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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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All of the AEL Linguistics Department are glued to their TVs, watching Eurovision 2014.
I hasten to add, this is purely in the academic pursuit of knowledge.
Nothing at all to do with girls in skimpy dresses and boys in tight trousers.
Hatty, please do sit down, you're blocking the view.
Mick, have you just eaten all the crisps and pickled onions?
Anyway, what was I saying?
Oh yes, the big question is, why are they nearly all singing in English?
Or, perhaps I should rephrase that.
Why are the ones who are not singing in English doing so?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It's an accident of history. You maximise your chances by singing in the language most people understand and that language presently is English. Not just presently, but probably forever. This happened because the previous 'international language', French, in the nineteenth century, lost out to English in the twentieth largely because the Americans (and the Brits) refuse to learn foreign languages and, since they were dominant in many international fields (air traffic control just to give a minor example) everybody else had to learn English.
Then the global economy took off and everybody is now obliged to learn English. The Eastern bloc held out for some time (promoting Russian as the international language) but even they are now fully in line. The only possibility now is if China insists on Chinese when she takes over.
AE says we (English-speakers) should take advantage of this situation by not bothering to learn foreign languages at school. Naturally the education lobby says different, "It broadens/trains the mind." So does studying pornography.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Boreades wrote: |
Oh yes, the big question is, why are they nearly all singing in English?
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I am afraid orthodoxy has caught Ishmael up, they now realise that Humans use similar sounds for common words in more than 6,000 languages.
English is of course the language that best approximates to these common sounds. This explains why foreigners have an immediate good grasp of English, yet we struggle with their posh, bastardized, over-complicated attempts to communicate. To be fair we did have the advantage of being an island. Once the trees came down uniting the disparate bands roaming the taskscape... in the so-called mesolithic.... these earlier sounds were quickly standardised, and the first English words and sentences were expressed.
I will say it again .......Humans use similar sounds for common words ......
Please put my PO in the post, Boro.
Ok, it did take two years to work out.......
http://www.sciencealert.com/humans-use-similar-sounds-for-common-words-in-more-than-6-000-languages
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Oops, it's taken me two years to have a look at that article.
But why do so many human languages demonstrate these ties to this hidden, universal language of sounds that informs the way we speak?
The researchers aren't themselves sure. They considered it could be the remnant of some form of "prehistoric protolanguage" that was once spoken by the earliest humans before the evolution of modern languages |
Or Doggerland, as we say in prehistoric North West Europe?
PO in the post any day now ... to the AEL Pension Fund address?
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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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This is really interesting. The reason why these researchers are so surprised by these findings though is because they always focus on the sound and never on how the sounds are made.
| For example, the word for "nose" often involves "neh" or "oo" sounds; the terms for "red" and "round" usually include an "r" sound. |
When we make the 'N' sound we literally push our tongue up to the roof of our mouth, beneath the nose. Like we're pointing at the nose with our tongue when we make the sound. Similar with the 'ng' sound which goes through the nose, like a bunged up nose.
When we say 'R' we literally curl the tongue. So it makes sense that we would use it for words like round.
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