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EU & Languages: Policies and your view? | ||
Tags: Europe | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5783 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 57 of 66 21 July 2010 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The speakers of the language and their social/cultural artifacts (art, TV, newspapers, magazines) reflect the current state of the culture and the dominant ideas. For instance, in the main English-speaking countries, there's a high emphasis on self-reliance / personal independence, especially in relation to entrepreneurism and business. There's also a strong near-religious belief in the superiority of capitalist markets over any other form of economy. These are basic cultural assumptions that are required in order to properly understand the meaning of much that is written.
As you learn the language and investigate sources of the language to read and listen to, these assumptions will be everywhere, and you will have to absorb them too, if you wish to understand the things that people are saying. It's not a part of the morphology / syntax / phonetics of the language, but how the language is used everywhere. In Esperanto, the culture is about equality, cooperation, and peace. These are reflected in Esperanto cultural activities and writings, as a required assumption in order to fully understand how they work. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5124 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 58 of 66 21 July 2010 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Edited by johntm93 on 21 July 2010 at 8:28pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6900 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 59 of 66 21 July 2010 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with there. There's also a somwhat insulting assumption that anyone needs to buy in to a point of view "to properly understand it". So, if I don't agree with what I'm reading, it's because I didn't fully grasp the underlying meaning? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5320 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 60 of 66 21 July 2010 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If English is spoken by somebody with super-equality-cooperation-peace opinions, then what part of the language has the super-capitalistic undertone? Is there some sort of cash clinking that can always be heard from the teeth of English speakers, and is there always a deep peaceful chant that emanates from an Esperantist's throat, regardless of the actual words?
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| mrhenrik Triglot Moderator Norway Joined 5876 days ago 482 posts - 658 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, French Personal Language Map | Message 61 of 66 22 July 2010 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If you'd say English has deaths on it's conscience, wouldn't Esperanto also have that as
soon as it became the official EU language? Or is it somehow excluded from that? How does a language have deaths on it's conscience? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| aarontp Groupie United States Joined 5064 days ago 94 posts - 139 votes | Message 62 of 66 22 July 2010 at 1:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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All widely spoken languages were spread by violence at one point or another. It's not
like ordinary humans were historically as thrilled to learn new languages as we are. They most likely learned because they or their ancestors were enslaved, conquered, or dispossessed of their homelands. Anyway, I don't advocate that all Europeans learn English. That's their business, just as it's my business whether to learn European languages. But it seems to me that continuing with English, which offers the added benefit of communication with 300 million Americans, 200 million (approx) Indians, 51 million Brits, and many millions of others all over the world; plus a gigantic literary tradition, is a more desirable option than starting with an artificial language from scratch. And while it may be true that English carries with it certain biases; it is not reciprocally true that Esperanto or any other language would be neutral or only bias toward ideas that nearly everyone approves of (love, peace, cooperation, ect.). Once adopted by hundreds of millions of people--it would become no less pernicious than English; and would eventually become saddled with the same baggage as the other dominant world languages. Anyway, this whole notion of official languages is ridiculous to begin with. People will learn the languages that are relevant to them, and right now the most important business language in the world is English; hence people want to learn English. In another hundred years, perhaps it will be German, or Chinese (likely in a modified form) or even Spanish. Edited by aarontp on 22 July 2010 at 1:44am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| guesto Groupie Australia Joined 5538 days ago 76 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 63 of 66 22 July 2010 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, but it's about all of that from a left-wing, progressive, socialist, PC, internationalist point of view. Hence, it's not politically neutral. Hence, no one who doesn't share that ideology will learn it. Hence, it will never become international. And with a real language you can at least argue that "well, it just happened that way", but Esperanto was created in light of this ideology to the extend that its hard to tell which is the consequence of which. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5124 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 64 of 66 22 July 2010 at 5:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
If English has deaths on it's conscience, then doesn't Arabic, German, Russian, Spanish, and every other natural language?
I just realized your post could have been a joke on the "English is capitalist durrr post" someone else made, but I'll leave the rest of this up anyway :\ 1 person has voted this message useful |
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