Indonesian still has nothing that will be regarded as grammar by anybody who’sfficeffice" />
done battle with Latin or Russian. There are suffixes and prefixes aplenty, neat and
regular, that convert verbs into nouns and give verbs additional meanings and the like,
but no inflections according to person, number, tense, aspect, or anything else.
Indonesian uses the Roman alphabet and is delightfully easy to pronounce. If
you’ve ever studied any other language, you’ll marvel at how quickly and clearly you’ll
understand and be understood.
Indonesian is closely related to Malayan, the language of Malaysia and Singapore,
and gives you a head start in Tagalog, the major language of the Philippines.
Hindi and Urdu
The spoken languages of India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu, are so close that the true
language lover is tempted to take the plunge even though both languages use different
and, to us, unfamiliar scripts (Devanagari, and a mixture of Persian and Arabic). Though
other languages abound on the Indian subcontinent, Hindi-Urdu united their respective
nations and whoever jumps in (despite the current lack of good learning materials) will
be able to communicate with a population second only to that of China.
Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian
Despite the grammatical complexity and the relatively small pool of native speakers, an
occasional adventurer is drawn almost masochistically to the three Finno-Ugric
languages. If you were the hated kid in ninth grade who stayed after algebra class to beg
the teacher to introduce you to calculus, they might want to try one of these.
Every word in all three languages is accented on the first syllable – every single
word, names and all, giving those languages the sound of a pneumatic jackhammer
breaking up a sidewalk. There are, in Finnish, fifteen noun cases in the singular and
sixteen in the plural. Hungarian and Estonian aren’t far behind. And that’s the easy part!
People whose language you choose to learn often ask polite questions about why
you wanted to learn their language. Let on to a Finn, a Hungarian, or an Estonian that you
know a little bit of their language and you will not merely be questioned. You’ll be cross
examined!
Swahili
Swahili enjoyed a surge of support beginning in the late ffice:smarttags" />1960’s among young American
blacks who wanted to reconnect to their African roots. Anyone who pressed on and
mastered Swahili would today speak a language spoken by fifty million people living in
central and eastern Africa, including the nations of Kenya and Tanzania in which Swahili
is the national language. Swahili is a Bantu language, and once you learn it you can
expect easy going when you decide to learn Kiganda, Kikamba, Kikuyu, Kinyanja,
Kichaga, Kiluba, Kishona, Kizulu, Kikongo, and Kiduala, all of which are spoken over
smaller areas in Africa south of the Sahara.
Swahili uses the Roman alphabet. The Say It In Swahili phrase book advises us not
to be discouraged by words like kitakachonisahilishia, because Swahili grammar is
mercifully regular and logical!
English
The mere fact that you’re reading these words right now calls for self congratulations. It
means you’re fluent in the winner, the international language, the number one language
of all time!
When a Soviet plane approaches the airport in China, the pilot and the control tower
don’t speak Russian to each other. They don’t speak Chinese. They speak English. If an
Italian plane is about to land in another part of Italy, the Italian pilot and the Italian traffic
control person also speak English.
When the Israeli general and the Egyptian general met in Sinai in October 1973 to
talk truce in the Yom Kippur War, they didn’t speak Hebrew. They didn’t speak Arabic.
They spoke English.
When Norwegian whaling ships put into the port of Capetown, South Africa, to hire
Zulu seamen, the interviewing is not done in Norwegian or Zulu. It’s done in English.
The parliaments of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway send delegates to a body called
the Nordic Council. Their official meetings are conducted – at great expense in
interpreters and simultaneous interpretation equipment – in Swedish, Danish and
Norwegian. When the meetings end, however, and the delegates from the three
neighbouring countries adjourn to the bar and the dining room, they all start speaking
English with each other!
Haven’t you noticed something odd about protestors you have seen on TV
demonstrating in Lithuania, Estonia, Korea, Iraq, Mexico, and other countries where
neither the protestors, the ones they’re protesting against, nor the local media speak
native English? In addition to the signs and banners in their own languages, they always
carry signs and banners in English. And for good reason. They want their message to
reverberate around the world.
On a map of Africa, Nigeria seems a tiny patch where the bulge of that gigantic
continent meets the body. Inside that patch, however, live between 100 and 120 million
people speaking 250 different languages, with names like Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Nupe, and
Oyo. From their first day of school, the children of Nigeria are taught English. Without
English, not only could Nigeria not talk to the world, Nigerians couldn’t even talk to each
other.
When a Nigerian educator, Aliu Babtunde Fafunwa, proposed in early 1991 that
Nigerian children begin their education in their 250 respective mother tongues, the
government newspaper itself wrote in an editorial, “The least luxury we can afford in the
last decade of the twentieth century is an idealistic experiment in linguistic nationalism
which could cut our children off from the main current of human development.” That’s
hardly a hate filled denunciation of former colonial masters.
Every attempt to launch an artificial international language has so far failed.
Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Kosmos, Monoglottica, Universalsprache, Neo-Latine,
Vertparl, Mundolingue, Dil, Volapuk, even an international language based on the notes
of the musical scale, all started out weak and gradually tapered off. My guess is they
always will. You can no more “vote” a language into being the international language
than you can vote warmth into a blizzard.
Languages attain prominence something the way individuals and countries do,
through all kinds of force, including war. There’s an added element in prominence,
however. Brute force is not enough. The winning language must have a degree of
acceptability to the losers.
Russian emerged from World War II as a mighty language, but it failed to bluster
beyond the bounds of the Communist empire. Russian even failed to inspire people to
learn it inside their empire. Students in Hungary, Romania, and East Germany knew no
more Russian after eight years of schooling than Americans know French after similar
exposure.
English, on the other hand, was welcomed. Africans and Asians may not have
rejoiced at being forcibly incorporated into the British Empire, but they recognised that
the English language, if learned by all, was a unifying tool that enabled different tribes
who lived five miles apart to communicate for the first time, in a language brought down
upon them from thousands of miles away.
A wolf will lift his neck to let a larger wolf know that he accepts the other’s
dominant role as leader. The entire world has lifted its neck to acknowledge English as
the language of choice in the modern world. It wasn’t all military and commercial power,
either. American movies, songs, comic strips, TV series, even T-shirts all helped make
English the international language of the earth by acclaim.
But only the shortsighted will consider the dominance of English reason to return
foreign language materials to the bookstore and forget the whole thing. It’s precisely
because the peoples of the world honour our language that we get so much more
appreciation when we go out of our way to honour theirs.
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