English is the Lingua Franca of the World
which is Latin for french language, but is meant to mean
"the language used everywhere between people that otherwise might
speak other, different languages"
on the other hand, English is a union of pretty much every language,
hence when someone invades or immigrates into England, rather than make them learn
English, we just glom their language onto the base, and everyone else has to learn to grok it.
If it was "vice versa", then the amount of work,
"pro rata", would be the same, but would be
"via" the immigrants, rather than the indigenous peoples.
Although it is an "ad hoc" arrangement, and leads to
"ad lib" creativity, the "quid pro quo" is that English
is a richer language than any other in the world, although
it is fair to say that in some sense or other, it isn't a
"bona fide" language, more a meta-language.
with many e.g.s of weird juxtapositions
such that geeky literati anoraks
will frequently incur schadenfreude amongst
naive readers of their utterances.
hence councils should not ban the use of any weird bits
viz bbc article on same
is silly:-)
"QED"
2 comments:
I see that Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wants all schools in the city to teach Latin.
However I would prefer Esperanto, not only because of its relative ease of learning, but because it has great propaedeutic values, also.
Check http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 if you have time.
A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
and the fine SF writer, harry harrison was a proponent of esperanto
which speaks volumes for it
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