dlowan wrote:Thought you'd be needing it for Chile and Tierra del Fuego and such?
Aussies would certainly be willing to pay more.
dlowan wrote:So - what is the right reason Spanish will survive, Fbaezer?
Current number of speakers and growth rate.
It dominates a continent, and is rapidly penetrating the most influential nation of the world (it has already practically split Portuguese: Brazilians speak a "spanishized" version, and "portuñol", an even more spanished version, is taking hold in parts of that big country).
It's very much standarized (the freaking exception of English-influenced Latinos in the US is being standarized too, by their TV).
It has growing influence in Europe, as Spain gains economical and cultural terrain.
It has presence in the North of Africa (spoken widely by the normal townsfolk, to my surprise, in Northern Morocco; official language of the Saharaui Republic) and, in a corrupted version, in the Philippines (a Spanish colony, before being a US colony).
Ah - I wondered if numbers were what you meant - I am wondering if Brazilian Portoguese may succumb at some stage, from what you say...
I would love to speak it - I gather it opens up Italian as well as Portuguese - and the literature...!!!!!
fbaezer wrote:dlowan wrote:So - what is the right reason Spanish will survive, Fbaezer?
Current number of speakers and growth rate.
It dominates a continent, and is rapidly penetrating the most influential nation of the world (it has already practically split Portuguese: Brazilians speak a "spanishized" version, and "portuñol", an even more spanished version, is taking hold in parts of that big country).
That's not quite true. Portuguese from portugal actually sounds more like spanish when it comes to pronounciation than the one spoken in Brazil. And portunhol is nothing more than brazilians who don't speak spanish trying to communicate with foreign people who do. They can manage to do it because the languages are somewhat similar. "Portunhol" is not taking hold in any parts of the country. I imagine you can hear it often in border cities, but that's it.
I will not contend you, rairun. My sources are from Argentina, and the cities that speak "portuñol" would be Rio Grande do Sul and Pelotas. It's possible that my friends' impression came from meeting communicative Brazilians.
BTW, welcome to A2K.
Also, if i were to point out an influence to explain the difference between portuguese and brazilian portuguese, I'd say the most important one was the contact with native languages that aren't spoken anymore, such as Guarani.
fbaezer wrote:I will not contend you, rairun. My sources are from Argentina, and the cities that speak "portuñol" would be Rio Grande do Sul and Pelotas. It's possible that my friends' impression came from meeting communicative Brazilians.
BTW, welcome to A2K.
Yes, that might be the case... I know I'd try to speak portunhol if i met argentians :wink:
And thank you.
I was going to comment on that but then I realized that if I were to compare Brazilian Portuguese to Spansih what Spanish would I use?
Rairun is absolutely right in that portuñhol is not evident in Brazilian culture (in any of the places I have lived there, both in the south, São Paulo and the North East).
Rairun,
Where are you in Brazil? I really miss Brazil, I lived there many years.
Thank you very much for your welcome, BBB!Obstinate as I may be, I shall still argue that sign language is technically not a language in its own right, but rather a way of communicating another. Sign languages does not attempt to express in its own right concepts and ideas; it usually attempts to express through signalling the words and phrases of another language- for instance, English or Spanish- and until it avoids expressing in a non-oral way another language, it cannot be classified as its own language. This being said, what I have heard about sign language not representing another language- e.g. in the South American scenario you described- is very interesting. Yet, on the whole, sign language is a hand-sign reproduction of another language.
As for Spanish gaining ground over Portuguese, frankly I believe Portuguese will survive... after all, it has superceded Russian and French in number of speakers. Nevertheless, Spanish is the stronger language, Portuguese being isolated... when I last went to Brazil I spent time in Progresso, Portuguese with an even more visible Spanish influence "portuñol" was how the locals seemed to talk... yet, that distinctive Portuguese pronunciation was still there to confuse the similarities between the two languages.
dròm_et_rêve, what you are describing is a sign system, such as Signed English. You are correct; that is not a true language.
However, American Sign Language IS. (Did you check out that link? I can provide more, that are more specific, but am less inclined to do so if I think they will be ignored.)
By the way, I am deaf and fluent in ASL. Just so you know where I am coming from.
I'll try to give an example. The English sentence, "Who is going to go to the store?" would be signed in the following way:
[sign for store], [sign for going, future tense], [sign for "who"]
The word order is specifically ordained, and there are specifics that can't be conveyed by just typing the word order. Just for example, when the word "who" is signed, the eyebrows must be in the query position (umm, lowered/ drawn together), the shoulders must be slightly hunched, the mouth must be in the shape of an "o".
That goes for all of the signs and how they go together. It is very specific, very codified, and meaning is skewed or lost if the grammatical rules are not followed.
On the other hand, if that sentence were conveyed in Signed English, it would be:
[sign for who], [sign for is], [sign for going], [sign for to], [sign for the], [sign for store], [sign for question mark.]
This is done without any specific grammatical markers such as eyebrows or body position. There is no inherent syntax or grammar there. (If you can't tell, I'm NOT a fan of Signed English.)
Do you see the difference?
To help make the difference:
Sign for who = word for quién.
Craven de Kere wrote:I was going to comment on that but then I Rairun,
Where are you in Brazil? I really miss Brazil, I lived there many years.
I live in Belo Horizonte. Are you american? How did you end up coming to live here?
Morei em Brasil tres vezes. Moreia ate em Belo Hotizonte aonde se encontra mas não conheço a cidede bem.
Etstou inebriado então lhe- conta mas tarde.
Guarani is still spoken in the hills of Paraguay.
Sozobe, of course I read the information you sent to me. After all, I believe in one of our family sayings, ä joi caminen en le plüvia sin ei vëla?- so I walk in the rain without a cover?, i.e. I do not walk out nonchalantly unprepared- and I would not debate something incessantly if I had not at least read up on it. (It is strange how far my family travelled; a legacy to crossing the world is the so-called language constructed by a few family members so that the many language barriers could be crossed and we would not have the problems of the dominant and secondary language speaker.) Anyhow, I am less reluctant- if reluctant at all- to accept ASL as a language in its own right. Although one could say that ASL seeks to substitute English sounds for hand symbols, it does have its own rules that could be applied to any language; e.g. (tienda; símbolo del tiempo futuro; ¿quién?) and so I would agree with you. I was not trying to say all sign languages are duplications of other languages- that would be most improvident- I was saying most, like "Signed English", are. I agree with you on Signed English; I think it is a waste of time and still quite imprecise when one can cut it down to but three or four symbols. Yes, I would be very interested in seeing more sites about it; I did about four months of Signed English in preparation of a job I ended up not getting and it was hugely inefficient as a means of communication.
On the subject of native and indigenous languages, do you think that many African languages- e.g. Zulu, Lingala, Swahili, rather than the lesser known ones- will be around in fifty years time? Which do you think will be the most influential native language in the time to come?
1.Chinese mix English
2.Mathimatics
3.Computer language
4.Love
5.Hand language( used for someone losing voice)
6.Animal's Language
Probably at least some form of machine language, maybe Esperanto (it seems to be fairly popular among the new intellectual crowd), I'd guess Latin (too much important literature written in it), Hebrew (ditto Latin - the OT), and also I think that one of JRRT's Elvish languages will survive in part, or appended as neccessary (never underestimate the power of geeks to influence history), and some form of ASL (too many are dependant on it).
That said, these six would very quickly branch off into many more.
1.Chinese
2.English
3.Spanish
4.French
5.*****
6.*****
This bookreview from the "Telegraph" might be quite interesting re the original question and this discussion (since it's on a website, where you have to register, I copy and paste the article below):
Quote:How English may go the way of Latin
(Filed: 10/11/2003)
Allan Massie reviews The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg sets out to tell the story of how "a few tribal and local Germanic dialects spoken by 150,000 people grew into the English language spoken and understood by about one and a half billion people". He calls this story "a tremendous adventure". Trying to tell it in just over 350 pages is certainly quite an undertaking. His story may be compared to a river which, travelling down through the hills, swells as it is fed by tributaries, until, nearing the sea, it breaks up in a delta.
This last is perhaps the most interesting point Bragg makes: that there are now so many varieties of English that "the mother tongue as we know it
will be spoken by only a minority of English speakers. Other Englishes are being formed all the time." He goes on: "Just as Latin, which once held sway over a great linguistic empire, split into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian
so may the future of English be not as a single language but as the parent of a family of languages."
Why does a language become dominant, as English now is? Some argue that it has peculiar merits, chief among them the almost complete disappearance - now many centuries ago - of inflections, and therefore its comparatively easy grammar; these characteristics, with meaning supplied principally by word order, make it a language that is not too difficult for foreigners to acquire a working knowledge of. But its irregularities of spelling and the absence of any consistent relation between the way a word is written and how it is pronounced render it more difficult than some rivals.
It is more probable that the reason for the current dominance of English has very little to do with the qualities of the language itself. It is rather a reflection of political and economic power. It was the soldiers of the East India Company who ensured that India would be a British, rather than French, imperial possession. Later it was Macaulay's famous Minute on Indian Education (Bragg prefers to call it "notorious"), written when he was legal adviser to the Supreme Council in India in 1834, which ensured that teaching should be conducted in English. "We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue." So, thanks to Macaulay, call centres are now being transferred from England and Scotland to Bombay and Calcutta.
The British Empire has given way to the American and, in consequence of the US's political, economic and cultural pre-eminence, English is the world's second language, and the language of international organisations and multinational companies.
Melvyn Bragg's book really comes in two parts. The first tells how English was formed, how it supplanted the tongue spoken by the Britons (much like Welsh), how it survived the Danish invasions, how it was first endangered, then enriched, by the Norman Conquest, and how a standard English was gradually created by the work of great writers (notably Chaucer, Tyndale and Shakespeare), and then codified by lexicographers and grammarians. He is particularly interesting on the interplay between the language of the court, universities and London (standard English) and the various regional dialects. Not surprisingly, in this respect he pays most attention to the dialect of his native Cumberland.
It is curious that in his treatment of dialect and the work of great authors, he should pay so little attention to Walter Scott's contribution to the enrichment of the language, and it is quite extraordinary that a book on the history of English should make not a single reference to James Murray, the creator of the Oxford English Dictionary. You might as well write a history of cricket without mentioning Wisden.
The second part of the book tells how the river of English has branched out into its delta. Many of the words created in other parts of the world and introduced to English there have found their way back here, though sometimes Bragg seems to overstate this case. Is it really true that "the quasi-aristocratic British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was using a Yiddish phrase when he said 'You've never had it so good.'" Well, no, and not only because what he actually said was "Some of our people have never had it so good." Nobody can read a book like this without finding points of disagreement - things to question, and things that are not there, their absence to be deplored.
That said, Bragg has given us a survey of the development and present state of our language that is informative, entertaining, sensible and good-humoured. It grew, as many readers will know, out of a television series, but it is much fuller, and more personal, than "books of the series" usually are. It will sit happily on my shelves alongside that little masterpiece, Logan Pearsall Smith's The English Language, written for the Home University Library some 80 years ago - a book which isn't listed in Bragg's bibliography.
source:
Telegraph
