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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (66780)	1/18/2003 3:48:08 PM
From: kumar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The english language has its quirks, as does the spanish language : Took me a while to figure out that "J" is pronounced as "H" and "L" is pronounced as "Y". example : La jolla

To: carranza2 who wrote (66780)	1/18/2003 4:34:42 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 281500

<I've always wondered how it is that English, with all its minefields, has somehow managed to ascend to the top of the linguistic heap. Spanish is infinitely simpler. > Carranza, money talks. The people using English had a superior culture to all others. When they showed up on the shores of distant lands, with their machines, law, money, ethics and guns the locals were keen to do business. Weaving flax, scavenging in the sand for pipis, wearing bird feather cloaks for a bit of warmth and fighting off cannibalistic neighbouring tribes with stone clubs wasn't exactly a lot of fun. Well, it probably was when it wasn't actually raining, cold and the opposition was the dinner and not oneself, but the temptations by the British were great by comparison. Now the Yanks have the world's greatest culture. They show up in China, show Hu Jintao the really cool CDMA that I hired QUALCOMM to invent and he can't resist the temptation. Bingo! Chinese start learning English to get jobs with QUALCOMM, Google etc. It's true that not all aspects of Yankee culture are attractive to everyone, but sufficient that the bad stuff is trivial. Anyway, people just adopt the parts they like, such as Big Macs, Starbucks, Tom Cruise, Coca Cola and cyberphones. They ignore the culturally bad stuff, such as the right to bear weapons of mass destruction, though even that is appealing to some. It's not just consumer goods which are appealing though. The concept of universality of people and egalitarianism is appealing too. Habeas corpus beats arbitrary detention and execution. The Poms exported pounds shillings and pence, ounces, feet, inches, gallons, bushells, acres and other absurdities. The USA is still using some of them [though they got the quantities wrong in some instances - Americans have no idea how much is in a gallon for example, though they kept a standard pound, mile and the standard nautical mile too]. We in NZ have abandoned the archaic Pommy weights and measures and adopted the metric system, which is much better. I suffered decades of pounds, shillings, pence, guineas, pounds, poundals, slugs, feet, inches, miles to battle my way through engineering. Immediately after I graduated, we metricated. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. I can imagine that English seems like cruel and unusual punishment too. The Yanks metricated English a little, changing colour to color and aluminium to aluminum and humour to a sullen search for WMD. But we need to go the whole hog. The Japanese long ago invented hiragana to replace kanji, which was invented by the Chinese a few thousand years ago. Now they use a mixture. japan-guide.com I think it's time to metricate English or at least American. Or invent something else. Esperanto hasn't exactly taken off. Maybe English will morph into something more intelligible by variations chipping away at it, like mutations in DNA, with successful mutants taking hold. With cyberspace, there's quite an opportunity for linguistic development to take hold quickly. Mqurice