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.
No comments:
Post a Comment