When first I heard that Latin was a "dead language", I was completely puzzled. I had heard, on good authority, that Latin was used in the Catholic Mass. Cardinals--those red birds who sat around a wood stove burning straw, and elected the next Pope--were said to speak in Latin. There were books in Latin. I knew how to write Roman numerals. Somehow, the "V", carved into stone over school and library entrances, as in "PVBLIC SCHOOL 101", and "PVBLIC LIBRARY", had something to do with Latin.
So far as I was concerned, in the sixth or seventh grade, English was a dead language. I did not understand a word of what the teacher was talking about when she asked us to diagram sentences. I memorized defnitions of nouns and adjectives and adverbs, but the process of taking real sentences apart and putting them on staircase diagrams was pure, black magic. That was how to kill a language!
That was in Warshington State, where we warshed our close, sometimes, on Mondays.
Winston Churchill said that, "Americans and British are one people separated only by a common language". I always thought that odd, too, since there was nothing British about my Scandinavian ancestors. (I have since learned more about Germanic tribes.)
The English language, while having no special place among languages, certainly is not a dead language. The number and variety of people around the world speaking English is astounding! Americans, traveling abroad, are often stunned by their own confinement to a single language. Other people try to help us by using the only language we know. We reciprocate, by returning home and trying to pass laws that require that people learn English.
Newscasts are peppered with people from all over the world who speak English to us. They do so with an accent, of course, and sometimes the accents puzzle us. We stare at them as if we were one people separated by a common language. How do the Indians say their consonants, anyway? How did the Australians get "Mate" to become "Mite"? What did that young Chinese businessman say?
I still assume that the way I learned English, or re-learned better English is, if not proper English, at least English as it ought to be spoken and spelled. But that is only my judgement. Judgment! It isn't a "Pu-Vee-BLICK" school. Or "Shool". It is a skool! Shool was not in the sheem of my shooling!
I think often of the times when I have lived overseas, trying to learn German, or Norwegian, and of more recent attempts to learn some Spanish. I spent a lot of time trying to walk up the broken staircases of their grammar, and being gently corrected for my lame pronunciation. One of the kindest people I know, in Norway, almost scorns people who cannot pronounce Norwegian "correctly". (That isn't kind, but it is common.)
Our particular English, whoever we are, is not "proper" English. It is just a variety. We are, perhaps not one people, but many peoples, brought together by our varieties of English. Real scholars know that only "dead languages" never change (supposedly), by which they mean that, to the extent the language is being used, it is being used as it once was. (That, of course, is impossible, but it is meant to distinguish it from languages that grow like Topsy, everywhere, changing, without regard to an absolute standard.
I fuss like an old rooster when I hear what seems to me to be fractured English. That is silly! It is useful--and to some extent, absolutely necessary--that we provide order and sense to what we say so that we can communicate clearly, but just what will emerge as that "order" will work itself out.
British English is not the proper English. Neither is American English, nor Pakistani English, Nigerian English, nor English as millions of other people know and use it. Our usage is a generation in the family of English. The same is true for any other vibrant language.
So far as I was concerned, in the sixth or seventh grade, English was a dead language. I did not understand a word of what the teacher was talking about when she asked us to diagram sentences. I memorized defnitions of nouns and adjectives and adverbs, but the process of taking real sentences apart and putting them on staircase diagrams was pure, black magic. That was how to kill a language!That was in Warshington State, where we warshed our close, sometimes, on Mondays.
Winston Churchill said that, "Americans and British are one people separated only by a common language". I always thought that odd, too, since there was nothing British about my Scandinavian ancestors. (I have since learned more about Germanic tribes.)
The English language, while having no special place among languages, certainly is not a dead language. The number and variety of people around the world speaking English is astounding! Americans, traveling abroad, are often stunned by their own confinement to a single language. Other people try to help us by using the only language we know. We reciprocate, by returning home and trying to pass laws that require that people learn English.
Newscasts are peppered with people from all over the world who speak English to us. They do so with an accent, of course, and sometimes the accents puzzle us. We stare at them as if we were one people separated by a common language. How do the Indians say their consonants, anyway? How did the Australians get "Mate" to become "Mite"? What did that young Chinese businessman say?
I still assume that the way I learned English, or re-learned better English is, if not proper English, at least English as it ought to be spoken and spelled. But that is only my judgement. Judgment! It isn't a "Pu-Vee-BLICK" school. Or "Shool". It is a skool! Shool was not in the sheem of my shooling!
I think often of the times when I have lived overseas, trying to learn German, or Norwegian, and of more recent attempts to learn some Spanish. I spent a lot of time trying to walk up the broken staircases of their grammar, and being gently corrected for my lame pronunciation. One of the kindest people I know, in Norway, almost scorns people who cannot pronounce Norwegian "correctly". (That isn't kind, but it is common.)
Our particular English, whoever we are, is not "proper" English. It is just a variety. We are, perhaps not one people, but many peoples, brought together by our varieties of English. Real scholars know that only "dead languages" never change (supposedly), by which they mean that, to the extent the language is being used, it is being used as it once was. (That, of course, is impossible, but it is meant to distinguish it from languages that grow like Topsy, everywhere, changing, without regard to an absolute standard.
I fuss like an old rooster when I hear what seems to me to be fractured English. That is silly! It is useful--and to some extent, absolutely necessary--that we provide order and sense to what we say so that we can communicate clearly, but just what will emerge as that "order" will work itself out.
British English is not the proper English. Neither is American English, nor Pakistani English, Nigerian English, nor English as millions of other people know and use it. Our usage is a generation in the family of English. The same is true for any other vibrant language.
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