All reactionaries are paper tigers

[qatarperegrine]

One of the main topics of this conference I'm attending is whether the spread of English as a global language is good (yay intercultural communication!) or bad (boo Anglo-American hegemony!).

As I suspect is typical wherever Anglo-American academics gather to criticize Anglo-American hegemony, there has been a fair bit of capitalism-bashing going on. The opening plenary speaker extensively quoted Marx in his talk on whether English is a panacea or a pandemic. The final speaker of the day wondered whether English can ever be culturally neutral, or whether it is too tied to the failing capitalist international regime.

I'm not normally one to sing the praises of rampant unchecked capitalism, but giving a speech on the failure of capitalism in the middle of Hong Kong struck me as a little humorous.

Comments

[y-pestis.livejournal.com]

I've no idea if this is true or an urban legend, but I heard a story when I was at university about Noam Chomsky going to some university in Asia to do a talk on "government and binding", which resulted in the audience being double the expected size - half linguists there to hear about this element of his generative grammar theory, and the other half undercover agents looking to find out what sort of anarchy Chomsky was going to be spouting. :-D

They were disappointed when they found out what "government and binding" actually referred to. So was I, to be honest.

Global languages

[elkit.livejournal.com]

You (both of you, actually - hi Mary!) might like this book I am reading right now: The Story of French (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312341849/), about how French developed, spread, and continues to evolve, and how it stacks up to English. The two authors are Canadian - one who was raised with English as the first languages, the other a native French speaker.

Esperanto!

[brian-barker.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately English will always be tainted by the accusation of "linguistic imperialism"

Interestingly then that eight British MP's have nominated Esperanto for the Nobel Peace Prize 2008

An excellent Youtube on the whole subject of a future global language can be see on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU

You can see detail on http://www.esperanto.net