Graeme Foster wrote:
<snip>...
> The current brouhaha about standardised school tests is interesting - the issues seem
> to me to be that:
>
> 1. Whilst we don't want a fixed in the mud, 18th century Dickensian English, if anyone
> can use any words or conventions they like, we will lose the commonality required for
> understanding, which could erode to impossible levels very quickly indeed, certainly
> within 50 - 100 years or so.
>
Ok I'll buy into a couple of things here... At the risk of stirring a few possums
a.) As English is for the main part a spoken language (it is more used in speech than it is ever likely to be in writing) isn't there a real chance that the "loss of communality" is already with us? Isn't spoken English as we hear it in the street -- often spoken by migrants or children of migrants (before them, by convicts and children of convicts) -- the thing that drives a separation from the so-called "core" (ie. presumably written material)?
In fact, hasn't this always been so, from the beginnings of the language ?
Isn't it the case that what has to happen is that the written "core" eventually has to try (and often fails) to catch up with the reality of the streets and of pop radio and music and science and migrant jargons and kids' fashions and new ways of pronouncing words? Isn't this what dictionaries in fact do now -- they spend a lot of time catching up with the language as it is spoken and used on a daily basis ? The core is not fixed, as reading Shakspere and Chaucer reveals and reminds us. It is a case of the written language always having to catch up with "English as she is spoke". Always has been, always will be until we find the gene for ESP and do something with it.
b.) And aren't the so-called spelling and grammar mistakes actually a large part of the process of making the language more efficient ? Old languages like English and Chinese have done this for centuries... they've dropped weird and inconsistent things like gender and strange declensions and conjugations because people who couldn't speak the language particularly well actually helped refine it, by cutting back on the unnecessary "core communalities". As far as I'm concerned, we should be down on our knees every day to thank the disadvantaged and the illiterate and the migrant speakers of English of yesteryears that we don't have to write English as though it's just another form of Latin.
Examples:
In Mandarin, although there's a verb "to be", in a common phrase meaning "are you ok?" (equivalent of "hello", or "good day") you just say "you good" (with a verbal question word) or "you good not-good " without the question word. No need for the "are" word. Simplified language spoken by non-native speakers (e.g., the millions of Chinese who didn't speak Mandarin) becomes more universal, and actually more efficient -- same meaning, fewer words.
In English? Listen to quite competent English speakers trying to talk to foreigners: "Which way hotel? We lost. You know Hotel ? Which way ?" Suddenly bits of the "core communality" are shown to be almost irrelevant. And not insignificant bits: just forms of the good old basic verb "to be"! Done almost instinctively.
Stand by for the death of some parts of the verb to be. :-)
c.) At least these developments eventually have some point in simplifying a language which has been at times ludicrously complicated in both spelling and grammar. The real irony is hearing political "experts" on education and language training who carry on about the need for communication, all the while using words you seem to have chosen instinctively, like "core communalities". Of course, it gets worse than that, "going forward" with the "outcomes" and "learnings" and all the other weasel shit specialities of Education Action Person that Don Watson rightly claims run the risk of destroying our language. As if getting kids to spell is what really counts, and somehow overcomes the fact when you grow up, you're expected to talk the meaningless gibberish our bosses or sales people or government ministers talk, or if you can't do that, worry about trying to guess what the
y really mean if they mean anything.
Suddenly a few test results (which aren't accompanied by productivity indicators like the level of government spending on the schools involved, or the level of fees charged) are supposed to be the great measures of outcomes and learnings at a national level. Phoooey !
It's the equivalent of saying a car is so much better because it gets you from Sydney to Canberra 30 minutes faster than others, while failing to mention that in doing so it burns up 3 times the amount of fuel. (Oh, shucks! Did we leave out the fuel consumption figures! Ah, never mind!)
All of this from a guy who's lecturing us about productivity?
> 2. Are we saying that it is impossible to define any common core of things we should
> be able to do in the English language area? What arrant nonsense.
Yes of course you can define a common core if you must have a bloody "core". As long as you then understand that as soon as you define it, like the computer or mobile phone you just bought, it's already out of date. So do you think we should stop them making new mobile phones ? Must the world stand still for last year's English language ? Do we do without transistors and RAM and ROM and wait for the "core" bus to catch up and get new words for new devices into the dictionaries before we can make sense of the technology?
>
> 3. Debate has been poor - the 'in 1890 we were expecting students to spell the
> following correctly' type stuff is very well, they were the standards - but how good
> was the performance? There was always a core of people who were intelligent, but
> hopeless at spelling and the like. I remember a headmaster marking a spelling test I
> did in the 1950's - which I still have somewhere. I spelled everything correctly, and
> he marked all 15 words as wrong. I wondered what that was about at the time, I wonder
> more what it was about now. (Alzheimers? On the piss?)
>
Here's a subject for your test on this subject which may provide a more relevant answer:
"Spelling and grammar in schools was generally worse 10 years ago than it is today and 10 years before that it was worse still. "
Discuss and disprove. Ensure you check the current standards of spelling of senior business executives today. Then check the politicians. (Allow no excuses of dyslexia -- they should have thought of that before they opened their mouths.) Cite national test standards for the periods involved as part of your answer. Give examples of current leaders who demonstrate their superior skills in simple and direct language and communication.
Then tell us if the country's in the very best of hands.
<snip>...
> Is this a suitable topic for debate in this forum?
>
Nah. Well, maybe. Or probably not. But that doesn't always prevent it creeping in...
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