Sunday, September 17, 2017

English as she is spoke

Why don't we speak the same language?

includes this factoid:

The biggest boost, perhaps not surprisingly, went to those learning English. There are still plenty of places where English won’t do you much good. But at something like 1.5 billion speakers, it has certainly become what John McWhorter calls a “big, fat language” — which is even more striking when you consider that only about 400 million of them are native speakers.

Another factoid not in the article: if you visit Baguio, you run into lots of Korean students who go there to learn English, and a lot of English Language teachers in Korea are Filipinas.

Even in English, there are dialects, which are slowly fading as TV takes over.

One of those in the podcast is John McWhorter, a linguest who argued that some inner city black students needed to be taught in their dialect until they mastered English. I thought he was a radical, since I had not run into the problem in our neighborhood when I was growing up, but in more isolated neighborhoods with mostly kids from the south, this is apparently not true

when I worked in Liberia I needed a translator for the first three months because I didn't understand the dialect.

Kids pick up the language easily, however... Spanglish anyone? it works both ways.

one of the problems of English being everywhere is that English words replace the local word... here it is called "Taglish"...

Most educated folks here speak some English... and you can also find classes for Mandarin and Korean for those seeking jobs.

replacing English with the local language is discussed in the podcast, and how it can lead to tribalism in languages that didn't get chosen. we are Tagalog but two dialects and one separate language are spoken a short distance away, and this doesn't include those living here from the Visayas or Muslims from Mindanao...

One thing pushing English is that textbooks are easy to find in English, in the same way Latin was used in the past as the educated language.

Chinese? well, kids have to learn standard Mandarin in China, and when even Chinese have trouble learning  at least 3000 symbols to read the language, you can see the problem. This might be okay for kids in school in China, but learning it as an adult has problems (not to mention the tonal aspect, which is hard for outsiders to "hear" if their native language is not tonal).

Pinyin anyone?
Ah, but Pinyin means first you have to learn the official dialect... more HERE.

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English as she is spoke is a famous book about how to speak English

  Wikipedia article on the book.

Mark Twain said of English As She Is Spoke that "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."[4]


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