Linguistics and Science and the Public 7:25 pm
I should be doing a spot of science writing, but my goodness this is too delicious not to share. From Vlastos’ Plato’s Universe (OUP Clarendon 1975 edition, from p. 1; I’ve naughtily screen-captured the amazon scan with GIMP, but we all know I could have typed it by hand):
Linguistics and Statistics and Metrics 12:26 am
[Ed.: I started writing this and it turned into gargantupost, so I've broken it into chunks. This is Chunk the First. The others will appear whenever I'm short of ideas.]
So - some languages are more difficult to learn than others. Not intrinsically, mind you - the difficulty is the result of not being familiar with the language family (Teutonic for, say, German or Romance for, say, French). The U.S. State Department has a system for categorising the difficulty of a new language for a native English speaker. It goes:
The direction of the ordering is evident as soon as one picks up a book in French and a book in Japanese, and decides which is easier; I have no idea how the classification was arrived at. In primary schools in Australia during the late 1980s, there was a rush to study Japanese to prepare for the nation’s impending engagement with Asia, but after the Keating government was foreclosed the wedding was called off; I think everyone learns French and Indonesian now. The positive: we learnt about a culture well outside the continental European orthodoxy of languages taught throughout the 20th century. The negative: after studying Japanese throughout primary school, high school and a semester of University, I don’t speak a foreign language.
(Prof. Friedman says: “Try talking French with someone who studied it in public school”)
This is a bit unacceptable - being monolingual in Europe is like not being toilet-trained. Seriously. Britons are pretty bad offenders here too, so any Australians seeking asylum in the U.K. are sheltered from having to face their inadequacy fully, but this has the downside of allowing ignorance to fester. I worry that whenever I travel to the mainland the Dutch air stewards are making abominably witty multilingual puns at my expense.
