READINGS IN LANGUAGE

On the life, growth, survival, and death of languages

We have four very interesting readings on language this week before Christmas. The first reading features the provocative answers of French linguist Claude Hagège, author of On the Death and Life of Languages, to questions posed by co-vocabularists on the future of communication. The second is Paul Bignell’s article in the December 13, 2009 issue of The Independent UK, “The Beckoning Silence: Why half of the world's languages are in serious danger of dying out,” which tells of the saga of one man’s efforts to save Nepal’s Thangmi language, one of the world’s 6,500 spoken languages that are expected to die by the end of this century. The third is about a new book, Robert Beard’s The 100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language, where the author explores the sound and meaning behind many uncommon English words. And the fourth is about another book, Jean-Paul Nerrière and David Hon’s Globish The World Over, which explains and advocates Globish-English, a language of only 1,500 words and simple grammar.

In Schott’s Vocab’s “Q and A: The Death of Languages” in the December 16, 2009 issue of The New York Times, Hagège predicts that Hindi—the most spoken language in India—and Mandarin Chinese might replace English as dominant languages in the future, but rather slowly; that the worldwide spread of English will not disappear because of the predominance of English-language books and the Internet, both of which cover all domains of knowledge and various other activities; and that the arts—particularly painting, sculpture and architecture—will play a rather limited role in the survival of a language.

Read Schott’s Vocab’s “Q and A: The Death of Languages” now!

In “The Beckoning Silence,” Bignell tells the story of Dr. Mark Turin, a University of Cambridge academic leading a project that aims to pull thousands of languages back from the brink of extinction by recording and archiving words, poems, chants. Dr. Turin, he explains, is “trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with anthropologists around the world to record what he calls ‘oral literature’ through video cameras, voice recorders and other multimedia tools by awarding grants from a £30,000 pot that the project has secured this year.”

Read Paul Bignell’s “The Beckoning Silence” in The Independent UK now!

In The 100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language, Dr. Beard, a linguist and former linguistics professor at Bucknell University, examines the pronunciation, usage and history of uncommon words like “cynosure,” “desultory,” “ephemeral,” “gambol,” and “serendipity.” And in the book, he explains that words like “becoming,” “wherewithal,” “erstwhile,” and “fetching” bring along with them a sense of simpler, more comfortable times past. “They carry that warm sense of security and ease we get from things that belong to us,” he says.

Read an introduction to The 100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language now!

Read Jennifer Copley’s “Eloquent, Evocative Words to Enhance Writing and Speech”

In Globish The World Over, Nerrière and Hon answer the critics to their groundbreaking book, Don’t Speak English, Parlez Globish, which has touched off controversy among academics and global thinkers because of its advocacy of a highly simplified, 1,500-word variant of English that the authors say is more democratic, easier to learn, and learned more quickly than English. That first book of theirs in French, which became a European bestseller but was denied publication in English, warned Europeans that English was taking over the world, but in a form that would not be the same as Standard English. Nerrière claims that people speaking Globish-English are now doing a lot of the world’s international business in English, excluding native English speakers who he says tend to monopolize conversations.

Read the news release on Globish The World Over now

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