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A Presentation by the Expansionist Party of the United States, Newark, New Jersey

LINGUISTIC DECOLONIZATION

English as the Language of Liberation

by L. Craig Schoonmaker, Chairman 

Language is hard. Almost no one speaks, reads, and writes even one perfectly. The more languages one must know in order to function, the harder one's life and the less likely success in life becomes. Time and mental energy dedicated to merely operating in multiple languages is time and mental energy taken away from mastering substance. The minor tradeoff of mental agility that some advocates of multilingualism assert, even if real, does not justify the enormous waste of time, energy, and educational resources involved in maintaining and promoting multiple languages needlessly.

Language is important, because it is the means by which information and technological knowhow are conveyed and misunderstandings between individuals and groups can be cleared up. That is the major function of language, uniquely. Expressing emotions, creating mental pictures, and other artistic or cultural aspects of language are much less important in the international sphere than is the basic function of language as a communications medium. The graphic arts, music, and dance are better at conveying many aspects of emotionality than is language.

No one, and especially no one in the poverty-ravaged, undereducated Third World, should have to know more than two languages in order to travel to, function in, and get information from any other part of this planet: (a) one's own language, in which the emotional parts of linguistic functioning operate, and (b) a world language, or auxiliary international language, for travel, technology, and intergroup communication.

Years after this webpage was created, I was advised that the founder of the Bahá'i faith long ago took a similar stand:

"One of the great steps towards universal peace would be the establishment of a universal language. Bahá'u'lláh commands that the servants of humanity should meet together, and either choose a language which now exists, or form a new one. … A universal language would make intercourse possible with every nation. Thus it would be needful to know two languages only, the mother tongue and the universal speech. The latter would enable a man to communicate with any and every man in the world!"

"A third language would not be needed. To be able to talk with a member of any race and country without requiring an interpreter, how helpful and restful to all!

"Until such a language is in use, the world will continue to feel the vast need of this means of intercourse. Difference of speech is one of the most fruitful causes of dislike and distrust that exists between nations, which are kept apart by their inability to understand each other's language more than by any other reason.

"If everybody could speak one language, how much more easy would it be to serve humanity!"

— Paris Talks,  1911, pages 160-163

"It behoveth the sovereigns of the world ... or the ministers of the earth to take counsel together and to adopt one of the existing languages or a new one to be taught to children in schools throughout the world, and likewise one script. Thus the whole earth will come to be regarded as one country."

— Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh, 1888, page 22

Naturally, one does not have to cleave to the Bahá'i faith to appreciate the importance of a universal language.

The race for world-language status is over. The winner is English — or what we in the United States beneficently still call "English", even tho the English (Britons) who speak it are numerically but a small part of the English-speaking community today. French has lost the race, and for it to continue to struggle against the dominance in international affairs of English makes the French look ridiculous — as pitiable as contemptible.

Portuguese was never even in the running.

So why are desperately poor former French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonies in the Third World, and especially Africa, wasting educational resources and draining the intellectual energy of their peoples in teaching French or Portuguese instead of English?

It's time for all former colonies around the world to abandon the languages of colonialism and aspire to the language of liberation: English — American English, the language of the first modern anticolonial power, which is now transforming the world, especially via its creation, the Internet. Former British colonies should cut the strings to the class-ridden accents of Britain and speak standard English: American English.

A succession of historical accidents have made English the language of liberation worldwide. Britain's geographic isolation made it relatively safe from foreign invasion for centuries, which denied would-be tyrants the excuse of "national security" for imposing or prolonging despotism. Britain's American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand settlement colonies were so distant from the colonial overlord that they were able to free themselves both politically and in large part mentally from captivity to British domination — which was less onerous to begin with, given Britain's own relatively free institutions, than the colonial overlordship of France, Spain, and Portugal, much less Russia or China.

Britain's American colonies in particular were blessed with a combination of anti-establishment groups that gave rise to an independent mindset, and the thick woods that clogged the Atlantic coast and nearby interior of North America, which were an insuperable obstacle to centralization and close control over colonials by the London authorities in days when the canter of a horse was about as fast as the agents of government could get around. If a person found life in "civilized" areas confining, he had only to move himself and his family a few miles into the woods to be free.

With the reality of personal freedom all around him, the American was able to evaluate independently much of what he was fed by The Establishment. Devotion to general literacy in the American colonies early on meant that an unprecedentedly high proportion of people could read. That meant they had direct access to voices of revolt and radical speculations on the nature of society and the relative rights of the individual and society from the entire English-speaking world. They could explore the full texts on their own, with an open mind and without a governmental interlocutor telling them what a given statement meant. That empowered Americans to create an intellectually defensible ideology of freedom.

An American could persuade himself that the Magna Carta was a more important stand for freedom than it really was; that his traditional liberties were greater than they really were; and that his striving for liberation from all forms of oppression was part and parcel of his heritage, even tho it wasn't.

Observations such as "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" struck a resonant chord in Americans. The author of that striking phrase, Swiss-born French philosopher, author, and social reformer Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), uttered it in French, but it became part of the American mindset in its English form. Reading English-language translations of the Enlightenment writings of French philosophes and English-language originals of works by major British authors such as John Locke and Adam Smith of the Age of Reason, Americans developed a credo of liberty which they were to add mightily to, in 1776, with the striking language of the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Americans then set out a form of government for free people in two constitutions, (1) the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union (1781) and (2) the present Constitution (1787). The Preamble to the Constitution of 1787 set out the national purpose of the new United States in other, striking words:

"WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

They followed that up two years later with ten amendments to the original Constitution to set out the world's first Bill of Rights. Article I of those Amendments proclaimed:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

In the two centuries since, Americans have used their First Amendment rights to thrash out the issues of liberty vs. security, freedom vs. responsibility, the individual vs. society, etc., in innumerable books, articles, public debates, town meetings, and talk shows; in debates in legislatures, decisions in courts; and in interpersonal and intergroup conversations among immigrants of widely divergent ethnicity and national cultures. This national conversation has produced great works whose resounding phrases keep Americans constantly in mind of the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. These works, and all their intellectual predecessors, remain accessible to us in libraries and, in many cases, on the Internet, if ever we should need to consult them. They have produced a culture that reminds people that liberty is not license, and one person's rights end where another's begin.

This culture of freedom is memorialized in English, but much of it has not been translated into most of the world's languages — especially not the languages of the Third World. Moreover, most people in the Third World cannot read — in any language. Thus, this great conversation on freedom is not accessible to them in their own language. To gain access to it, and to the ongoing discussions of how we can maintain freedom in the face of threats such as terrorism and electronic invasions of privacy, Third Worlders must know English.

English is also the world's door to masses of information not just from English-speaking countries but from all the advanced nations of the world. Scientific journals in many non-English-speaking countries are written in English, at least in part. Articles for international journals in every intellectual discipline are written in English or translated into English soon after publication in their original language. Even major literary works from the great writers of all ages and all major languages — from Homer and Aeschylus to Virgil and Ovid to Confucius and Lao-tsu to Cervantes and Moliere to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — have been translated into English. With this one language, then, anyone has access to the information, musings, and great stories of all of world civilization.

One does not have to read Persian to delve into the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám nor Arabic to read either The Thousand and One Nights or Koran (altho Islam teaches that one must read the Koran in Arabic to be a true Moslem). Nor does one have to read Japanese to learn the details of the many useful devices produced by Japanese technology, nor Russian to read of Soviet and free-Russian work in space exploration. One can study the Bible in half a dozen English-language versions, or explore nonreligious, even atheistic ethical writings by thousands of authors from scores of language communities, in their English-language versions. Many of the most important writings on Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, and dozens of other religions and belief systems appear in English versions, as does everything in politics from Hitler's Mein Kampf to Marx's Communist Manifesto and Mao Zedong'z Little Red Book to the questions posed by Catholicism's "liberation theology" and the proceedings of the United Nations.

All the world's knowledge is summarized in English-language encyclopedias for readers at all levels. There are children's encyclopedias, general-readership encyclopedias, medical encyclopedias, scientific encyclopedias — an encyclopedia for almost every taste and interest. No other language has so much available in reference works on so wide a range of matters as has English. Some 80% of everything posted on the Internet is in English. Anyone who wants access to this universe of information must read English.

It is pitiful and contemptible that the ruling class of so many former colonies (but especially French and Portuguese colonies) are still trying desperately to win the approval of their former colonial overlords, to fit in with the ruling class that held them in contempt and used them to exploit their people and resources. Let's be plain here: France and Portugal do not respect their former colonies. The ruling class of such colonies as try to win such approval by mastering the language of colonialism are less than lapdogs to the ruling class of France and Portugal. At least a dog's owner usually loves his dog. The ruling class of France and Portugal do not even like their former colonials. They will feign interest in their concerns, but have no real affection for their lost colonies. Why do former colonials still need the approval of the very people who abused them?

It's time for former colonial peoples to put an end to the tedious sado-masochistic, love-hate relationship they have with their former overlords — and move on!

Except for Latin America, where the language of the former overlord (Spanish in most of Latin America, Portuguese in Brazil) has become the daily language of the mass, there is still time for former colonies to break from their colonial language, because by far most people do NOT speak the colonial language. Bizarrely, most of these countries are trying to TEACH the mass these useless colonial languages, at huge cost in wasted educational resources.

It's time for all such countries to renounce the colonial past and STOP teaching French and Portuguese in their schools, to replace ALL such instruction with English-language instruction.

Further, it's time for all former colonies that do not have a single dominant native language, to declare English their official language, and to call upon the Peace Corps and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations for massive help in making the transition from languages of colonization to the language of liberation, American English. (Countries that do take the decision to do so are hereafter called "conversion countries".)

Even countries that do have a dominant language but have minority language communities of size might do well to adopt English as a neutral language of national reconciliation rather than try to impose the language of the majority upon resistant minorities. In India, for instance, resistance to the imposition throughout the nation of Hindi, the major language of northern India, has produced language riots and many hundreds of deaths. Indian authorities have relented and permitted English to remain in official use everywhere (altho some speakers of Hindi resent their government's refusal to inflict Hindi upon people who don't want it). This has given India an open door to the world that Hindi would close, and has prevented India from erupting into full-scale language wars in the south.

The "Commonwealth of Independent States" formed by most (but not all) of the former Republics of the Soviet Union should also adopt English as its official language for all proceedings, even if much of the present ruling class in most republics does still know some Russian, if it wants to create an ongoing relationship of consequence. Because as the years go by, fewer and fewer people outside Russia will speak Russian, and more and more will speak English and resent Russia's historic efforts in the czarist and Soviet eras to "Russify" the whole of what was first the Russian Empire and then the USSR (the Russian Empire in disguise). Natural geographic and economic ties can flourish among these countries — but in English. (See our letter to former Soviet President Gorbachev at Gorby.html .)

Sources of Help in Converting to English

Governments. All U.S. embassies and consulates abroad should offer English-language courses for free (including course materials) to anyone interested, as should Canadian embassies and consulates. Peace Corps volunteers and their Canadian equivalent can staff such programs, as they can staff many others all around the Third World. (A drive of this sort might arrive at a propitious moment: Peace Corps recruitment in 1999 is way up from prior years.)

The U.S. should tie monetary and educational foreign aid to English-language teaching. No country should receive Peace Corps volunteers unless it permits such volunteers to teach American English, and actively cooperates in those efforts. U.S.-subsidized teachers should feel no compunction about crossing out needless letters in British-spelled materials used in the classroom, especially if they were provided thru American aid. Just delete all those U's in what should be -OR endings; strike thru those S's in what should be -IZE and -IZATION endings and write the Z above; etc. (See "Cautions on Teaching Bad English: Spelling", below.)

Government English-language newspapers and publications across the Third World should be encouraged to switch to American spellings and helped to do so by U.S. teachers on sabbatical or loan from local school districts, professors from the Modern Language Association, proofreaders on loan from U.S. book publishers, newspapers, magazines, etc.

Service Organizations. Kiwanis, Rotary, and other service organizations, college and professional fraternities, sororities, etc., should round up cast-off books and quality magazines (National Geographic comes to mind) to send to English-language educational programs and libraries throughout the Third World.

One major difficulty in learning English is knowing which syllable to stress. So, to the extent they have the time and volunteers to do so, such organizations should neatly mark syllabic stress on all words of more than one syllable in all the major publications they contribute to teaching programs and permanent libraries. Ideally, a pair or team of volunteers should work on such marking to catch each other's errors and make sure that all words that need accents are marked. The acute accent should be marked over the primary stress in each word of more than one syllable: e.g., decíde, prímary, sýllable. The grave accent for secondary stress should as well be marked in words of four or more syllables, and in some with only three: ìnstitútion, pòlysyllábic, èducátional, òrganizátion, vòluntéer. (Teachers should instruct learners that English tends regularly to alternate stressed and unstressed syllables, such that words of three syllables with a primary stress on the second syllable would not need to be marked: idéally, Kiwánis, fratérnal.

Publishers. Each year millions of unsold copies of books are shredded by American publishers — maybe tens or even hundreds of millions of volumes. THAT IS AN OBSCENITY. Publishers of reputable materials should, instead of destroying them, contribute them to libraries across the Third World. The Association of American Publishers, National Library Association, Project Literacy, Carnegie Foundation, and educational, service, and other organizations (both governmental and nongovernmental) should create a fund for the establishment of English-language libraries (or English sections within existing libraries) all over the world and for the transportation and cataloging of such materials worldwide. All such activities should be tax-deductible, and contributions by publishers of materials for such distribution should be rewarded by tax write-offs.

Plainly, there are materials we would NOT want taxpayers to subsidize nor distribute widely abroad (pornography, the trashiest novels, etc.), so standards of appropriateness would have to be met for publishers to qualify for a tax write-off. Such credits would have the added advantage of encouraging publishers to produce more quality works because a part of the cost of producing a commercially unsuccessful book could be recouped in educational-gift tax write-offs. Moreover, publishers could use participation in such a program as proof, in their advertising, of their public-spiritedness and dedication to universal literacy.

Even electronic versions of commercially unsuccessful English-language materials should qualify for participation in this program, and the tax write-offs it awards. To the extent Third World libraries have computers, CD-ROM text titles and educational titles written in American English on any subject, not just those that teach English as such, should qualify. The American computer industry should contribute tens of thousands of computers to Third World schools and libraries, perhaps in a cooperative effort by an existing or newly established not-for-profit educational foundation supported by the entire computer industry. In doing so, contributing manufacturers could, more than incidentally, promote their own brand abroad. (Some computer gurus have suggested that in the future Internet service providers and e-commerce businesses might give away computers to promote their businesses. The Third World would be a good place to start, even if profitability should be well more than a decade in coming.)

Student groups, fraternal organizations, etc., should as well collect, for shipment to the Third World, older but fully functional computer equipment that people who upgrade to the newest model wish to give away — for a tax credit, if need be. But since computers that people do not know how to use are useless, such computers should be accompanied at installation by technicians and/or teachers who can show local library or school personnel how to use them and to teach others to use them.

Audiocassette recordings of books should especially qualify for tax write-offs if the recipient libraries have tape players on-site or, especially, for off-premises loan. Paired hardcopy and cassette versions of a given book, bundled together, might even be given a tax-credit bonus.

Videocassette players for schools and library media centers should also be contributed, along with educational tapes, such as Sesame Street, again, for tax credit. Here too there are millions of fully functional older machines that people might be willing to donate because they no longer use them, for having bought a new, more fully-featured model. Plainly, equipment that relies upon electricity would not be appropriate for areas where there is no electricity. That, however, speaks only to the need of the First World to electrify the Third World. If aid organizations cannot create a power grid or local electric generation and distribution system, they might at least create electrical systems for individual buildings or even a single room in a school or library. Solar power would be ideal for most such use, given that much of the Third World is hot and sunny most of the year.

Tax deductibility or dollar-for-dollar tax credits for all qualifying programs to bring English to the Third World could produce huge world-development efforts from the private sector.

National Geographic Society. The magazine National Geographic has been, for a century, a publication of such lasting value that it has achieved a status unlike any other. Some people collect the magazine for decades at a time and regard those volumes as being among their most valued possessions. Others, however, toss them into the garbage or recycling bin when they're done with them. What a waste — in both cases. Wouldn't it be better if these durable educational volumes were donated to libraries and schools in the Third World, where they'd actually be read, not left to gather dust on a shelf or shredded to make paper towels or newsprint for tabloids?

Some service organizations have collected National Geographics for Third World distribution, and more can do so. If these volumes are marked with accents for syllabic stress before being shipped, they would be even more useful. If you have a collection of National Geographics that is crowding you out of house and home, but you would feel guilty about just tossing them into the trash or putting them out for recycling; or perhaps you feel you are approaching the end of life and have a good collection but don't have an appropriate heir to leave it to, contact local service organizations (or the National Geographic Society directly) to see if they are doing anything for the Third World with donated magazines. If they are not, suggest they do. Refer them to this netsite to get them thinking along those lines. (The same holds for books in a personal library. If you fear that books you leave to others will be destroyed, or a valuable collection scattered, arrange to donate them — now, during your lifetime, so you can know with certitude that they are doing some good.)

Colleges. All American institutions of higher education should seek cooperative ties to peer institutions in the Third World interested in teaching American English. Personnel from those institutions should be brought to the U.S. for intensive training in writing and pronunciation, so they don't teach bad English when they return home. American teachers should be sent at their college's expense, one academic year at a time, to teach the teachers abroad. The English Department, now an often neglected part of a disrespected Liberal Arts faculty, could become one of the most dynamic and socially useful centers of American higher education, focussing on English for use, rather than English as (yawn) literature.

High Schools. Even high schools should be active in promoting student exchanges with Third World conversion countries. U.S. kids who go abroad for a year should be trained during the preceding summer in techniques for teaching American English, and be supplied by local service and fraternal organizations with masses of books and quality magazines to take with them to contribute to a permanent library in the school or larger community that will remain long after the particular student has returned home.

Grade Schools, Scouts, Social Clubs, and Sports Teams. Even little kids can get into the act of collecting durable reading materials for Third World children. (The youngest might have to have the concept "durable" explained first: e.g., sturdy paper and cloth books, and well-bound glossy magazines are durable. Newspapers are not.) When small children outgrow their first books, children's dictionary, etc., they can make their very own gift to kids abroad. If they now disdain Dr. Seuss as "kid stuff", let them send him to visit kids overseas who would love him. Conversely, if they now treasure their first books, they might want to give something very special from themselves to kids who have so little.

Acting thru their schools, families, Parent Teacher Associations, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Brownies and Girl Scouts, social clubs (their own or their parents'), Little League and other sports teams, etc., millions of little kids can collect and dispatch tens of millions of books, National Geographics, audiocassettes, etc., to libraries all over the Third World. Slightly older kids can mark syllabic stress in printed materials before they ship. Rather than collecting small change for UNICEF on Halloween — and not knowing where that money goes or how it's used — kids in a given school or team could as a group select the town or village they want to receive materials they collect, and gather and ship real objects that they know will go to real people and not be diverted to luxury accommodations for UN bureaucrats.

There's not much that little kids can do for others in a meaningful and lasting way. This is one way little kids can make a BIG contribution.

Cautions on Teaching Bad English

"American English" is sometimes called "North American English", out of misguided charity to Canadians, who long ago gave up a British accent (the only former British settlement colony to do so). To use that term greatly exaggerates the trivial linguistic contributions to English of Canada's 20 million native speakers, and concomitantly minimizes the massive contributions of the United States' 250 million speakers. It is especially inappropriate to call American English "North American" given the bizarre guilt some Canadian intellectuals seem to feel about speaking English at all. They have been made to feel that maybe they really should speak French, or 'at worst', both French (first) and English (second), because they 'stole' Canada from France and, since the French minority refuses to abandon French for English, the only way Canada can be emotionally united is if all English Canadians (also) speak French. Never mind that the French were in the process of stealing Canada from the Indians and Eskimos (a French term in the form "esquimaux") when the English took over their northern empire. Canadian guilt about speaking only English and not French as well is, thus, just plain silly and should forthrightly be denounced by English Canadians of good sense.

Still, English Canadians do speak American English (with inconsequential variations), so Canadian governmental and nongovernmental organizations can help conversion countries make the switch to American English.

British entities, however, should not, in general, be asked to help in this task unless they agree to teach American English, not RP ("Received Pronunciation"), and agree as well to use texts that employ American spelling, not the cumbersome and more-unphonetic British variety.

"Received Pronunciation" is the snotty accent of the upper classes of Southern England so often heard on the BBC. It is an unnatural dialect (affectation) for many of its speakers, who "receive" it in the "public" (that is, bizarrely, private!) schools to which the British gentry and aristocracy have traditionally sent their children. Neither Received Pronunciation nor any other dialect that drops the R-sound from many words and twists vowels in grotesque fashion should be taught in any Third World country. Alas, that precludes millions of Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and West Indians from teaching English to Third Worlders unless they consent to undergo re-education in proper speech. There is no point in teaching people a dialect that most speakers of English, and especially speakers of English as a Second Language ("ESL") must strain to understand, if they can understand it even then.

It would as well be sad to go from one colonial mentality to another. So the snooty, class-laden RP dialect should be avoided at all cost. It carries with it class sensibilities and tends to draw people who speak it into the class-conflicted "Oxbridge" culture, where the way one speaks is thought to prove one's worth. No, it is not British English but American English that is liberating..

Some geographic areas and social classes in the British Isles do speak dialects closer to American English than RP. Educated people in Northern England and especially Ireland tend to pronounce the R everywhere, just as Americans and Canadians do. But some misguided souls in those areas aspire to RP and affect an R-dropping accent. Also, some of their vowels are not right. They would have to be trained to use correct American pronunciation before they could sensibly be permitted to teach ESL to impressionable Third World children.

Spelling. The United States accounts for about 70% of all native speakers of English and employs a slightly simplified version of traditional spelling. In most cases where American and British spelling differ, American spelling is shorter and closer to a phonetic rendering of the sounds. The great majority of all materials written in English on planet Earth are written in American English. There would thus be no hardship in the Third World's adopting American spelling. U.S. publishing houses are huge, and more than capable of (a) providing the first wave of textbooks, workbooks, and the like needed by conversion countries for teaching American English, especially with governmental subsidies from U.S. international-aid organizations; (b) establishing, perhaps as joint ventures with local governments, national or regional publishing houses for local production of English-language materials of all kinds; and (c) supplying, on short-term contract (possibly subsidized by nongovernmental or U.S. governmental organizations), American proofreaders, copy editors, and general editors to work closely with their peers in conversion countries to teach standard English and catch obvious errors in the first locally-produced materials. This is especially the case given that the U.S. comprises over a quarter-BILLION speakers of English, more than four times as many as Britain and twice as many as all English-speaking countries BUT the United States put together.

The U.S. Government must stop being the world's cultural pantywaist but demand that the UN — which is headquartered in the publishing capital of the United States, New York City — stop using British spellings. The United States can enforce this demand by cutting its contribution to the UN by three times the amount the UN spends on producing British-spelled publications of all kinds, for internal use and public dissemination. (Treble damages is a typical monetary punishment in U.S. courts for willful misdeeds.) Merriam-Webster or another enterprising American publisher of reference books might offer to donate dictionaries enough for all English-language staff at the UN's Manhattan headquarters.

Survival of Local Cultures

Many people in smaller cultures fear the disappearance of their language if they teach English. In many cases, they're right. There are some 6,000 languages, large and small, spoken on this planet. They are likely not all going to be spoken 1,000 years from now. No country, no culture is so rich that it can afford to cut itself off from the world. So, people in every country will communicate with people in other countries, and much of that communication, especially from areas that speak minor languages, will be in English. But which is the greater hazard to the future of minor languages: the growth of English as international auxiliary language, or the growth of national languages at the expense of local languages?

Universal teaching of English may actually benefit minor languages by reducing the pressure to give up a local language in favor of a national language. If everyone in areas that do not speak a major language knows his own language and English, he doesn't have to learn a national language that is not his own to communicate with everyone else in his own country, any more than he will have to learn multiple languages to communicate with every educated person in the world more generally. Two languages become enough.

In India, that would mean that a boy in Karnataka need learn only Kannada and English, or a girl in Kerala only Malayalam and English, not Hindi as well. In Mexico or Peru, it would mean that an Aztec child need learn only Nahuatl and English, or an Inca child only Quechua and English, not Spanish as well. A child in Brittany would need to learn only Breton and English, not French too; a child in a mountain village near Bilbao need learn only Basque and English, not Spanish as well. And a Tibetan child need learn only Tibetan and English, not Chinese as well.

Minor languages all over the world would be far safer if all the world taught English as a second language than they are today, in a world where national languages are intent on destroying minority tongues.

American Indians might resent the fact that English as world language constitutes no guard against assimilation to the national language of the country they belong to, but hundreds of thousands of Indians (or, if you prefer today's 'politically correct' term, "Native Americans") continue to speak their ancestral languages, and the U.S. no longer seeks to impose English as the only language they may speak. Anyone serious about preserving an Indian language in the U.S. and Canada can do so. They can even convene, in English, great, Hemisphere-wide intertribal conferences to strengthen the voice of native peoples that would be nearly impossible to conduct if they did not have that common language to ease communication across the hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages spoken in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans.

Spelling Reform. The chaotic, insane, and contemptibly stupid spelling of English is a serious problem in promoting this most useful of all international languages.

Even French spelling is better than English. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica observed in 1973: "Among the great languages, French closely rivals English in perversity. But whereas French is systematically unphonetic, English is unsystematically unphonetic." This means that French usually passes the see-say test: if you see an unfamiliar word spelled in French, no matter how ridiculous the spelling might be, you will generally (tho not always) know how to say it: croix, humeur, chommage, traduirent. (French miserably fails the hear-spell test, however, since there are many different ways of spelling most French syllables.) Unless you just know how a bizarrely spelled English word is pronounced, there is no way to guess: chamois, champagne, phthisis, phthisic, isthmus, Missouri, Hawaii, eleemosynary. (Alas, if you do know how to pronounce them, the absurdity of spelling them that way may elude you.) How did English spelling get to be so bizarre? And what do we do about it?

For purposes of teaching English today, spelling reform is not a major issue. English is spelled the way it is for historical reasons that most people are not interested in. What they want to know is how to read English now. In learning to read English, however, simplified spelling might help. It's not necessary, but it could help. For a summary of the historical process by which English spelling became so bizarre, and what we might do about it, see the following discussion. To skip that discussion, click here.

How English Got to Be Spelled So Stupidly. Old English (spoken from about 450 to 1150 A.D.) was originally written quite phonetically, in runes. Runic writing used an alphabet of thin lines in various patterns carved into stone or wood to record words. Almost all the lines of that alphabet were straight, and the spelling was straightforward: pretty much phonetic. Over the centuries, however, a number of things happened to destroy phoneticity.

First, the Roman alphabet replaced runic writing, which may have produced some problems at the time but did not create major distortions. Old English, a Germanic language, once rendered into Roman writing was still phonetic. But rendering English in the Roman alphabet set English up for problems centuries later.

In the 800s A.D., Anglo-Saxon contact with large numbers of Scandinavian invaders resulted in the borrowing into English of many Scandinavian words. But, since the languages were similar and the invaders were not highly literate and did not demand that loanwords keep their original spelling, these borrowings were written in Anglo-Saxon phonetic fashion. That produced a lot of homonyms, in the sense of words that were pronounced and spelled the same but had different meanings. Tho that confused the issue of which sense a word should have, it did not confuse the spelling. Words that sounded alike were written alike.

In 1066, the Normans conquered England. The Normans were originally Scandinavian ("Norman" being French for "North Men": "Norsemen"). That is, they were Vikings who raided French coasts and established a large settlement colony in northwestern France, which became known as Normandy. They became completely Frenchified within the 150 years they resided in France before invading England. With "the Conquest", the triumphant Normans established French as the official language of the English court and society, and English (called "Anglo-Saxon" during this era by some linguistic historians) was relegated to use by the peasantry and displaced Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Schools, to the extent there were any, taught French, not English, and Old English gradually evolved into Middle English. We can say, today, that English "evolved". At the time, however, educated observers probably thought the language was going to hell, bigtime.

The uneducated populace had no patience for the intricate grammar of Old English, and so, over the course of four centuries, sluffed off what they felt were unimportant verb and noun forms, including grammatical gender, and stopped making adjectives agree in number with the nouns they modified. Contemporary educated people must have been horrified to hear the way the language was changing, just as many older people today are horrified that most people no longer use the word "shall", ever, but only "will", and many people never say "whom". But still, the writing of the reduced forms of English remained basically phonetic: people wrote what they said.

Alas, the process of destroying the phoneticity of English was now under way. French scribes (clerks) started to write some Anglo-Saxon names and other words as they visualized them, in the French manner. Worse, and far more important, Anglo-Saxons started to borrow French words, but did not change their spelling.

One can speculate that if English had remained written in runes, borrowed French words would have been written phonetically. But runes were most appropriate for inscriptions into hard surfaces, such as stone or wood. Once other materials were used for written works, such as ink on parchment, the flexibility and distinctness of an alphabet that had round strokes as well as straight became manifest. Since English was now written in the Roman alphabet, as was French, it was simpler just to write French words in the French manner than to figure out how to write them in the Anglo-Saxon manner such that other Anglo-Saxons (and Normans) would understand which French word was meant.

French, like English, has hundreds of homonyms, in the sense of words that sound the same but are written differently. If words borrowed into English had been rendered phonetically, a reader might have had difficulty knowing which sense was intended. Realize that very few people could read in those days in any case, and education in general was very poor and not generally appreciated. Specialists in spelling and guardians of the purity of a language are products of an educated society, or at least an educated elite, and the educated elite of England at the time spoke and wrote French, not Anglo-Saxon.

Over time, tens of thousands of French words and their derivatives entered English. The original loanwords came in with French spellings. Derivative forms had a French root, spelled in the French fashion, to which might have been added an Anglo-Saxon suffix spelled in the Anglo-Saxon fashion (for instance, the French word regne (reign) entered English at this time, and might have been given the combining form regnende (modern "reigning", where -ende was the Middle English equivalent of modern -ing).

The French word "bureau" is easily handled by readers of French, for -EAU is a typical way of writing the long-O sound in French. When Anglo-Saxons borrowed that word, however, they left it spelled in the French fashion, even tho there was no model in Old English for how "-eau" endings should be pronounced. Today, for instance, EA is often pronounced EE ("beat"), sometimes AE ("break"), sometimes short-E ("bread"). But add a U to EA, and there is no old English word it is parallel to. English has borrowed a number of such ridiculous spellings from French: tableaux, eau de cologne, plateau. Not one of them should have been taken into English with such ridiculous spellings, but thousands were.

Then an odd thing happened in English that didn't happen in Continental European languages: the "Great Vowel Shift" occurred over several centuries but was especially marked in the 15th Century. It didn't finish until about 1700.

Before 1400, English and Continental European vowels were said much the same: long-I as "elite" \EE\, long-A as in "father" \O\, long-E as in "élan" \AE\, etc. For no apparent reason, starting in the 1400s English long-I changed to the I in "wine", long-A to the A in "take", long-E to the vowel in "see", etc. Perhaps Anglo-Saxon chauvinists wanted to break dramatically from French by discarding even the French way of pronouncing vowels. No one knows. But the consequence is that some words that had been spelled phonetically, no longer were. Some became homophones, even tho they had originally been both spelled and pronounced differently: "see" and "sea", "beet" and "beat". Others, tho spelled similarly, took different pronunciations: "beak" and "break", "beat" and "great". Words that arose during that time would be written as ever the people who introduced a given word felt it should be written, according to whatever rule was in place at the time. A century later, that spelling might be wrong.

But before the Great Vowel Shift finished, the printing press came into use in England (1476). The first major printer in London, William Caxton, churned out multitudinous copies of standardly spelled works; his spellings were emulated by other printers; and the spellings of that day froze the writing of English in the forms employed by Caxton, where they remain to this day, with relatively minor variations.

Altho the written form of the English language was thus largely frozen in 1476, the spoken form was not. People stopped pronouncing G and K before N in words like "gnat" and "knight". And they stopped pronouncing the GH in words like "night" and "light", which in 1400 had been pronounced neehht and leehht, where the HH is much like the CH in German "ich" or "nicht" — the latter of which probably sounds very much as "night" was pronounced in English in 1400. Now English was in pretty bad shape, its sounds and its spelling having departed considerably. More trouble was to come.

In 1607 England established its first permanent settlement colony in the New World, at Jamestown, Virginia. The colonists encountered many unfamiliar plants, animals, geographic places, and cultural objects for which they had no customary name. For many such things, they asked the Indians in the vicinity what they called them, and adopted the name themselves, writing it as they visualized it. Large numbers of American Indian words thus entered the language, with spellings that were more or less phonetic according to what the settlers thought they heard. Since Indian languages were unfamiliar and many contained sounds that speakers of English found difficult to pronounce, the settlers guessed at some sounds and altered others to conform to the standard English of the day. Different groups of settlers might write the same word in different ways, and it might take decades for a standard spelling to emerge.

Over the next four centuries, British exploration and trading settlements encountered new objects and placenames elsewhere in the world, especially in new settlement colonies in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and the same process of bringing unfamiliar words into English ensued.

There was no "English Academy" along the lines of the Académie Française to assign an approved spelling on academically sound grounds. What different people heard, they wrote in their own way, and it took a long time for a single spelling to win out.

Meanwhile, immigration to English-speaking colonies, then countries, of people as well as words from established European language communities became significant. Most of their names and loanwords came into English with the same spellings they had had in their original language: Schuster, Weinstein, Lemieux, Panebianco, Gutierrez, Chiarichella, Soares, Rensselaer; gesundheit, Chanukah, chauffeur, linguine, guacamole, lasagne, flamingo, curacao.

Now, new words are borrowed into English from other languages at a very high rate. Essentially all that originate in the Roman alphabet are borrowed in their original spelling. Only those taken from languages that employ other alphabets or nonalphabetic writing are given anything like English-style phonetic spellings: e.g., Russian vodka, Chinese [egg] foo young, Japanese kimono. But even with non-Roman sources, bizarre spellings sometimes enter English: Korean taekwondo, Japanese karaoke (pronounced as if written "cariokey"), even sushi, which uses Continental European values for an Asian language (as against, say, "sooshe" or "sueshee")!

Each year, English spelling becomes more and more chaotic and confusing, and there is no sign that things will get better anytime soon, because there is no central linguistic authority to control which words are accepted into English, with what spelling.

English is long overdue for a spelling reform, but powerful forces in the educational establishment of the present English-speaking countries actively oppose simplification. Some educators argue that the writing of English contains its history, and that that is valuable and worth preserving.

Others argue that the present spelling reflects the origin of prefixes and suffixes, as well as of some roots that derive from foreign languages, as allows people who know those relationships to make sense out of an unfamiliar word by analyzing its parts. For instance, "dysfunctional" has the Greek prefix "dys-", which means "ill" or "bad", and the Latin suffix "-al", which means "pertaining to", around the Latin root "function". So if you know all that, and that the Latin root "functio" comes from "fungi", the Latin verb meaning "to perform" — which is not to be confused with the Latin plural noun "fungi", meaning plants without chlorophyll! — you should be able to figure out, without a dictionary, that "dysfunctional" means "pertaining to bad performance".

That will seem to most people more than a little ridiculous a justification for learning all that crap. Why not just look the word up in a dictionary?

Moreover, "dys" is NOT the Greek spelling for that prefix, because Greek is NOT written in the Roman alphabet! And would the way the word "dysfunctional" is perceived really be changed in any significant way if it were spelled "disfunctional"? "Dis-" may mean, narrowly, to etymological experts, "apart" or "not" rather than "bad" or "ill", but wouldn't "disfunctional" convey well enough the sense "dysfunctional"? Not to prigs and pedants it wouldn't.

Wouldn't it be plain to people who study etymology that "-shan", "-shon", "-shun" or some other more-phonetic spelling adopted as part of a systematic spelling reform is English for Latin's "-tion" ending? just as "dys-" is the Roman-alphabet version of a Greek term we can't really show in its pure form without using the Greek alphabet? Please note that we don't puristically insert Greek letters into English words to show the Greek origin of prefixes. Why don't prigs demand we use Greek characters for Greek wordforms? or Chinese characters for Chinese loanwords? If romanizing Greek, Chinese, and other non-Roman loanwords is permissible, why not phoneticizing everything according to English rules?

Some 30 years ago I devised a phonetic spelling system for English ("Fanetik") by means of which anyone can spell any word in the entire English language so that anyone else who knows the system can read it unambiguously (even to the point of knowing whether you speak with an American or British accent). The entire system is summarized in a single table that runs perhaps two pages in 12-point type. At the request of the editor of the international Mensa bulletin who liked my system and was thinking of publishing an article on it (I was a member of (the high-IQ society) Mensa then), I did research into other spelling reforms that had been proposed for English, and made minor changes to my own system in light of those reformers' work. Over the intervening years, in response to problems I encountered in actually using that spelling system for notes to myself., I have made other minor adjustments.

After investigating many other proposals and having used Fanetik for many years in personal note-taking, I have concluded that it is by far the best (romanic) system yet proposed for reforming the spelling of English. ("Romanic" means "employing the Roman alphabet".) If it had proved inadequate, I would have abandoned it in favor of something better proposed by someone else or some scholarly organization. To the contrary, all the other proposed reforms have proved, to my mind, grossly inadequate. The Simplified Spelling Society of Britain and (now-defunct) Simplified Spelling Board of the United States couldn't even agree within each of their organizations on a single system to promote to the world! Much less could they agree on a system they could promote jointly.

"Androcles" font by Ross DeMeyere (http:://www.demeyere.com)

There is one non-romanic system many people may have heard of, the so-called "Shavian alphabet". That is an intellectually elegant and visually pretty alphabet of over 40 characters designed in 1962 specifically for English by British typographer Kingsley Read in response to a contest established by the last will and testament of the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw (thus "Shavian": inspired by Shaw). Alas, it is utterly impractical as a general-purpose spelling reform, for it bears no resemblance to the Roman alphabet, so would require that everyone be retrained, in an altogether new way of writing; all keyboards on all typewriters, computers, etc., would have to be replaced (or, in the case of computers, reconfigured); and all materials produced in English heretofore would become unreadable to people who learn the new alphabet. It would also cut English off from all the rest of the world's languages, whereas it is now part of a great linguistic community of dozens of languages and billions of people who share the Roman alphabet. The Internet would have to be entirely redesigned to accommodate this new alphabet, and every word of English on it would be rendered unreadable by people in other language communities.

The Shavian alphabet also does not, as I recall, have capital and lower-case forms, but only one form for each sound. Many uses of English require a distinction between special terms, written with an initial capital letter, and ordinary words. Personal names, placenames, corporate and organizational names, and "defined terms" in legal documents all require a distinction between ordinary words and words of special importance, which capitalization provides handily. Also, last I knew, Shavian was designed only for production by printing presses, typewriters, and such, and has no cursive form, so it would have to be hand-printed until a fluent form for handwriting could be devised and taught.

These are fatal flaws that condemn the Shavian alphabet to being dismissed by serious spelling reformers. Still, it is an interesting and esthetically pleasing intellectual exercise. For more about the Shavian alphabet, go to http://members.aol.com/RSRICHMOND/shavian.html .)

Fanetik, my romanic system for spelling English phonetically, and a version that employs accents to mark syllabic stress (Augméntad Fanétik), are summarized at http://members.aol.com/Fanetiks , which site includes many samples of considerable length to show how easily materials can be rendered into Fanetik and how easily Fanetik (and especially Augméntad Fanétik) can be read if it is employed as a general-purpose spelling reform across the English-speaking world. But even if no spelling reform is adopted for use in newspapers and books, Fanetik (and especially Augméntad Fanétik) could be used to teach English to new learners, both to children in current English-speaking countries, and to children and adults in conversion countries.

Impelling Change. English spelling is like hazing. Kids going into their freshman year of high school or college are usually opposed to hazing, but if they consent to go thru it, they often lose their animus immediately thereafter and become defenders of hazing: "If I had to go thru it, you have to go thru it." In like fashion, learning to read English is torture — horrible, painful, intellectual torture that causes children in English-speaking countries years of hardship. But once they go thru that intellectual hell, they pretend it wasn't so bad, and see no need to get rid of the mad spelling that caused them so much trouble for so many years. Perhaps they just forget. People do tend to suppress unpleasant memories.

But the agony we all go thru in learning to read and write English is something we should NEVER forget, and never forgive. Every time we come to an unfamiliar word or placename and don't know how to pronounce it, so have to rush to a dictionary (or just move on without knowing how to say it) we should be ANGRY all over again that English uses an alphabet but doesn't convey sound with it. Every time any of us who WORK with English in our profession find ourselves wondering how to spell a word and having to go to a dictionary or call up a spellchecker, we should realize that this crazy "system" has got to go!

Conveying sound is the FUNCTION of alphabets. Alphabetic writing that doesn't convey sound is a self-defeating absurdity.

The purpose of an alphabet is to convey sound, nothing else. Not the history of a word, not the ancient meanings of its elements, not the country it came from — just the way it sounds. If you can convey sound unambiguously AND add more information, that's fine. But if to provide more information means you must tolerate a spelling that loses sound, you have thwarted alphabetic writing and created a monster.

English often employs alphabetic characters as pictorial elements, to create a pattern that we recognize as a word. For instance, we learn that the alphabetic-character pattern "knight" means a medieval warrior in a suit of armor, and we learn to associate a word that sounds like "niet" (or "nite") with that little alphabetic picture. But the picture itself cannot be deciphered to get to "niet" or "nite". Recognition of this pictorial aspect of English writing is the basis of the "whole word" approach to teaching kids to read. Critics of that approach have suggested that we must "get back to basics" and teach kids to "sound out" unfamiliar words by using "phonics".

The pretense that we can achieve universal literacy in English thru "phonics" is a fraud upon the gullible, because there is no way you can "sound out" K-N-I-G-H-T and come up with "niet" / "nite". You have to teach kids to ignore the K and interpret the GH before the T as being a marker to indicate that the I that precedes it takes the long-I value, rather than being the GH in "laugh" or "rough" (pronounced F), the GH in "ghost" or "Ghirardelli Square" (pronounced G) or GH in "borough" (silent, without indicating anything about the OU preceding).

To teach people to read English now, we have to resort to "rules" that aren't really rules, because they are riddled with exceptions. E.g., "I before E, except after C". That one was so preposterously inaccurate that an annex had to be created: "or when sounding like A as in neighbor and weigh." That still left words like seize, weird, and either!

We might as well use hieroglyphics pure and simple, little pictograms for objects, like the children's puzzles in which a picture of a honeybee stands for "be" and a picture of an eye stands for "I". That way, if you had a sentence about a house and showed a picture of a house, people in other languages might at least know that the passage at issue has something to do with a house. Pictures transcend languages. That's why we use hieroglyphs at international airports: little pictures of a man or woman on the sign outside the relevant restroom; a stylized picture of an airplane at the corridor that leads to boarding gates; and dollar, pound, and yen signs at banking and currency-exchange booths. It makes no difference whether a given person looking at such a sign says to himself "men" or "hommes"; "to the planes" or "a los aeroplanos"; "exchange" or "weksel". They can all make sense of the sign. They have no such luck with English spelling.

English needs to reform its spelling. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are now trying to learn English as a Second Language. They struggle daily with the outrageously stupid spelling of this otherwise fabulous language, and become furious. They don't care about the history of English. They have no vested interest in defending an asinine tradition not their own. They want to be able to use English now, not memorialize its history in every word they write. The present spelling of English severely handicaps them in learning English and thus making use of this should-be most useful of all languages.

Perhaps they will say "Enough is enough!", and convene a world congress on spelling reform, finally to bring order out of chaos. Until then, we will all, all 1 billion-plus of us who use English as first or auxiliary language, have to struggle with its insane orthography.

Spelling problems should not dissuade people in former colonies that now employ French, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Danish, German, or any other colonial language as their co-official or second language from renouncing that language of colonialism and replacing it with English. Even linguistic minorities in Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas should press their national governments to desist from all attempts to force them to speak Spanish but instead grant them the right to use their own language among themselves and English to speak to the larger national community.

The Third World desperately needs the knowhow available in English but in no other language. It desperately needs to democratize socially, not just politically, and internalize the democratic mindset. No other language has so long and vital a democratic tradition as English.

Learning English is essential to the material progress, and political maturity and stability of the Third World. The governments of Third World countries now trying to establish French and Portuguese as their national language should abandon those efforts, renounce such neo-colonialist behavior, and redirect all educational resources now misdirected to those useless languages to the teaching of English instead.

No one should HAVE to learn more than two languages, and everyone who wishes to speak to people outside his own language community should have to learn only one, international language — English — to do so.

(This is the end of this discussion.) [Go to the top of this page.] [Expansionist Party homepage.] [Fanetiks homepage.]

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