Larry maper fastest speed reader2/27/2024 But it is not the only one, as shown by Jacques Melitz (2008) who uses two measures of linguistic distances between trading partners and tries to estimate their effect. Worldwide, English is indeed the language that is most often used in international contacts and trade. Is this what Professor Summers would like? Just walk in the corridors of the many buildings of the European institutions in Brussels, and you will realise that the non-native English that is spoken is hardly understandable by a native English speaker, and that English native speakers lose others when they go into somewhat deeper discussions (Wright 2007). This is by the way not the case in practice, but the EU still spends over $1.4 billion every year to interpret and translate from one language into all others. The reverse is also true, and the European Union is ludicrous in its defence that 24 languages (including Croatian, spoken in the recently admitted 28th member) are official, and that all official documents should be translated into all 23 other languages. Remember Sri Lanka, and the many lives it cost because one language group (out of the two main ones) decided that its language would become “more important” than the other. Check Fernando Pessoa and his “my homeland is my language”, or Ngugi wa Thiongo: “The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people's definition of themselves in relation to the entire universe” (Thiongo 1986). Read Shakespeare’s Richard II to see what happened to Thomas Mowbray whom King Richard exiled to Venice (“Have I deserved at your Highness’ hands/The language I have learn’d these forty years/For my native English, now I must forego /And now my tongue’s use is to me no more/… What is thy sentence, then but speechless death,/Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?”). Language is an essential expression of culture (and culture is, according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, shaped by one’s native language). English is indeed the native language of some 400 million people (that is 6% of the seven billion living on our planet) and is “spoken” by another billion, whatever “spoken” means (Crystal 2001). This time, he has outraged some 94% of the world’s population by suggesting that native speakers of English should forego learning other languages since, anyway, the rest of the world will soon become fluent in English (Summers 2012). In 2005, Larry Summers, then President of Harvard University, outraged 50% of the world by claiming that women are not as talented as men in science and mathematics. Yasar Kemal, a Turkish writer whose words are quoted by Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar “English! German! Ya! French! All the barbarian”. Kurdish I speak, and Turkish, and gypsy language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |