Posted on 03/23/2015 2:02:37 AM PDT by Cronos
“English is not a language in India,” a friend once told me. “It is a class.” This friend, an aspiring Bollywood actor, knew firsthand what it meant to be from the wrong class. Absurd as it must sound, he was frequently denied work in the Hindi film industry for not knowing English. “They want you to walk in the door speaking English. Then if you switch to Hindi, they like it. Otherwise they say, ‘the look doesn’t fit.’ ” My friend, who comes from a small town in the Hindi-speaking north, knew very well why his look didn’t fit. He knew, too, from the example of dozens of upper-middle class, English-speaking actors, that the industry would rather teach someone with no Hindi the language from scratch than hire someone like him.
India has had languages of the elite in the past — Sanskrit was one, Persian another. They were needed to unite an entity more linguistically diverse than Europe. But there was perhaps never one that bore such an uneasy relationship to the languages operating beneath it, a relationship the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock has described as “a scorched-earth policy,” as English.
In the past, there were many successful Indian writers who were bi- and trilingual. Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in English and Bengali; Premchand, the short story writer and novelist, wrote in Hindi and Urdu;...
But around the time of my parents’ generation, a break began to occur. Middle-class parents started sending their children in ever greater numbers to convent and private schools, where they lost the deep bilingualism of their parents, and came away with English alone. The Indian languages never recovered..
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Not really — it is that by leaving bilingualism or trilingualism behind, the country loses a sense of itself. Which is why, on a lower scale, it is good that the USA has got it’s own version of English :-P
I think Macaulay was wrong on that respect. But his aim was to make Indians more English and he succeeded wildly in that
Mongols didn't impose their culture -- the Turks did that, making the people of Azerbaijan and Anatolic believe they were Turks when they have very little Turkic blood. The Arabs did the same with the Berbers
Russians imposed their culture heavily on central Asia
Actually, they should be bi-lingual — learning another language is good for your brain studies show. English is critically important now, but it is good to have another language in your quill — like Israel and Hebrew
paragraphs are your friend
the post is unreadable
Though elephants are prone to stampeding BACK into your own lines — good as a scare tactic but not really effective beyond that
Learning is hard.
Rewards for education are so unfair ... when you are lazy.
During the time Japan ruled Korea, the Koreans were give and ordered to use Japanese names as a first step toward learning the Japanese language.
I'll admit that I have not been to Tanzania in 30 years, but on my last trip, I brought in a case each of light bulbs & toilet paper for the British scientists with whom I would be working. Neither were available in Arusha at that time.
When the Tanzanian army helped Museveni's NRA throw Obote's UNLA out of Uganda, very few of their junior officers spoke or read English. The official language of Uganda is English, with Swahili coming & going as a second Official language. Official communications from Kampala to the Tanzanian army occupying southern Uganda were sent in English. The inability of Tanzanian junior officers to read the Ugandan clearances for my helicopter which were sent in English led to my being arrested once and fired upon twice, once by 23mm AAA.
So much for the "modernized" Tanzanian army. BTW, English is also the Mandated International Language of Aviation.
Swahili may be great for national pride, but it is useless in communicating with the rest of the world. Julius Nyere's "African Socialism" and Swahili-only policies set Tanzania back 30 or more years.
My linguistics professor was from West Africa, and he was pretty adamant that the lack of a common language was responsible for many of Africa’s problems.
Whether the language is a cause or just a symptom of tribalism, it is certainly a huge factor. Africa has over half of the world’s languages.
Another evil effect (at least from a modern leftist perspective) of colonialism was that it did unite many disparate peoples with a common tongue. Strange how those same folks rarely want to live in those tribal utopias that they envision from their safe ivory towers.
So true! This even applies to our "tribalism" in the "Developed Western World", though most often through accent & dialect. For a fictional example, think Henry Higgins & Liza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady".
In today's America some accents give one an apparent 10 point social/intellectual boost and others the equivalent detriment. Several years ago I was watching a TV special on Space Exploration. They were interviewing a number of "rocket scientists" and astrophysicists. When they interviewed a PhD from NASA Huntsville, Alabama with a normal Alabama accent I thought, "He's a Southern redneck yokel, what can he know about rocket science or astrophysics?"
My second thought was "I'm a Southern redneck yokel! How can I be so bigoted?" Conclusion, I've been conditioned by TV & Movies to view Southern accents as symptomatic of so many social, intellectual & educational deficits. Yet one of my own North Carolina born & (mostly) raised daughters is a Systems Engineer on NASA's Orion capsule program.
My Arkansas born & educated father worked with James Van Allen (discoverer of the eponymous radiation belts) and J Allen Hynek during World War II at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where they helped to develop the United States Navy's radio proximity fuze. (a vacuum tube radar set that fit inside a 5" antiaircraft shell and withstood 50,000g acceleration when fired!)
(Familial boasting over...)
The Indian students who come to America to go to college are English-first. Many of them have a hard time with Hindi.
One of the ways conquering people keep the indigenous population down is by denying them language. Slave owners have historically allowed only a pigeon language among natives. It actually stunts intellectual development since you cannot conceive ideas, much less communicate them, without a sufficient vocabulary.
It is very telling how this nation’s youth have been defrauded of their heritage by the debasing of our own language. Substituting propaganda for education has made them ripe for tyranny and they willingly go to the slaughter.
Sright. Freedom of xpressin an all that, dog.
I didn’t know that; that would certainly be a drawback. I always thought archers atop an elephant were pretty intimidating.
Nowadays everyone should pounce if the opportunity to learn a second language arises. Hebrew is tough because it is a different alphabet; in my area many jobs are only open to people who can speak English + Spanish or Portuguese. Bank tellers, cashiers, etc. - anyone dealing with customers.
Yes many of them do have a hard time with Hindi. You also are indirectly proving my point, only the Social Elite are making it that far in life. In my experiences in India, very few working class people outside of the wealthiest areas of the country speak English. Speaking Hindi is becoming a bit socially exclusive in some areas outside of the native Hindi areas. Most people speak at least two Indo languages even if they don’t speak English. These are just my personal observations, interpret them as you please.
I think if you know English well (which is a big IF... :) you can pick up French and German. Italian and Spanish are easy enough. Portuguese for me was strangely difficult, I couldn't link it in my head to the other languages I know, I don't know why.
Spanish is much easier than English because it is a pure language, while English is sort of combination of German vocabulary with Latin grammar; there are so many exceptions in English that I genuinely pity foreigners trying to learn it. Spanish on the other hand has less letters and they always sound the same (with the exceptions of “ll” and “rr”). For example, their vowels don’t have “long” and “short” sounds (as we do with “Cat” and “Kate”).
One thing that has been a real help with learning Spanish in my area is that there is no lack of opportunities to practice (which is key to learning a new language).
I agree about opportunities -- or immersive. I came here and was in a mileau of Polish speakers so had no choice but to speak.
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