^^ Um. . . yeah, many Europeans learn English in school because (1) they are required to and (2) they want to be able to communicate with people from some other EU countries and people from the world's only superpower: the United States of America, which is well over eighty percent in English-speaking people.

[Edited on May 13, 2008 at 8:04 AM. Reason : .]

5/13/2008 8:03:20 AM

We should return to 16th-century spelling standards. For example:

Quote :

"The spelling used in those days was rather erratic and thus "Raleigh" is just one of the (over 40) ways in which his surname was written. He used numerous of these spellings, with "Rawleigh", "Ralegh" and "Rawley" being more often used than the currently accepted version."

http://www.btinternet.com/~richard.towers/jim/raleigh.html

English isn't designed for rigid spelling rules.

5/13/2008 10:56:29 AM

word up

5/14/2008 8:22:59 AM

Obama Tells Audience, "You Need to Make Sure that Your Child Can Speak Spanish"

Quote :

"WASHINGTON, Jul 09, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- At a town hall meeting in Georgia this morning, presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama told an audience that, 'you need to make sure that your child can speak Spanish.' Speaking in Powder Springs, Ga., the Illinois Senator said that the nation's chief priority should not be for immigrants to learn English, but for American children to learn Spanish. 'Senator Obama's idea is characteristic of an elitist mindset declaring that it is not the job of immigrants to America to learn English, but that it the job of Americans to learn the language of the immigrants,' said Mauro E. Mujica, Chairman of U.S. English, Inc. 'This runs counter to our proud history as a melting pot and counter to the belief of most Americans. Clearly, Senator Obama has spent too much time at the lectern instead of interacting with the American people.' Recent polls have found overwhelming support for making English the official language of the United States. A 2007 Zogby poll found that 83 percent of Americans favor making English the official language, including substantial majorities of Democrats, Republicans and Independents. 'As a naturalized citizen of the United States, I am appalled by Senator Obama's comments,' Mujica continued. 'When I came to this country, I knew I was coming to a nation of many different nationalities, none more prized than another. I also knew that English was the unifying force between the diverse people, and that it was the language of opportunity and success. 'Nationwide, more than 25 million Americans who struggle with English, who are stuck in menial jobs and low wages because they are unable to converse with the majority of Americans. More than two million of these are native-born Americans who have come to rely on the crutch of government multilingualism. While I agree that we should encourage our children to learn additional languages, telling parents that they must enroll their children in Spanish classes is completely misguided.' Twice in the last three years, the U.S. Senate passed measures to make English the national language and to reduce multilingual entitlements. Legislation is currently pending in both the House and the Senate that would make English the official language. One bill, H.R. 997, the English Language Unity Act, has nearly 150 bi-partisan co-sponsors. U.S. English, Inc. is the nation's oldest and largest non-partisan citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. Founded in 1983 by the late Sen. S.I. Hayakawa of California, U.S. English, Inc. can be found on the web at: http://www.usenglish.org"

http://tinyurl.com/5ah3jc

[Edited on July 9, 2008 at 9:25 PM. Reason : .]

7/9/2008 9:25:02 PM

a) Context, for crying out loud.

b) How is that even elitist? They just enjoy throwing that word around, apparently.

7/9/2008 11:22:34 PM

Of all the things we NEED to make sure our children learn and are failing to do.. speaking spanish should be pretty fucking far down the list.

7/9/2008 11:27:42 PM

Context

7/9/2008 11:29:04 PM

Calling for context is elitist.

7/9/2008 11:33:10 PM

That we don't expect our kids to be able to learn a second language, or that it would occur at the expense of other skills is sadly symptomatic of the malaise sweeping our middle classes. It's not elitist to learn a second language in a global economy, it's a survival instinct.

7/10/2008 12:07:43 AM

Isn't forcing kids to learn a second language from an early age something that yuppies from both side of the fence do nowadays? Because of the obvious cognitive skills these kids will develop over their peers


(In other words, it's something that, when given the resources, people will rationally choose to do anyway).

[Edited on July 10, 2008 at 12:24 AM. Reason : .]

7/10/2008 12:20:43 AM

america is falling behind the rest of the world in just about every educational metric available.

so... isolating ourselves and becoming protectionist is a sure fire way to guarantee our future success

7/10/2008 1:23:28 AM

Why not Mandarin?

7/10/2008 1:42:05 AM

Um. . .there are a lot of, you know, countries and stuff in Europe--not to mention, you know, the rest of the world and all. How many languages should we "force" our kids to learn--it's a legitimate question, right?

And here's a thought: If, you know, so many Spanish-speaking immigrants weren't entering our country illegally, maybe. . .um. . .the need to learn Spanish would be a choice and not forced upon us? And, you know, how about people coming here just learning to speak English? It might work.

7/10/2008 2:02:59 AM

Quote :

"Isn't forcing kids to learn a second language from an early age something that yuppies from both side of the fence do nowadays?"

The education system exists for everyone's benefit so the central question here isn't just about what "yuppies" do. Obviously inherent to the policy question of making English the "official" language is adding fuel to the fire of banning bilingual public education.

Quote :

"Um. . .there are a lot of, you know, countries and stuff in Europe--not to mention, you know, the rest of the world and all. How many languages should we "force" our kids to learn--it's a legitimate question, right?"

Well, I'll put a stake in the ground and say that there's no question whether kids should be taught more than one language from an early age. I think there is a legitimate question as to which language to teach.

It really makes absolutely zero sense the way we do things now. Kids are voracious language learning machines; it's literally second nature to them. The requirement right now is generally for people to learn foreign languages in High (or Middle) School at an extremely slow rate, at which point they're practically incapable of attaining anything resembling fluency. Why even bother? I say if we value exposure to a foreign language enough to teach them in public schools, we should teach them very early on when it's actually most practical to do so.

Personally I'd think that Mandarin is the most valuable language to learn, but teaching it in public schools has a lot of practical problems. For one thing the script is insanely complicated to teach and learn. For another, it's a political minefield to teach the language of the world's largest communist country to children, no matter how ascendant it is globally. There are lots of benefits to teaching it -- studies show that children who learn a tonal language early on (or who are taught music) develop a sense of absolute pitch. Not to mention the obvious economic stuff.

Spanish is probably a reasonable and practical start. Really I'd say, leave it up to individual states/districts/whatever to figure out. At any rate I think the way we do things now is crooked and needs to change.

Quote :

"And here's a thought: If, you know, so many Spanish-speaking immigrants weren't entering our country illegally, maybe. . .um. . .the need to learn Spanish would be a choice and not forced upon us? And, you know, how about people coming here just learning to speak English? It might work."

Even if illegal immigration stopped tomorrow, there's a tremendous population of actual, you know, Hispanic citizens who were born here and will have kids, and their kids will have kids, that whole geometric growth rate, ya know? I can't think of an a priori reason why their speaking a different language is bad; and in practical terms, English will always be our first language regardless.

As to immigrants learning English -- well, gee, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense to expect that a dirt poor, uneducated man from a developing country who just went through Hell to get a low-paying manual labor job can learn to speak a new language fluently. I mean, duh, just sign up for night classes at illegal immigrant U, buddy!

Isn't it maybe a tad more practical for the bosses/supervisors/etc to learn Spanish than to expect all these people to learn English? Just speaking from common sense, here?

[Edited on July 10, 2008 at 2:25 AM. Reason : foo]

7/10/2008 2:24:23 AM

Quote :

"Isn't it maybe a tad more practical for the bosses/supervisors/etc to learn Spanish than to expect all these people to learn English? Just speaking from common sense, here?"

In case you haven't noticed, this has been happening in order to simply conduct business here. But when one calls up, say, some public agency, just how many numbers should one have to press to get the English language? It's a serious question.

The point is that there are many people from many countries coming to our great land--and with good reason. Just how many languages should the predominantly English-speaking population be required to learn to accommodate these non-English speaking populations?

Wouldn't it be easier--you know, actual "common sense"--to have everyone here communicate primarily in one language rather than having everyone trying to learn everyone else's language simply to conduct day-to-day affairs?

The answer is, of course, self-evident.

[Edited on July 10, 2008 at 2:46 AM. Reason : .]

7/10/2008 2:44:20 AM

^

But you didn't address my point that it's actually not very reasonable to expect low-income, first-generation people coming here to learn English fluently (or even very well). The people who don't speak English well aren't affluent immigrants, they're those whom I described above. The second-generation _does_ learn to speak English. That's self-evident for anyone who's been to, I dunno, California ...

I just take the argument a step further and say that _bi-lingual_ education is a net positive for our society, regardless of which language is the second one. I didn't say anything about mono-lingual education in some language other than English.

7/10/2008 2:54:27 AM

^ If people are coming here illegally, they aren't supposed to be here anyway. Frankly, I do expect anyone who's coming here to live--regardless of economic status--to do whatever is necessary to learn the English language well enough to conduct day-to-day affairs.

I, too, support multilingual education--but not forced foreign language education for English-speaking Americans as part of some PC indoctrination campaign. I think there's quite a difference between the two.

In any event, English will undoubtedly be made the official language here soon--it's well overdue. And we can stop this charade.

7/10/2008 3:03:06 AM

Quote :

"Smoker4: Well, I'll put a stake in the ground and say that there's no question whether kids should be taught more than one language from an early age. I think there is a legitimate question as to which language to teach."

Whole-fucking-heartedly agree.

Compared to other nations--not limited to Europe--we're woefully behind the curve on preparing for the global economy that's already beat down our door...

7/10/2008 3:11:09 AM

^^

Well you can expect it all day long but the fact remains that people ARE going to come here illegally, they ARE NOT going to learn English, and there's a practical problem to be solved. I'm not really interested in a long discussion on how to bend the laws of Physics to some theoretical parallel universe where there are no illegal immigrants. You can expect, expect, expect but the question you haven't answered is HOW do they actually learn the language?

As for PC indoctrination -- I'm not sure why we're getting into label politics here. I made quite a conservative, capitalist case for multi-lingual education; the first being that we waste a lot of money teaching kids foreign languages they have no chance of learning, the second being that language skills are simply necessary for a global economy.

And in addition to that I would say that, from a conservative perspective, the federal government has no authority to dictate what language people should speak from on high. More so doing it is wasteful as it impedes the obvious and necessary reforms I described above.

[Edited on July 10, 2008 at 3:18 AM. Reason : foo]

7/10/2008 3:18:15 AM

Quote :

"I'm not really interested in a long discussion on how to bend the laws of Physics to some theoretical parallel universe where there are no illegal immigrants."

It's not a "theoretical parallel universe" or anything of the sort. It's called securing our borders and enforcing the law--it's actually a rather simple concept.

Quote :

"As for PC indoctrination -- I'm not sure why we're getting into label politics here."

Because that's what a lot of it's about. Are you seriously claiming that there's not a lot of political to-and-fro surrounding the issue of Spanish-speaking immigrants in this country? In government? In schools--K-12 and college? Really?!

Quote :

"And in addition to that I would say that, from a conservative perspective, the federal government has no authority to dictate what language people should speak from on high."

The government does many things that some would say it ought not do. The fact that the government may make English the official language does not mean that people have to speak it all the time--I mean, are we going to have the language police ticketing offenders?

I think making English the official language will simply clarify and streamline quotidian events. And who knows, such a law may eventually be found unconstitutional--I'm sure it will be challenged by those groups that want special treatment.

BTW--and I'm not trying to be nasty--it's "multilingual." No hyphen is necessary.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/multilingual

[Edited on July 10, 2008 at 3:45 AM. Reason : .]

7/10/2008 3:41:30 AM

^

Well, I don't think there's much point in continuing the debate on securing borders here. I personally think it's a pie-in-the-sky political fantasy to believe we'll stop illegal immigration in any meaningful way. But there's no point in going further here.

As to the politics of the official language -- I'm just concerned about this little thing we have called the Constitution which very sensibly instituted federalism to deal with issues like this. If you're not, fine -- no point in continuing the discussion.

And where grammar is concerned -- well, also not to be nasty, I pay for a monthly subscription to the full Oxford English Dictionary which is the current definitive guide to the English language and it tells me the hyphen is A-OK. For example in the entry for "bilingual" it demonstrates the following usage:

"1955 T. H. PEAR Eng. Social Diff. iii. 97 In London, many waitresses and shop assistants are bi-lingual."

In the general entry on the MULTI- form (as in multi-lingual) it shows many examples of usage for words with the prefix where the hyphen is omitted or not.

I agree it's not "necessary" but think the usage is almost certainly a matter of stylistic preference. Not unlike what language one speaks.

[Edited on July 10, 2008 at 3:56 AM. Reason : foo]

7/10/2008 3:56:07 AM

^ Fair enough. Shall we call it a draw for now?

7/10/2008 3:59:19 AM

As long as we don't curtail long run economic growth, by say restricting immigration, we are moving steadily towards a time when every single human being on earth will speak English.

As long as the US remains the worlds most powerful capital center, international business will be in English. So long as we have the most advanced education institutions, English with be the language of the technorati. Those two things virtually assure that it will evolve into the universal language.

Though I think it is likely to loose its Victorian rigidity on spelling and grammar.

[Edited on July 11, 2008 at 12:40 PM. Reason : .]

7/11/2008 12:38:55 PM

Where are we going to find the labor to build a wall between us and Mexico? That's right, Mexico.

7/11/2008 12:43:01 PM