At the library today as I practiced language skills with the girls, I managed not only to be outdone by the girls but also to lose what meager skills I have in any language.
After we returned the books that were due today, Evangeline and I started practicing our Esperanto. It works like this: I read her a word, and she gives me the Esperanto equivelant. Then I use the word in a sentence, and she has to translate the sentence. If I ask her a question, she has to answer me in Esperanto. (This has all sorts of insidious purposes. Besides teaching her the language, I pass on subversive ideas, like Bonaj demandoj ne havas facilajn respondojn. "Good questions don't have easy answers.")
So we're on a roll, going back and forth, and then suddenly Rachel interjects a translation on her own. An accurate one.
I have given her virtually no instruction in Esperanto. She's drilled me on some of my vocabulary, and she's heard me make simple requests in Esperanto, but otherwise it's stuff she's overheard me explaining to her fratino or she's picked up from our impromptu conversations.
So my brain pops the clutch over that one. I wrestle it back into gear, and then suddenly Evangeline starts correcting my grammar. "You forgot to add the -N!" she wails. (It's true. I keep forgetting to add the -N for the accusative case.)
Then I realize that while I'm using words I've learned from the more advanced lessons that Evangeline hasn't reached, she is having no trouble following me. Demandi is an infinitive; theoretically, all Evangeline should know is the verb forms. In practice, she's already converted it into a noun, demando/n, and doing the same with other verbs.
I used to be ahead of her, mostly because I am the teacher, and so I need to understand it if I'm going to teach her. I now realize that my vocabulary is slightly larger, probably because I'm already bilingual and know a smattering of French and Spanish to boot, but she is rapidly eclipsing whatever advantage I have. Her brain is wired right now for language acquisition, while for me it's work.
So much work that my language center finally seized up and stopped working completely. We were having a little back-and-forth in Esperanto when I said, "Jodia estas los compleanos de your grandfather."
The girls looked at me like I made no sense. Which I didn't -- in four different languages. I had mashed them all together into one coherent statement that made sense only to me.
This is the year Evangeline decided to break all our brains.
In order to keep the children's brains from atrophying during the summer, I like to have them pick a research project or other academic sort of goal that they can work on, in addition to any new math concepts that we study and the standard reading goals.
This summer, Evangeline decided she wanted to learn a new language. We live in a part of Iowa with a heavy Hispanic population, but she didn't want to bolster her Spanish skills. I speak Haitian Creole, though not fluently, but she didn't want to learn that. She chose instead to learn Esperanto, that most famous of invented languages, which none of us speaks.
Esperanto is designed for ease of learning: There are no irregular verbs or nouns, spelling is a cinch once you grasp the language's flavor, and even the vocabulary is fairly accessible for an English-speaker, since it draws principally from European roots. If you speak a European language, the language is supposed to be a snap.
Additionally, studies have shown that studying Esperanto makes it easier to master other second languages. Many years ago in Britain, a school taught German to a control group for four years, and Esperanto to another group for one year, followed by German for three years. At the end of the road, the second group had a much stronger mastery of German than the control group.
Another incentive for learning Esperanto is that it is politically and culturally neutral; that is, you can speak Esperanto with someone from China, and you don't need to worry about sounding like an idiot, because it's a native language for neither of you. The words aren't laden with political significance because of one piece of history or culture; it's effectively a common middle ground.
I can vouch for how easy it is to learn, myself. At the end of the first lesson, I already could conjugate verbs into past, present and future tenses, and inflect nouns into nominative and accusative cases. The only barriers to communication were that I had to stop and recall the vocabulary as I spoke (as did Evangeline as she listened), and that because of the nature of the vocabulary list in Lesson One, all we could talk about was bread, cake, coffee and tea.
Lesson Two, which I've sneaked a peek at, includes information on adjectives and personal pronouns. Some auxiliary information in another flier also introduced numbers and colors. The language is so easy that, as Evangeline pointed out, we can now count just up to 1,000,000, even though we've been studying the language for less than a month.
In fact, I see two chief difficulties. First is that no one around here speaks Esperanto, that we know of. And second ...
As I said, we live in an area with a lot of Spanish speakers. Many signs and notices are bilingual. And I've been trying to teach Evangeline and Rachel how to speak Creole. The result is that I already speak to them in a medley of three languages -- English, Spanish and Creole.
Add Esperanto to this mix, and I have visions of the girls learning four languages, and being able to separate none of them.
Many Christians will say no, and cite Colossians 3:8 by way of argument: "But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips," as the prooftext against profanity. I can't picture Jesus using words like "bunt," "sickhead," or "flocksuckers" when he's talking to or about other people, and certainly I can't see him talking in a crude sort of way about women.
But I've often wondered if "filthy language" in this context refers more to crude or vulgar language rather than to profanity or cussing. The Greek word in Colossians 3:8 that some translations render as "filthy speech" is aischrologia. The aischro part can mean base or filthy, but that's hardly the same thing as saying, "Damnit!" when you realize that the wood you've been working with for the last eight hours has begun to split, and now you have to start that chair all over again.
For the same reason, it's not the same thing as saying "Oh, shit," when you realize that everything just went way down south for you, and the next several hours, if not days, are going to be fairly stressful and difficult.
The issue isn't word choice, although if the range of your vocabulary is limited to the F-bomb, you desperately need a dictionary. It's the thought and intent behind the word that determines whether language is filthy, or not.
When Jesus talks about righteousness, it's clear he's concerned with what's going on in a person's heart far more than with the externals of what they are doing or saying. A person whose vocabulary is limited to expletives may not be fit for polite society, but I wasn't aware that polite society is what we hope to be fit for.
Five years later, I find it ironic where we are today. Evangeline and Rachel are learning some Spanish, by virtue of living in New Jersey. They're not as proficient as I would like, but they have some basic vocabulary and understand a few basic questions when I ask them in Spanish.
Similarly, I've really stepped up the Haitian Kreyol this past year, so that they understand what I want when I say things like, "Vi-n isit! Se tann pou soti kounye-a, non?" or "Ban-m men ou you le n travese rout la." They don't answer in Kreyol yet -- and Rachel is very quick to complain, "Please speak in English!" when I go on long enough. But they're getting it.
And a month ago, Evangeline and I were chatting about languages, and I mentioned off the cuff about Esperanto. Wouldn't you know, she glommed onto it right away, and has made it a goal this summer to learn some Esperanto. So I sent away for the free lessons, and already have started going over some of the basic grammar with her.
No luck on Arabic or Chinese, though I have some hopes of getting something done at the charter school in the next couple years.
Well, we're back on the homeschooling wagon for at least another year. Rachel missed the cutoff date in our district by two weeks, so we have elected to put her through kindergarten at home rather than miss the opportunity.
One of the things we're trying to do is to expose her to languages other than English. Spanish is easy -- on our recent trip to Mexico I commented that it was virtually like being in Iowa because there were so many people around us speaking Spanish -- but I'd like to include some non-European languages as well, if not to learn then at least to build some familiarity with the sounds and the ebb and flow.
And of course, one of the best ways to experience another language is through music, especially if it's a tune we already know. Music makes it easier to remember and even memorize a song, and if they're songs we already know, it becomes easier to get the meaning.
Amazingly, none of the Judaica shops that I have visited in nearby Hoover Point -- which has a significant Jewish population -- appear to carry CDs with Hebrew or Israeli folk music, or other music in Hebrew. I can continue to rely on YouTube for the experience, but that's kind of a pain in the tuchis. Does anyone have a suggestion where I could find some decent music in Hebrew without exorbitant shipping rates? This could be folk music, such as recorded by Ofra Haza, but it could also be the ever-popular Children's Songs from Hell, or even soundtracks of Disney movies and Broadway shows.
I'm also looking for CDs of Arabic songs of that nature, since it's the lingua franca of the Middle East. The Arabic I'm most familiar with personally -- I can say "Marhaba" and "Shou ismac" -- is Lebanese. It seems kind of odd that the language would be that varied from nation to nation, especially since the Quran must act in some capacity to tether the dialects together, but then I imagine Arabic is an older language than modern English, and had more time to develop regional variations before mass communication set in.
Anyway, I am told that Egyptian is the most universally understood dialect, owing to the popularity of Egyptian television. Maybe that would be a good place to start.
And as I've been thinking about this further, I suppose the best songs to start with really would be songs they're already familiar with, whether popular children's songs, or soundtracks from movies and plays.
Back when I was teaching Evangeline how to read, I was struck by how many written words you "just have to remember" how to pronounce.
No wonder spelling -- and reading -- can be tough. You have to memorize practically half the written language. So I guess it's not surprising that there are groups that push for spelling reform of written English on a massive scale, to boost literacy and to ease the torment of spelling.
It's a long and storied history. No less august a man than President Theodore Roosevelt, who reportedly had spelling problems himself, pushed Congress a hundred years ago to adopt some 300 simplified spellings, such as thru and program. Congress wouldn't budge, but a number of those simpler spellings became the accepted American spellings anyway, from curb and jail, to the words we dropped the British U from, such as honor, color, rancor and armor.
Sight words, which defy "standard" spelling rules, come by the truckload in written English. Some follow auxiliary rules of their own, like silent E, the -ight ending, and "I before E, except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh," but plenty don't.
Depending on the region, T can be pronounced like ch in tree or like D in kindergarten; the D in dress sounds like a J, making a phonetic "jress"; and almost no one ever pronounces the first R in February. (Let's not even touch Wednesday.) And regardless of region, come and home don't rhyme, and neither do bomb and comb.
Whatever the intent of these latter-day reformers, their goal of widespread reform is unattainable.
That's partly due to regional variations in pronunciation. In New England, the word aunt phonetically would be spelled ont. Elsewhere in North America, its homonymous with ant. Similarly, roof can be pronounced with the double-O sound in whoops, or with the long U sound in rude.
Those are picayune examples, but they illustrate what I'm talking about. Relying on phonetics to produce proper spelling either would create multiple spellings that would complicate written communication, or it would require establishing a uniform pronunciation as well.
Logistics aside, the best reason not to alter the spelling of English words lies in the threat such reform would pose to our linguistic heritage. Changing our written language, even if only a fraction of the scope outlined by advocates of simpler spelling, would sunder us from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and other giants of the English language, except "in translation." Given that words derive their meaning from their use in literature, with such a loss, we might as well not even bother having the language anymore.
Also lost would be the history embedded in the words themselves. Candidate has the Latin root candida, white, because those seeking public office in ancient Rome wore white to announce their candidacy. That golden nugget of history would be buried with a spelling like kandidaet; in the case of Wensdae, the day's etymological roots in North myth would be wholly obliterated.
The English language still has literary roots as far back as "Beowulf," an Anglo-Saxon poem written about 1,500 years ago; within its vocabulary -- and yes, within its spelling -- it carries nuggets of history pertaining to trade, politics, religion and a vast panoply of culture and literature. Remove the spelling, and you eradicate that record for all but the most scholarly.
The measure of reform that American English saw a hundred years ago wasn't due to the advocacy of men like Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, another advocate for simpler spelling. Rather, it was an organic process that grew out of the popular sentiments and attitudes of the American public. '
This is, after all, the same sort of unconscious force that produced the English language in all its richness and depth in the first place, by mingling Angles and Saxons. They in turn later fell to French Normans invaders in 1066. Over the years the speakers of the Middle English that grew out of that conquest have begged, borrowed and stolen phrases and words from all over the world, often adding new words and almost as often jettisoning an old word in favor of a new one.
The result? A thoroughly mongrelized modern English with roots everywhere.
And still it evolves. Feminine forms of many nouns are fading out of use, as the masculine forms become gender-inclusive. The Motion Picture Academy now refers to "male actors" and "female actors," and professional writers have stopped referring to women as comediennes. Similarly, even scientific writing increasingly doesn't use plurals like indices, appendices and formulae.
The spelling reform most likely to succeed already is underfoot by virtue of already being in use for effect. Words like tonite, nite, lite and brite -- all of which take advantage of the Silent E rule to replace the -ight -- have gained some limited acceptability, thanks to advertising and marketing gimmicks, along with other shortcuts like thruway.
I have to admit that my own sensibilities see the appeal to phasing out PH to make way for F (fotografy), replacing more C's with S's and K's (sirkle), and eliminating the soft G in favor of an old-fashioned J (jiraffe). And like playwright George Bernard Shaw, I can see the wisdom in eliminating apostrophes from contractions where its absence will not change the word's pronunciation.
But it's not going to happen that way.
If the goal is improved literacy, I'd suggest the would-be reformers find better means to that end than demonstrating at spelling bees and lobbying dictionary editors to list spellings like altho and hanus.
New spelling rules won't make half the difference that spending more time writing and reading will, particularly when done with children. That we do that less than ever is a far greater cruelty and a far worse tragedy than any of the spelling headaches written English has ever afflicted us with.
Children have a way with words that is all their own. I don't mean that they possess a unique eloquence, although that often is the case. What I mean is that they are an engine that drives the creation of new words, both in terms of the new vocabulary we must conjure to describe the phenomena that manifest in their presence, and in terms of the neologisms they create. And there's also the words they mangle.
Back when I was a child and station wagons were all the minivan of the day, we had the back seat and the "back back," where we stowed our luggage, our coats and even ourselves, when the back seat was too crowded for four boys. For a couple years, when Ward and I were really young, our oldest brother was PJ, as B.G., his initials, was too difficult for us to say.
Our children have been full of such contributions to the language. Over the years, Evangeline has created terms like "ots" for house; employed the universal prefix yeah, as in yeah-tree, yeah-car and year-house; and vested words with new meaning like when she expressed her desire for milk by saying "computer lights," since she often nursed in the afternoon while Natasha used the computer.
She also renamed the front room of our house the "rivelling room." I admit that I rather like the sound of it, and hope it sticks.
For her part, Rachel has had a fixation on the letter K. Thus she puts on kajamas before she goes to bed, likes to get kabloons when we go to parties, and enjoys seeing korillas at the zoo.
She's also been most inventive with language at expressing new concepts. Although she didn't coin a phrase like "choo-choo bird" to relate the concept of an airplane, she has invented phrases like "tippy bottom," for the opposite of "tippy-top."
Is there a point to all this? No. But it amuses me, and so I share it with you.
Evangeline and I went to Babylon today -- Broadway, specifically, a couple blocks from Union Square. Someone tried to solicit money from me to protect the environment from President Bush -- I had no idea he was the greatest threat facing the environment, but I guess it makes sense since he's also the greatest threat to everything else -- but I managed to throw him off by speaking to him and Evangeline only in Creole, and left the poor bugger thoroughly confused.
Se obligasyon mwen, non?
I did that at Burger King once too. I wish I could have recorded the conversation, because the poor woman who was trying to take my order at the drive-through was so frazzled after my third attempt. "Mwen vle de chizbege, un laj pom fri e un koka, souple." (I want two cheeseburgers, a large fry and a Coke, please.) It seems pretty straightforward to me.
The worst part of living in a different country is not the diseases you may catch, it's not the new climes you must weather, and it's not the disorientation of being a stranger in a strange land.
The worst part is the language.
When you don't speak the same lanuage as everyone else around you, you have the mind of an adult burdened by the survival skills of a toddler. You're fully cognizant of your needs, and fully aware of how helpless you are to do anything about them, or even to articulate what they are. In the best of times, you bear this with grace and laugh at your difficulties. The rest of the time you want to run away and cry.
When you don't speak the local language, you are unable to communicate or understand the most basic aspects of life, from "Where's the bathroom?" to "How much do you want for that mango?" In no time at all, you feel like the stupidest person on the face of the earth, such as when I told the yard boy, "Remember, I am garbage" instead of "Remember to take out my garbage."
Eventually you learn important phrases like, "I don't speak your language." This helps, but only moderately. There are times that come too frequently when you trust this trusty phrase out only to discover that the national who is speaking to you is speaking English, and speaking it tolerably well, but they are putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, or pronouncing a silent letter, or committing some other minor gaffe that makes their speech unfamiliar to you.
Stupidest person on earth is too mild for how you feel on those occasions. Now you don't even understand English, and what's worse, you've just insulted someone who was trying to connect with you by inadvertantly telling him that he's too stupid to speak English properly.
Go get a shovel, dig a hole and climb in. Your only hope as a missionary whose enthusiasm outpaces your mastery of the language is that the Spirit will move, and people will connect with God despite your failings.
I was a missionary in Haiti, but not the sort who did led open-air services and tried to win converts. I initially worked with STEM Ministries, which brought teams to Haiti and other countries for two weeks at a time; and then with Cradle of Life Christian School, teaching English grammar and composition to middle-schoolers.
As a result, I didn't do much preaching in Haiti, but I did try to share the gospel with a other people occasion, if for no other reason than they expected me to and I had the feeling that I should. My first conversation along those lines went something like this:
"If you accept Jesus Christ, he will take away your dogs."
"My dogs? I don't have any dogs."
"Everyone has dogs, ma'am. But when Jesus forgives them, it's though you never had a dog your entire life."
Bill Smith, an Assemblies of God missionary whom I knew, told me he once preached an entire sermon in Kreyol once he felt he had gained sufficient mastery of the language. The sermon went well and the Spirit evidently was moving, so he decided to take an altar call and appeal to the congregation that if anyone wanted to follow of Christ, they should signify it by raising their legs into the air and coming forward on their hands.
He got plenty of puzzled looks, but very little response to the altar call. The Holy Spirit was quenched.
Still, my favorite embarrassing gaffe was committed by the late Dale Preiser, another Assemblies of God missionary who had left the country before I arrived. I met him once after I had returned to the United States, when he came to visit my church.
Dale had been in Haiti for a while, and was concerned that he saw a number of believers who were mixing voodoo and Christianity, and going to the voodoo priestess for help when problems arose. The word he wanted was mambo. Unfortunately, the word he used was mamba, and for three solid months he went along Highway One, using this word in his sermons.
"Stay away from the mamba," he warned them. "Mamba is of the devil. You cannot use the mamba without shipwrecking your faith and endangering the faith of others."
Mamba is peanut butter.
Still, the Spirit was moving. I am told that people were very open to this teaching, and sales of peanut butter plummeted wherever Dale went.
My daughter not only in teaching herself to read and write, she is now teaching herself French.
Several months ago, I was playing games with her and changed the langauge options on one of her favorite Disney films. She found that fascinating, and started asking me how to say one thing or another in French. (I had to substitute Creole, since I don't parlez Francaise myself.)
Wouldn't you know that for the past two days, she's asked me to play "Beauty in the Beast" in French for her? She even calls it "La Belle et Le Bete," and I swear I heard her singing along with some of the songs -- in French.
A friend of mine has pointed out that no one he knows from Pittsburgh understands how to ask questions. When we do ask something, the pitch of the last word, instead of being slightly elevated, comes out either flat or as part of a sing-son series of words, so that it sounds as though the Pittsburgher has left a sentence unfinished.
Illustrated with punctuation marks, this means the Pittsburgh native says things like, "Do you want to see the movie." Or "Haven't I seen you before."
Vince went on to make a remark about Pittsburghers' insistence on using the word "pop" to refer to soft drinks. (He also noted that Midwesterners usually pronounce it as "pawp.") At was at this point that Vince suddenly and unexpectedly was ejected from my vehicle.
As I later told him, any true Pittsburgher will defend to the death our use of the word "pop" since that is the correct common noun to use in reference to soft drinks.
One of the things about English grammar is that it's so dynamic. Often there is not a single correct answer, but several answers that are defensible as long as you're familiar with the concepts.
Gaining a greater familiarity with language has made me feel like I understand Logos in a whole new way. Like language, you can discuss him until you're blue in the face, but he can only be understood once you experience him.
Back when I was teaching English, I was looking for a way to integrate my lessons better with the gospel, to find a more holistic approach than the cheap tack-ons that most Christian schools use in the curricula.
It occurred to me at one point that language is what makes us fundamentally stamped in God's image. John describes Christ as Logos, the divine Word with the power of creation and the authority to give reality form.
In other words, as with God, language isn't something we do, it's what we are. Because I'm primarily an English speaker, I have any number of preconceptions about love, God, faith, sin, the weather and time stamped into my mind. It's a tremendous exercise for me to break away from the definitions we have of those concepts in English and imagine them as they are presented in a non-English language.
We could take the word "god" for example. There's no real analog to that word in Hindi, so we substitute "Brahma" because that's the closest thing, but it's still a poor choice. In Hindi, "Brahma" is the sum of all things; God as an individual entity does not exist, but is found in and through all the world. Similarly, our concept of "sin" fails to find an adequate corresponding term in Hindi, where their term for "sin" refers to breaking the caste order.
Because I'm an English speaker, I also have a difficult time understanding why Spanish has estar and ser. Both infinitives translate as "to be," although with different applications. A Spanish speaker has no problem getting the difference, and can't understand why we use "to be" as a catch-all for both ser and estar.
It strikes me that what God was doing at the Tower of Babel essentially was breaking humanity up into different ethno-linguistic groups, each with a different way of relating to him so that we could learn from another to appreciate and worship him in new and different ways. It also had the effect of breaking up the spread of our sin, since ideas now must be translated from one language to the next and we cannot all rebel together as in the days of Nimrod.
Of course, it also makes it more difficult for us to understand one another, since the curse wasn't a one-time event, but something new that was levied on the human condition so that our languages always are changing and mutating, and even within our own language we lose some degree of discourse with the past as words like gandermooning disappear and other words, like let, take on completely different, if not opposite, meanings from what they once had.
"God wen get so plenny love an aloha fo da peopo inside da world, dat he wen send me, his one an ony Boy, so dat everybody dat trus me no get cut off from God, but get da kine life dat stay to da max foeva." (John Tell Bout Jesus 3:16)
I guess I'd have to say I'm in favor of it, but part of me has a negative reaction to it, as though the pidgin should be considered poor English rather than a language in its own right. If the pidgin is regarded as its own language -- a shaky determination with pidgins, which usually don't have their own written literature, a codified lexicon, or even status as the sole or primary language to a group of people -- then it makes sense to treat pidgin speakers as a separate people group.
Otherwise, aren't we just elevating poor grammar and language skills to the level of the standard forms? Where then do we draw a line for what makes good or bad English?
The point one of the translators makes about the koine Greek scriptures is a good one. The gospel wasn't entrusted first to the well-educated and established members of Roman society, but to the cast-offs who spoke a pretty mangled form of Greek.
The difference I suppose is that koine was a universal second language throughout the ancient world, much like English is today, and pidgin languages usually are small subsets of a larger language family that pidgin speakers already are familiar with and deal with on a regular basis.
In Haiti, only the wealthy 10 percent speak French, and the 90 percent who speak only Kreyol aren't going to understand French properly if it bites them in the tucish, as it sometimes does. Kreyol is the language that defines their culture and their world.
Is that the case for the pidgin English they're talking about in Hawaii? Beats me, but I suppose it can't hurt to have the Bible in any language -- even a pidgin language -- if it opens doors to more people finding Christ. It's not likely to do that, though, if the language hasn't got a more or less codified and universally accepted lexicon, though.
Note that my plan to implement a global English already is being implemented and starting to bear fruit. The New York Times has run a most fascinating article on the spread of Engrishes.
Singlish seems to me a legitimate form of English -- perhaps a pidjin or creole version, but a version nonetheless, with its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax, much of it obviously cribbed from English. As a language, Singlish apparently also is developing a body of literature, just as other Englishes have.
In any event, it demonstrates the success of my plan, as stated, to develop a worldwide English language with no ties to any one nation or culture.
Singlish may be a pidjin English, but a pidjin form of a language is still a form of that language. Singlish is more closely related to English than it is to the other languages it draws from, and as noted in the article, as things continue and the Singaporeans' exposure to standard English continues, Singlish is going to conform in more ways to standard English.
In any event, as more Englishes arise around the world, the flow of ideas from one culture to another also will increase, with the eventual emergence of a pan-national English. This pan-English is what will be central to my world empire's lexicon, much as koine Greek became the second language of the ancient world, not just under Alexander and his immediate successors but under the Romans as well.
Singlish, Japlish, Russlish and Spanglish -- and the other Englishes that are out there -- are just the beginning. Give them time.
Now, this article from The New York Times shows that we ultimately will need some sort of regulatory process in place to pull the various strands of English together. Who better to do this than journalists, who deal with questions of clarity and grammatical correctness every day?
Natasha and I have started talking about getting our children to learn at least one -- I would prefer two or three -- languages other than English. The best time to start, of course, is now -- Evangeline is only 3, so her language-acquisition skills are in high gear. She's perfectly suited for developing fluency in multiple languages, even if it's done largely passively, through children's songs or videos, and engaging her probably will draw us in as well.
Among the languages I've been toying with:
1) Spanish. This is a no-brainer. After English, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language in this corner of the nation. It's also a standard foreign-language option on many DVDs, which means we'd have access to quality movies in Spanish without having to spend any more money. It's also spoken throughout Latin America, much of the United States and in Spain.
2) Haitian Creole. Not a commonly spoken language, but there are Haitians around New York and New Jersey, in Florida, parts of Canada and -- of course -- in Haiti. Advantages are that it's a language I already speak, which would give her someone to converse with and allow us a measure of privacy in public places; it could serve as a bridge to learning French later on; and it's a language other than English. Even if no one in the area spoke it, it would still have value in that sense. Chief drawback is that there is very little in the way of popular entertainment like songs and videos that I have ready access to in Creole, which means I would have to hunt it down so she could enjoy it.
3) Esperanto. I'm afraid this is mostly for the novelty of it, and for the privacy measure, although I understand there is a wealth of literature for esperanto speakers. And it even has speakers all over the world.
4) Arabic. With political lines and alliances drawn the way are right now, I imagine Arabic will continue to grow in importance as a world language. Knowing how to speak some variant of it would be an asset for Evangeline as she gets older. The drawback here as well is that I don't know where to get the music or videos (or storybooks, for that matter, though I can't read and understand any of these languages except Creole) that she can enjoy, and I also would have concerns about getting her music that espouses religious views widely different from our own. (True of any foreign language, actually; it just looms larger in my mind with Arabic.)
I've always been fascinated by linguistics, and a manmade language like esperanto is intriguing for obvious reasons. It's not tied to any one nation or culture, it has no irregularities in its verb conjugations or other parts of speech, and it does have some credibility when it claims to being a good way for people of different languages and backgrounds to meet in the middle, where neither has the cultural or linguistic advantage.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what languages we should be looking into, or suggestions on where we might be able to find quality children's music in those languages? If they're songs we're likely to know in English, so much the better. That would help us learn the language too.
Also of interest to me are the various Englishes that have been springing up around the globe. There's Spanglish all along the U.S.-Mexico border, Singlish over in Singapore, and other daughter Englishes like Russlish, Crenglish and what have you. Some of them have even begun developing their own literary voices, which is all the more intriguing.
In many ways I'm reminded of the influence of the Greek and Latin languages as a result of the spread of the Roman Empire. You see the influence even in lands that Rome never conquered, like Germany (kaiser), Russia (czar) and even India (Qasir, a name). Now English has become the dominant world language, with the result that every modern language has gained English roots, at least for technical terminology if not for more mundane uses, and many languages have adopted other aspects of English writing, such as the English punctuation marks now used in Chinese. I don't know where I'm going with this, it's just mental meandering, but it is intriguing to think about how our entire world's communications have been Anglicized to varying degrees.
One also wonders about the ramifications of that, since the Bible records that God explicitly confused human language at Babel in order to keep us from growing altogether wicked ....
In order to facilitate communication and cross-cultural understanding, as soon as I take over the world, English will become the official language of the world. Schools everywhere will be required to teach English as a subject at all grade levels, and all official government business will be done in English.
True, there are easier languages to learn, but it's no fun to be world ruler if you don't get to be petty every now and then.
In addition to the English-language requirements, students also will be taught Spanish and Arabic for four years each, while maintaining proficiency in their native tongue and learning one other living language in use in a neighboring country. (Languages like esperanto, Quenya, Latin and Klingonaase will not count for the fifth language, though people are of course welcome to learn them.)
Additionally, languages with a non-Roman orthography will be allowed to keep that alphabet because of its cultural significance, but they must also adopt a standardized Roman alphabet in order to boost literacy and make the migration of words and concepts across linguistic barriers easier. (If there is a sound in the language in question, like the Spanish eñe that cannot be duplicated with the American Roman orthography, speakers of that unofficial language will be allowed to add the appropriate letter from their own alphabet to their language's new Roman orthography.)
Local languages will not be suppressed. Owing to their importance to maintaining local cultural identity, these languages may continue in printed and spoken form for as long as there are people who want to use them.
The goal of these reforms is the eventual emergence of a new global English not tied primarily into any specific nation. And then, once we all speak the same language, we can begin the second stage of my plan, with the construction of a mighty tower on the plains of Shinar so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the earth.
Of course, the sticking point in my plane is becoming established as absolute ruler of the earth, since I personally find military conquest an odious route to building a power base, I don't go for Machiavellan manipulation to obtain my ends, and I don't see hordes of followers lining up to recognize my sovereignty.
