Lets stir things up a bit

I am in the mood to stir things up a bit here. English as a subject in school was originally set as a resource of the colonials to assist in their efforts of forced assimilation of the american indians but also to eradicate the native languages.
Thus English as a subject in todays society is a waste of resources that can be better allocated elsewhere by having less english (left lower case on purpose) teachers in high school and indeeed college and more language and culture teachers. Discuss

I think you should prepare your case a bit better. You say english lessons are "a waste of ressources", but you haven't defined the actual economic damage that is being done by them.


In other words, I rate this thread 3/10 (more effort required for successfull troll).

viciokie wrote:I am in the mood to stir things up a bit here. English as a subject in school was originally set as a resource of the colonials to assist in their efforts of forced assimilation of the american indians but also to eradicate the native languages.
Thus English as a subject in todays society is a waste of resources that can be better allocated elsewhere by having less english (left lower case on purpose) teachers in high school and indeeed college and more language and culture teachers. Discuss

I think this is rather interesting Viciokie, being part Native American myself, and my family practicing and teaching traditional Native History and heritage at pow wows. Are you proposing that English should not be taught altogether, or as part of a broader inclusive discipline such as language?

I certainly agree that this country fails in a rounded set of language curricula. Why is it that most countries are as a majority multilingual, but it's the exception to the rule in America?

And why isn't Native American languages at least offered in colleges?

Firstly, I was unaware that English was spoken in the USA, as I've only heard the American dialect.

Secondly, every country has language classes in their schools, both for their national language and for foreign ones as well. To my knowledge most developed countries have an official national tongue, and make allowances for ethnic minorities. Thus it is obviously not there just to suppress the indigenous languages.

Thirdly, from some of the posts on this site the lessons haven't been very successful.

At least on the West coast of the USA, English classes are now used for teaching things like spelling, grammar, and literature. Which your missed capitalization and punctuations argue is necessary.

That's not to say there isn't room for improvement. It's been pretty well proven that memorization isn't the best way to learn and the literature typically chosen doesn't inspire students to read for pleasure (for 1 thing, Shakespeare was meant to be watched and listened to, not read).

I think those 2 things allude the the primary failure of education as practiced in the USA; it fails to inspire a true desire to learn in most students. The admittedly limited understanding I have of other education systems leads me to think that most of them have the same failing, but I don't know enough to be sure.

viciokie wrote:I am in the mood to stir things up a bit here. English as a subject in school was originally set as a resource of the colonials to assist in their efforts of forced assimilation of the american indians but also to eradicate the native languages.
Thus English as a subject in todays society is a waste of resources that can be better allocated elsewhere by having less english (left lower case on purpose) teachers in high school and indeeed college and more language and culture teachers. Discuss

There've been some nasty political fights about a legally recognized national language in the USA so there isn't one. That said, the de facto language is English.

While your point is indeed correct, only in a broad sense. There is enough regional differences to argue there isn't an American dialect. However just like British English, Australian English, Canadian English, etc... it's still English. English isn't at the point that Latin was in the 1300s though, where the contemporary Italian, Spanish, and French were all called Latin even though they were not the same language.

Daryl wrote:Firstly, I was unaware that English was spoken in the USA, as I've only heard the American dialect.

Secondly, every country has language classes in their schools, both for their national language and for foreign ones as well. To my knowledge most developed countries have an official national tongue, and make allowances for ethnic minorities. Thus it is obviously not there just to suppress the indigenous languages.

Thirdly, from some of the posts on this site the lessons haven't been very successful.

While English may have been forced on many at-the-time unwilling populations, it is perhaps the most flexible, adjustable and modifiable language on the planet.

Latin, while well-known, is effectively a dead language as it is frozen. While this means that there are very few Latin varients (meaning that any Latin speaker can perfectly understand any other Latin speaker), it also means that Latin is rather unsuited to modern life.

Despite the best efforts of the French, the flexible nature of English has allowed it to penetrate other languages, sometimes forming new pseudo-languages in the process (such as Chinglish, a Chinese/English hybrid).

English is also very well suited to humour. In terms of puns, only Japanese can match English.

I must point out that if English did not exist, then another language would have rise to fill the need for mutual understanding and trade enhancement.

In conclusion...

We are the English. Your metaphors and grammatical idiosyncracies will be added to our own.
Resistance is futile.

cthia wrote:I think this is rather interesting Viciokie, being part Native American myself, and my family practicing and teaching traditional Native History and heritage at pow wows. Are you proposing that English should not be taught altogether, or as part of a broader inclusive discipline such as language?

I certainly agree that this country fails in a rounded set of language curricula. Why is it that most countries are as a majority multilingual, but it's the exception to the rule in America?

And why isn't Native American languages at least offered in colleges?

I feel that english should be a broader approach in multiple languages and not just one because the world is most certainly smaller now. As for Native american languages not being offered except at certain colleges(notably ones founded and run by native tribes) the idea was to eradicate most languages of the Native american's, which i will admit for the most part that has succeeded sadly. As for my native side that was repressed when i was in school. I do recall vividly being spanked, slapped or punished for daring to speak my native tongue (Tuscarora Iroquois) and on top of that punished for using my left hand as well. I under no uncertain terms have very bad memories of school when i was a kid and is one reason to this day i loathe English as a subject.

With globalization of communication comes globalization of language. In this case English which seems to be a combination of being in the right place at the right time and the inherent flexibility of the language.

The old phrase the sun never sets on the British Empire was true and it spread English to every corner of the globe. Even when the Empire broke up, most of the former English speaking colonies continued to be influential on a global or regional basis either militarily or economically or both. At the same time technology was developing from mail packets taking months to telegraph to telephone to internet. With the ability to communicate globally rising and the language with the widest dispersal being English, English was in the right place at the right time to become globally dominant.

This sort of thing has been seen on small scale as well. For example in some parts of Africa every valley spoke a different language. As communication increased the more common languages dominated and those tiny language groups disappeared (linguists are frantically trying to record them before the last few speakers die). So the force used against viciokie was completely unnecessary. Natural drift would have produced English fluency. Probably in a bi-lingual form for the first generation or two. After that it would take deliberate efforts such as cthia's family's work to preserve the original language.

English also seems to be a very flexible language and really is a combination of multiple mother tongues (Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Norse, Norman etc not to mention borrowing randomly from just about every language the English/British came in contact with!) which is why learning English grammar is so difficult! We're actually trying to learn multiple linguistic systems randomly stuck together. But because it is a merger of so many mother tongues and continues to rapidly evolve and has begun to merge still more tongues it makes a good trade language. And just imagine what English will look like in Honor's time and how many languages will be stuck together then!

English does follow many of the common rules of languages (which explains why we can place it in the Indo European group of languages), and as such it is possible to extrapolate how English *might* evolve in the future:

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html

Enjoy

One could teach other than English a communications basis class. One still needs basic reading and writing. Basic math basic science. One can see that philosophy could be introduced in junior high school. Not the boring history stuff the learn to think, think to learn.

A communications class could introduce how different languages all have the same basic notions that are communicated. Rather than what one gets of media types and presentations. Visual audio motion or static. Silk screens and photography, TV commercials that are too loud...

There are cultural representations in the languages though. These help to understand notions and concepts. For instance the Japanese business man follows that there is a past and a present but the future does not exist. While a bay or wall street trader thinks of the future change or gain.

While some of us know that the present doesn't exist just past that can't be changed and future events that don't exist yet but can only be known as past things. One can change a future supposedly but really that just is the past. Although sometimes weird things happen but who knows what that is. Perhaps a in a future we are actively changing our pasts all the time. Or perhaps space time is stringy. And one can cross a string without knowing it until something just doesn't fit anymore. Of course if a change is happening it might be very subtle or hidden from view. One second my neighbour is gone 3-4-5 minutes into the future. Yet if the wall paint in one of the houses changed from green to yellow I wouldn't know. Could things be changing all the time? One wonders.