Ivan Au
Deciphering the many facets of English
or better or worse,
English has become the most global of languages. With about 330 million
native speakers, and possibly another 400 million who learned it later in
life, it is the most widely studied, most borrowed from and most important
language in the world. More than 40 countries claim English as their
native, official or semi-official tongue, and it is the language of
international aviation. Roughly two-thirds of all scientific papers, half
of all European business deals and 70 percent of the world's mail depends
upon English.
Germans speak of der
Teen-ager, der Cash-flow, ein Image Problem, and German
politicians snarl "No comment" at German journalists. Italian women coat
their faces with col-cream and program their computers with il
software. Spaniards, when chilly, don a sueter. Almost everyone
in the world speaks on the telephone, or telefoon in the Netherlands
and te le fung in China.The Ukrainian herkot
might seem wholly foreign until you realize that a herkot is why a
Ukrainian visits the barber. You also might not recognize ajskrym as
Polish for ice cream, muving pikceris as Lithuanian for moving
pictures and sztar as Hungarian for movie star.The Japanese are particular
masters at turning a foreign word into a native product, thus the sumato
(smart) Japanese man seasons his conversations with ap-tu-deto
(up-to-date) expressions like hai-kurasu (high class) and
kyapitaru gein (capital gain).Occasionally the borrowed
words grow. Productivity has been stretched and mauled until it emerged as
purodakutibiti, which sits more comfortably on the Japanese tongue.
Picnic has become pikunikku. But the Japanese also employ the same
ingenuity miniaturizing English words as they do televisions and video
cameras. Modern girl comes out moga, word processor becomes
wa-pro, mass communications is masu-komi, and commercial gets
truncated into cm.European languages show a
curious tendency to take English expressions and give them a new twist. The
French don't engage in sunbathing, but rather in Le bronzing. In
Italy, cosmetic surgery becomes il lifting and in Germany, a young
person goes from his teens to his Tweens.If we all spoke a common
language, things might work more smoothly -- but there would be far less
scope for amusement. Consider the warning to Tokyo mortises, published some
years ago stating that, "When a passenger of the foot heave in sight,
tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still
obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor." Coca-Cola cans in
Japan at one time carried the slogan, "I feel coke & sound special."Products manufactured by
one company in Japan used to bear the vacuous message, "Too fast to live,
too young to happy." The company, informed of its error, changed the second
half of the phrase to "too young to die."A hotel in Yugoslavia
posted on the doors to its rooms that, "Guests should announce the
abandonment of their rooms before 12 o'clock, emptying the room at the
latest until 14 o'clock, for the use of the room before 5 at the arrival or
after 16 o'clock at the departure, will be billed as one night more."What all this suggests is
that, while more than 300 million people in the world speak English, the
rest, it seems, try to.Ivan Au is a junior majoring in business administration.