Showing posts with label chinese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chinese. Show all posts

21 June 2010

Globish, Glanglish and Google Translate

There's a new book out about the rise and use of a globalised English, dubbed "Globish":

Globish is a privatised lingua franca, a commercially driven “world language” unencumbered by the utopian programme of Esperanto. As taught by Nerrière’s enterprise, it combines the coarseness of a distended phrase book and the formulaic optimism of self-help texts – themselves a genre characterised by linguistic paucity, catchphrases and religiose simplicity.

I won't be buying it, mostly because I wrote about the rise and use of a globalised English, dubbed "Glanglish", over 20 years ago. It formed the title essay of a book called, with stunning originality, "Glanglish." This is what I wrote:

English has never existed as a unitary language. For the Angles and the Saxons it was a family of siblings; today it is a vast clan in diaspora. At the head of that clan is the grand old matriarch, British English. Rather quaint now, like all aristocrats left behind by a confusing modern world, she nonetheless has many points of historical interest. Indeed, thousands come to Britain to admire her venerable and famous monuments, preserved in the verbal museums of language schools. Unlike other parts of our national heritage, British English is a treasure we may sell again and again; already the invisible earnings from this industry are substantial, and they are likely to grow as more and more foreigners wish at least to brush their lips across the Grande Dame's ring.

One group unlikely to do so are the natural speakers of the tongue from other continents. Led by the Americans, and followed by the Australians, the New Zealanders and the rest, these republicans are quite content to speak English - provided it is their English. In fact it is likely to be the American's English, since this particular branch of the family tree is proving to be the most feisty in its extension and transformation of the language. Even British English is falling in behind - belatedly, and with a rueful air; but compared to its own slim list of neologisms - mostly upper-class twittish words like 'yomping' - Americanese has proved so fecund in devising new concepts, that its sway over English-thinking minds is assured.

An interesting sub-species of non-English English is provided by one of the dialects of modern India. Indian English is not a truly native tongue, if only for historical reasons; and yet it is no makeshift second language. Reading the 'Hindu Times', it is hard to pin down the provenance of the style: with its orotundities and its 'chaps' it is part London 'Times' circa 1930; with its 'lakhs' it is part pure India.

Whatever it is, it is not to be compared with the halting attempts at English made by millions - perhaps billions soon - whose main interest is communication. Although a disheartening experience to hear for the true-blue Britisher, this mangled, garbled and bungled English is perhaps the most exciting. For from its bleeding hunks and quivering gobbets will be constructed the first and probably last world language. Chinese may have more natural speakers, and Spanish may be gaining both stature and influence, but neither will supersede this mighty mongrel in the making.

English is so universally used as the medium of international linguistic exchange, so embedded in supranational activities like travel - all pilots use English - and, even more crucially, so integral to the world of business, science and technology - money may talk, but it does so in English, and all computer programs are written in that language - that no amount of political or economic change or pressure will prise it loose. Perhaps not even nuclear Armageddon: Latin survived the barbarians. So important is this latest scion of the English stock, that it deserves its own name; and if the bastard brew of Anglicised French is Franglais, what better word to celebrate the marriage of all humanity and English to produce tomorrow's global language than the rich mouthful of 'Glanglish'?

Twenty years on, I now think that the reign of Glanglish/Globish will soon draw to a close, but not because something else will take its place.

The obvious candidate, Chinese, suffers from a huge problem: linguistic degeneracy. By which I mean that a single word - "shi", say - corresponds to over 70 different concepts if you ignore the tones. Even if you can distinguish clearly between the four tones - which few beginners can manage with much consistency - saying the word "shi" will still be much harder to interpret than a similarly-mangled English word, especially for non-native speakers. This makes it pretty useless as a lingua franca, which needs to be both easy to acquire, and easy to understand even by novices.

But something is happening that I hadn't allowed for two decades ago: machine translation. Just look at Google Translate, which I use quite a lot to provide rough translations of interesting stuff that I find on non-English language sites. It's pretty good, getting better - and free. I'm sure that Google is working on producing something similar for spoken language: imagine what a winner Google Voice Translate for Android would be.

So instead of Globish or Glanglish, I think that increasingly people will simply speak their own language, and let Google et al. handle the rest. In a way, that's great, because it will allow people to communicate directly with more or less anyone anywhere. But paradoxically it will probably also lead to people becoming more parochial and less aware of cultural differences around the globe, since few will feel the need to undergo that mind-expanding yet humbling experience of trying to learn a foreign language - not even Glanglish.

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28 August 2008

Words Fail Us

linguistics professor and author shares a personal selection from the thousands of languages on the brink of disappearing

How about if we all volunteered to learn an endangered language? - You can put me down for Ket:

Ket is the only Siberian language with a tone system where the pitch of the voice can give what sound like identical words quite different meanings. (Much like Chinese or Yoruba). To add to the difficulty for any westerner wishing to learn it, it also has extremely complicated word structure and grammar.

03 January 2006

Unhappy New Year, Tibet

Although open access usually refers to journal papers, there are an increasing number of books freely available too, as a previous post noted. One I came across recently is a good example, because it lies at the opposite end of the open access spectrum from the latest research reports.

As its title - "Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction" - suggests, this is one of those "work of lifetime" books that both sums up what is currently known, and also provides as starting-poing for future directions.

It is really quite extraordinary - even for someone like me who has no Tibetan or Burman. In fact the book, which is a svelte 3.2 Mb PDF file, can be appreciated by anyone simply as a hermetic artefact. Scrolling through the 805 pages (yes, you read correctly - it really is one of those awe-inspiring tomes) you encounter a cloud of almost completely-inscrutable signs.

It can also be appreciated as poetry, dealing as it does with the relationships between several hundred languages in the Tibeto-Burman family with names like Bal-brang, Jingpho-Nung-Luish, Khualsim, Loloish, Nruanghmei, Ugong and Yakkhaba.

And anyone can appreciate the importance of this book, laid out in its introduction:

The great Sino-Tibetan language family, comprising Chinese on the one hand and Tibeto-Burman (TB) on the other, is comparable in time-depth and internal diversity to Indo-European, and equally important in the context of world civilization. The overwhelming cultural and numerical predominance of Chinese is counterbalanced by the sheer number of languages (some 250-300) in the TB branch.

But as well as providing clues to the origins of Chinese, whose "cultural predominance" grows by the day, this wonderful e-book is also a major contribution to the understanding of the Tibetan language, almost totally ignored in the West, along with its people.

This fact is particularly regrettable at the moment. It appears that China has decided to crackdown on monks in Lhasa who remain steadfast in their allegiance to the exiled Dalai Lama. This is but the latest episode in China's appalling treatment of Tibet after its invasion of that country in 1949. In addition to its continuing abuse of human rights, Chinese authorities have embarked on what the Government of Tibet in Exile terms "ecocide": the reckless and systematic destruction of Tibet's environment. One of the ironies of this is that China too is suffering the consequences of this.

The only consolation is that however brutal China's treatment of Tibet itself becomes, Tibetan culture will live on. As well as a considerable number of Tibetans living in exile around the world (chiefly in India) who keep the flame alive, there are now a number of projects, some major international collaborations, to digitise the unique Tibetan cultural heritage.

Once again, the world of bits offers a partial counterbalance to some of the terrible losses taking place in the world of atoms.