dangerous world: how is it that we survive it for more than a few minutes, let alone our "allotted" three score and ten?

It's a mystery, a miracle perhaps. Yet that's the definition of life itself.

Ten

By David Simmons

There has been little on television over the past week but features related to the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And of course the question on top of everyone's mind is: What is the significance of 10 years?

The answer, of course, is "absolutely nothing". We mark things by tens because we have 10 fingers, a fact that has nothing at all to do with a gang of wackos flying airliners into buildings.

The September 2001 attacks are often described as "world-changing", but in fact that description is far more apt to an unrecorded event: the day humankind learned to count past the number 10 (or 20, assuming this happened before the invention of the full-coverage shoe). However, even with that giant achievement, humans were unable to leave behind their 10-digit-based mathematical origins. Despite built-in flaws and even clashes with the cosmos itself, we cling to our base-10 numbering system.

Our own planetary system tells us that 12 would be a better base, as there are 12, not 10 lunar phases. The decimal-fraction system shows how this is so. One of the most useful fractions we have, one-third, cannot be conveniently expressed decimally: it becomes 0.333... with infinite repetition. One-fourth is not much better; it requires two numerals to designate as a decimal. But with a base-12 system, one-half would be 0.6, one-third would be 0.4 and one-fourth would be 0.3, vastly simplifying calculations at all levels. We actually do use base-12 for time, as you can see by looking at a (non-digital) clock: 12 hours, each divided into 60 minutes, for a total of 3,600 seconds – all numbers easily divisible by the prime numbers 2, 3 and 5.

This timing anomaly may derive from that most basic of clocks, the lunar cycle. Yet even here we see reflections of our obsession with the number of fingers we possess, for the 12th month is called "December", which means "10th month". This actually happened not because there were once 10 months in the year but because the pre-Julian calendar started in March, not January. Still, one would have thought that the various renamings of the months that took place over the centuries would have dealt with this oddity had we not been so decimally biased.