What impressed me most about my travels in Europe as a child was that almost all educated Europeans I met - and this would be in Germany and Denmark, because that's where we traveled, and Spain as well - spoke some English. They had studied English in primary school and high school. However, this made for a comic situation in the caves at Alta Mira (Costa Brava), my father translating from Spanish to English, where a Danish man hovered by his shoulder translating the English into Danish for his kids. Talk about 'chinese whispers' ! The English-centric perspective is derived from (at least) these three factors: 1) the spread and dominance of the British empire throughout the world 2) the refusal of the English-speaking peoples to learn other languages (although this may be changing) 3) the analytical power of English (rather than the inflected languages of Latin derivatives and German) The analytical power of English allows for working vocabularies of 100-500 words to be useful in communicating with others - fewer than any other popular language spoken today. Where I read that - I think it was in a critique of Esperanto as an international language. Esperanto picked a format like Latin and Spanish (inflected) as I recall the discussion. Naturally the spread of the British empire is strongly linked to commerce, and political might, etc. Cheers, Denise --- Samuel Klein <sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
limited period (a week? a few days?) accept posts in a number of
languages, for example the working languages used by the European
Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tuesdays: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html