Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Yesterday, I got stuck in traffic behind a person whose beat up pickup truck sported a bumper sticker saying "Speak English or Go Home". I have to admit, this instantly annoyed me. I am a huge fan of the English language, obviously. I think it is capable of great beauty, perfect for science and I want to continue speaking it. I wonder, though, how many people who hold this opinion would be able to speak another language if forced. Not willing, able. Let's face it, English isn't the easiest language in the world to learn. 

Why? Several reasons, naturally. Many languages are gender based, where every noun is either masculine or feminine. Others, like Chinese, do not use all the same tongue movements we do (I have it on good authority that in speaking Chinese, the tongue moves only forwards and back in the mouth, never up and down, which explains why native Chinese speakers have so much difficulty with the English letter L.) Mainly English is difficult to learn because it contains so many words. English has three to four times the words in use that most other languages do.

For a writer, this is a wonderful tool, it lets us provide nuance and precision without ever sucumbing to redundancy. For a student of the language, it's a bloody nightmare. And the difficulty doesn't end there. 

You see, languages aren't unlike certain science fiction cultures. For example, French would probably equate best with the Vulcan society, as it is concerned with its purity to an almost fanatical degree. I don't fault them, I speak French, and it is a beautiful language. English, on the other hand, is really more of the Borg mentality: "We will add your distinctiveness to our own."

Case in point, most legal terms come in pairs like "assault and battery", or "cease and desist". Both words mean pretty much the same thing, but exist together because the Saxons and the Normans in England came from different linguistic backgrounds. Well, that and we never throw anything away, it might be useful later. We absorbed terms from both the Normans and the Saxons, as well as usurping a good number of words from the French, because at one time all major business, and most international politics was conducted in French. It doesn't hurt that the French can say anything at all and make it sound like a caress.

By the time English left England and came to the Americas, it had absorbed quite an impressive additional vocabulary, but of course, it didn't stop there. Native Americans supplied words in their various languages, as did the Dutch, Irish, and other settlers. Later, interactions with the Spanish that settled both Mexico and California added hundreds more words. Many of these words described things that simply didn't exist on our former shores, others were colorful terms that might have originally meant the same as an extant English word, but now took on a slightly different meaning. The English word "herd" refers to a group of horses, or other hooved animals, the originally Spanish word "remuda" also refers to a group of horses, specifically riding horses, and has come to refer almost exclusively to a ranches group of working cowhorses.

Language is what we use to define thought, and the language itself helps to shape the way we think. This is a fact that gives me great hope for the future, despite the narrowmindedness of some of my fellow men. Any language that is as determinedly inclusive as English has always been cannot long support the foolish exclusion of others, simply because they are different. That is, at any rate, how I choose to see it.

Cheers,

Michelle