Jon writes:
I was talking specifically about Africa, where a European language (English, French) is the typical option for a 'second' language.
Then specifically say Africa, or apparently Sub-Saharan Africa, as Northern Africa speaks Arabic and has a long scholarly tradition since they have had a written language for well over a millennia.
Jon writes:
In Message 77 I discussed the reality as it affects the world as a whole, where I included the languages of Asia.
Here is message 77 in its entirety:
quote:
And that's a stupid goal that ignores the reality that Europe, its former colonies, and (increasingly) Asia have a heavy influence on the world.
Have you read through my posts in some of the economics threads (such as: A Tree is a Tree: Growthmanship in the Developed World )? I think it is pretty ridiculous that in a society overflowing with plenty people still need to be fully employed making and serving useless doodads.
But I still have a job.
The students want to know why they're going to fail their exams. The answer is that they'll fail them because no one bothered teaching them the English they needed to pass them.
Ideals are nice, but until reality matches those ideals, we need to be practical. And it's practically impossible to live a successful life without being fluent in one of the major European languages.
Yes you acknowledged the increasing importance of Asia in the first sentence and managed to forget that importance in the last. More clarity please.
Jon writes:
The bottom line is that people can't be educated in some of the native African languages. If you try to educate folks in the native language, that education will be very limited; that's why the highschools switch the kids to English: there's no practical way to teach upper-level material in the native language because the tools (text books, online information, journal articles, etc.) just don't exist in the native language.
If the folks want access to that world (and having access to that world is pretty much the only way out of crushing poverty) they'll have to learn the European language eventually, and better do it while they're young when it's easy.
I agree to a point and here is why. From
WorldCat , defined by the
wiki as "a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories . . . contains more than 330 million records, representing over 2 billion physical and digital assets in 485 languages, as of November 2014."
Preliminary research unfortunately does not provide the current statistics on this database but a
snapshot from Dec. 2008 shows:
Records with linguistic content:
English 40,180,000
German 8,765,000
French 4,491,000
Spanish 3,038,000
Dutch 2,319,000
Chinese 1,693,000
Japanese 1,560,000
Russian 1,313,000
Italian 1,181,000
and
Swahili 5,800
Amharic 5,033
Yoruba 2,480
Hausa 2,525
Zulu 2034
Xhosa 1,415
Oromo 504
Igbo 472
Bantu (other) 1,100
The main problem is Sub-Saharan African languages, excluding those used in Ethiopia, were not written languages until after colonial contact. This does not mean such languages should be ignored, simply they do not have as deep a written record of scholarship as many others.
Please understand these figures with the following caveat:
quote:
A word of caution. Although new libraries from all over the world are constantly coming online, Worldcat is still heavily oriented towards the English-speaking countries and their foreign language collections. The numbers will fluctuate as library membership becomes more international. It is interesting to note that the list of top Worldcat languages resembles the list of Wikipedia languages ranked by the number of articles (top three: English, German, French). Languages like Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese and Polish rate rather high.
OK, bearing the above in mind, wouldn't it be better to say "It's practically impossible to obtain a meaningful graduate degree in science, engineering, international law or business without being fluent in either one of the major European languages or, somewhat more limiting, a major Asian language." than "And it's practically impossible to live a successful life without being fluent in one of the major European languages."
After all, what defines success? wealth? happiness? wisdom?
Sheesh, Jon. I agree with most of what you say but you sure make it a pain in the ass to support you when it seems we often have to spend half a dozen posts just to pin down exactly what you mean.
Edited by anglagard, : as usual, discovered a random misspelling
Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. - Francis Bacon
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