all worship the english speakers
I'm reading the Appendix from Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers. In this section, she argues for the importance of studying Latin as a base by which one can move on to other languages. She first considers the question of which language it ought to be that a child learns first ...
"Let us begin, then, with grammar. This, in practice, means the grammar of some language in particular; and it must be an inflected language. The grammatical structure of an uninflected language is far too analytical by any one without previous practice in dialectic. Moreover, the inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas the uninflected are of little use in interpreting the inflect.
I'm not a linguist. So perhaps I don't understand this correctly. English, Spanish, Hungarian, Icelandic, take your pick, are inflected, yeah? What's uninflected? Chinese languages? What is Sayers saying when she writes the inflected interpret the uninflected?
Kind of a tangent now, but I asked my dad about it at dinner last week. He went off along the lines of ...
DAD: Well, you know, English has a precision that no other language has.
ME: Um, well, every language has it's own kind of precision that no other language has, I'm sure.
DAD: But we've been able to achieve so much with the English language that's not possible in other languages. Great scientific discoveries in the past 200 years have been because of English. Other languages just don't have the capacity to discuss and precision to do what English does.
*my sister and mother nod in agreement*
ME: *thinkingWTFWTFWTF*!!!
Oi ... where THE HEC does that come from? I, just, was, I couldn't believe it. I just had no idea what to say. Uhrm, yeah. I've experienced that attitude in lots of people, who I sort of perceived as culturally unaware, you know, but I just didn't understanding hearing it from where I did?? What in the hec?! It reminded me of something I read in a newspaper about why Irish should be exterminated ... because, they argued, any economy that has become a world power has arisen so as a result of it being English-speaking. Yep, yep. Better believe it.
"Let us begin, then, with grammar. This, in practice, means the grammar of some language in particular; and it must be an inflected language. The grammatical structure of an uninflected language is far too analytical by any one without previous practice in dialectic. Moreover, the inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas the uninflected are of little use in interpreting the inflect.
I'm not a linguist. So perhaps I don't understand this correctly. English, Spanish, Hungarian, Icelandic, take your pick, are inflected, yeah? What's uninflected? Chinese languages? What is Sayers saying when she writes the inflected interpret the uninflected?
Kind of a tangent now, but I asked my dad about it at dinner last week. He went off along the lines of ...
DAD: Well, you know, English has a precision that no other language has.
ME: Um, well, every language has it's own kind of precision that no other language has, I'm sure.
DAD: But we've been able to achieve so much with the English language that's not possible in other languages. Great scientific discoveries in the past 200 years have been because of English. Other languages just don't have the capacity to discuss and precision to do what English does.
*my sister and mother nod in agreement*
ME: *thinkingWTFWTFWTF*!!!
Oi ... where THE HEC does that come from? I, just, was, I couldn't believe it. I just had no idea what to say. Uhrm, yeah. I've experienced that attitude in lots of people, who I sort of perceived as culturally unaware, you know, but I just didn't understanding hearing it from where I did?? What in the hec?! It reminded me of something I read in a newspaper about why Irish should be exterminated ... because, they argued, any economy that has become a world power has arisen so as a result of it being English-speaking. Yep, yep. Better believe it.