Klarinet Archive - Posting 000111.txt from 2004/09

From: Robert Wood <instruments@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Language as an evolving process- and a means of rapid transit
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 16:44:38 -0400

There's an excellent NPR program on our Albany,NY WAMC- called "Word to
the Wise" with Kathleen Taylor researched and underwritten by Merriam
Webster. It correctly ( if self-servingly) points to the constant
evolution of language keeping up with changing tastes - influenced
moreso now by youthful, street-wise expressions; technology shifts.
etc. etc. ya ti da ya ti da.

I thoroughly enjoy a rapid stop-over in Elizabethan England; or the
Spain of Lorca / Calderon, Cervantes, Julio Camba-, and the numberless
cries of passion from Flamenco singers; Then comes over me the latin
mindset in the Yucatan with a guitar sharing Mexican folksongs with
Mexicans who never heard them - but who cares -.

Once in Oldenburg, Germany on our first night of a 2 month camping
trip- we stopped at an Inn- (summer 1955) and the only German I could
drum up was cribbed from Schiller's Freude Schoner, and from all the
studentenlieder I had been teaching my own music classes back
home....but we did make warmth and loving sense to each other, in that
early post-war period...

If anyone wants an instant epiphany on spoken English - I recommend the
intermediate public school in Osaka, Japan where children read but
rarely spoke...and an hour was spent with 35 children, after one had
asked my age - I asked them all to guess--in English. ..it ranged from
22 to 175 as each kid heroically struggled to get something past a hard
working lower jaw.. Please tell Mrs. Miwako Manabe, their ever patient
English teacher I will never forget her families generosity while I was
there.

But all of this may be a waste with our nuc-U-learing at the rest of the
world tearing each other up with the obsolete weapons systems we sold them

to preserve their "...freedom" ya tid a ya ti da. Let no child read his
picture book upside down...(cancrizans inversion)

Bob Wood

Kevin Fay wrote:

>Lelia Loban posted:
>
><<<Unlike the French, we speakers of English can't afford to be purists,
>because we've mixed up a regular word salad in the centuries since
>Shakespeare. We've assimilated native speakers of hundreds of languages
>and adopted vocabulary from all over the world. . . .
>
> . . I hope it doesn't mislead anyone to assume that people here will
>be contemptuous if it's obvious that a Klarinet list member learned
>English as a second (or fifth!) language. Genuine disrespect for
>foreigners is rare on this list (though not so rare in
>everyday life). >>>
>
>Lelia - well written indeed.
>
>I work with a gal in Singapore, diaspora Chinese, grew up in Malaysia,
>schooled in Europe and the US and is married to a German guy. Her
>English is broken/mangled, but charming. (So is her German, French,
>Japanese and who knows what else.) She states that she's functionally
>illiterate in maybe ten languages, but can travel most anywhere in the
>world and get by.
>
>She also has the tax code of about 14 countries committed to memory, and
>is without a doubt one of the most brilliant people I have ever met.
>People who negotiate deals against her assume that she's not smart
>because her English is broken. She takes them to the cleaners, every
>time.
>
>One quibble - I'm not sure that the French can afford to be purists
>either. This is the 21st century, and the world is getting much smaller
>very, very fast.
>
>OTOH, reading well-written English can be a joy. Like your posts.
>
>Admiringly,
>
>kjf
>
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