Our Language

Introduction

This is inspired by a couple of recent stories I read about essentially racist ignorance being slapped down in no uncertain terms and then I started thinking how many of us have a truly pure language that we use to communicate.

Vocal tells us that stories should be in "English" but English is probably the most arbitrarily difficult language ever although ironically that makes it brilliant for writing.

The music for this is "Electrical Language" by Be Bop Deluxe because in some ways that is how we communicate these days.

So What Happened?

I have seen a lot of posts about racist ignoramuses (is that right) telling a non-white minority person to speak English when the person being admonished is speaking their language or the county's language.

This gives an expanded view and these incidents may or may not be true, but I have seen similar things happen. Confirmation or Implicit Bias can sway our opinion too possibly seeing things that are not there.

Here is what happened with me going back a bit

And What Did It Make Me Think?

As I have said, English is an arbitrarily difficult language and many nations on Earth is a slight variation of that for their own native lave language in the land where they have subjugated the indigenous people. Similar words have different meanings.

I do not know if Mandarin and Spanish are similarly plagued.

According to Wikipedia English is nowhere near the most spoken first language, the order is Mandarin, Spanish then English. However English is an almost default second language so more people can speak English than any other language, but only because of the numbers that have it as a second language.

I know a smattering of French, German and Dutch but like most English we expect others to be able to speak OUR language, which when you think of it is extremely ignorant.

We see English as the be-all and end-all of language, because of the books and writers that are written in our language using our words. Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, all English language which are then translated but I am not sure how well that works.

The letters of our words were brought to us when the Romans invaded and brought their Latin. Previously, Britain had a runic alphabet called Futhorc, which was the alphabet and language of the Anglo-Saxons.

This can be explored in much greater detail in this article.

So immediately you can see that the English Language is anything but pure. It is fine because things, including language, evolve and grow, to fit with whatever situations it is needed for.

The numbers we use are Arabic and this has caused many amusing spats when certain people are horrified to find that their children are using Middle Eastern figures to do their adding up.

As you can see nought to nine are Arabic.

Our language is a veritable literary stew that is continually simmering and each time we take a spoonful we often find that it has changed, or has ne qualities or has lost old ones.

I always take umbrage when I hear the word bathroom or restroom used for toilet or lavatory or loo. But this is just a language development to possibly make the word more palatable, but I have never seen a bath in an American "batchroom" though I expect many go there to take a rest.

Conclusion

I do like the English languages but there are many more out there. My vocal friend Talie Devora publishes poem in multiple languages, here are a few examples:

Oneg in the Arctic from the Northern Territories can show us a lot about languages other than English

I have friends all around the world and language is always fascinating, but the language does not have to be yours, and give people respect when they ware using theirs.