My friend Saritha Rai writes in the New York Times:
click here to read it
The first comment is wonderful, and, I suspect, written deliberately in pigdin English to underscore the commenter's point!
My response to this:
Languages evolve, and routinely, some disappear. Where is Pali? Hebrew? or any of the other tongues that we do not even know of? People communicated with each other through whistling across the hillsides, I learnt once.
I feel that English itself is evolving into a series of local dialects; as it is now, we can hardly understand the language as spoken in Fiji, or Singapore, or South Africa...or for that matter, the English between, say, Punjab and Tamil Nadu varies so widely.
So...I feel that instead of a polyglot Babel, we will have polyglot English....and since I am not going to be around to find out....I am OK with the process of evolution! How else would you and I communicate, dear reader, when some of you speak Swedish, Punjabi, French, and other languages I don't even know of?
- Polyglot English...my prediction
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deponti- June 3rd, 2012
2012-06-03 02:35 pm (UTC)
2012-06-03 09:01 pm (UTC)
I was surprised at first when I found out that my DIL, who has an almost monolingual Japanese mother, barely speaks and understands the language! I try to encourage her to have her mom teach Japanese to my my granddaughter, but DIL thinks her mom will not be interested...I try to speak with my granddaughter in my dialects, at my son's behest, but it's hard since she only communicates with both parents in English...She picks up easily on the songs, though, so that's a start. My son, on the other hand, speaks both my mother tongue, Ilocano, and Tagalog, our national language, fairly well. Most often when I scold him or want to tell him some secret, I use any of the two or a mixture of both;)hahaha
I agree with your prediction of a polyglot English. Just off the top of my head, I know of at least one word that English, or American English, at least, has adopted from my language-"boondocks" which means "mountains," in my language. I'm sure there are some words adopted from your language.
I also am with Donna. I frown upon the " attitude of some English speakers who find themselves living in non-English speaking countries and are actually proud of never learning the local language well enough to communicate. That isn't the point here, I realize, but so many English speakers have become arrogant that way."
Edited at 2012-06-03 09:02 pm (UTC)
2012-06-03 09:55 pm (UTC)
Since none of us can know everything, I cannot understand arrogance of any kind...but I hope I am not prey to it, unwittingly...
2012-06-05 12:03 pm (UTC)