International English

English as a global language

English is often referred to as a world language or global language. It isn’t, however, an official language in most countries across the world and its status was brought to it as it is most often taught as a foreign language and is, therefore, widely spoken. No surprise then that English is an official language of the United Nations and other internationals committees and organisations. Books and newspapers written in English are available around the world and even though it has no official status of being the universal language on the Internet I think most of us realise this is how things look in reality.

Why English?
There’s one major reason why English has attained its position as a global language and it’s the economical and political importance of today’s English-speaking countries with the huge, world-scale domination of the US. At the same time it doesn’t mean that linguistically English is suitable as a universal language. I would even go far enough to say it isn’t.  Due to the fluency of native speakers whilst speaking English problems arise with non-native speakers not being able to understand and the former having an unfair advantage when discussing things orally or even in writing. Also,native speakers get misunderstood easily as they tend to use rare words, idioms, speak fast and have varieties of accents. Even amongst native English speakers there are skirmishes over dominancy as there are numerous regional accents and variations.

Not the easiest at all…
There is a myth about how English is supposedly the easiest language one can learn. A seemingly endless repertoire of idioms, synonyms with totally different connotations, an immense number of words with irregular spellings and grammatical forms, complex grammatical tenses, rich vocabulary resulting from word borrowings… the list goes on. Look at the following:

The bandage was wound around the wound.
I subject the subject.
Soldier wants to desert his dessert in the desert.
I’m too close to the door to close it.
It comes to the point when you as a student wonder about how ridiculous English is.

Craziness and oddity of the English language

It just makes no sense!
Seriously, what’s wrong with people? Why are we so clumsy with expressing our thoughts and why do we speak in such odd ways about the physical world surrounding us? Think about it: you fill the form in by filling it out! If hairs is plural of hair then why a man with hair on his head has more than a man with hairs on his head? Why is it called after dark when it’s really after light? Things we claim are under water or under ground are in fact surrounded by water or ground rather than under it. A theory of physics must be imbedded somewhere deep in our language, some indistinct and very rough concept of space in prepositions and an awkward concept of matter in nouns. Understanding this theory helps us explain not only the oddities of our language but also the mental models that we use desperately in our struggle to make sense of our lives.

Space in language
Location in language is somewhat digitised. I sense it from the simple fact that we make binary distinctions like near - far, on - off, in - out, on – under while scale is relative – we can use the same special term across about a spider walking across a window sill and a boat travelling across Pacific even if in first case the scale is centimetres, the other it’s thousands of miles. For the same reasons the interpretation of the special term there may vary. Saying the book is there I could possibly mean the book is in another room or in another country.

3 D’s
When you think of it, shape is schematic. In reality all objects take up some three-dimensional arrangements of matter but language idealises them as essentially one-dimensional, two-dimensional or three-dimensional. For example we don’t think of a CD as short cylinder, three-dimensional object, even though that’s all it is in reality. We think and talk about it as it was only two-dimensional. Well, hold on, isn’t it that in other words we choose to ignore some of the dimensions that make it up in reality concentrating on the smaller number of dimensions that sum it up in our minds? Yes, sounds about right.  It goes into some general sense of shape – We make it so much easier for ourselves by thinking simply of what shapes are similar to other shapes on the basis of comparison.

Prepositions and nouns
What’s important is that this idealised schematic geometry rules the use of our prepositions e.g. we use the preposition along in connection with one-dimensional objects only – therefore along the line is correct but along the table isn’t because we perceive table as a surface and a two-dimensional object. We can, however, say along the edge of a table and here’s another quirk about language of shape. For some reason the boundaries of objects are treated as if they were objects themselves. Edge is the one-dimensional boundary of the two dimensional table (I hope you are still with me because I think I’m close to losing it myself). For similar reasons we say something is under water when in fact all we mean that it is surrounded by water. Water can be refer to as to two-dimensional surface of a body of water so objects can be, in fact, under that two-dimensional surface.