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THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Pity all who must learn it as a second language
By LEN KLEMPNAUER
of TheColumnists.com
Everyone raised in
the United States should be thankful. Oh, not because we reign
as the most powerful nation in the world or own the globe’s
wealthiest economy or enjoy freedoms that people in so many countries
can only imagine in their fantasies.
No, we should be grateful because we don’t have to learn
English as a second language.
Any American who has learned a foreign language or, in my case,
tried to learn a foreign language--three years of high school
Spanish and three years of college German--learns that other
languages have rules to actually follow in grammar and spelling.
Not so for English. You probably remember one of the simplest
English rules our teachers taught us early on: “i”
before “e” except after “c.” But not always.
In English, rules are made to be broken.
We do have one thing going for us, however, that continues in
other European languages. Whether in the familiar or polite forms
of address, we use only one word: “you.” Or a variant:
“your.“ Long ago we jettisoned “thou, thee, thine,
thy,” the English versions of the familiar form of address.
Even in Europe, English must be the most difficult for foreigners
to learn to speak fluently. The simpler the English word, it
seems, the more difficult it is to define and understand. Take,
for example, one of our most common little words: “get.”
*
Get lost and get out of here (leave) or, in a different context,
get out of here (you’re kidding me).
*
Get me a drink (fetch) or I got my drink (possess).
*
I get cold every winter (become) or I get a cold every winter
(contract).
*
I got a book for my birthday (receive) or I got a book from the
library (obtain).
*
I got it (understand) or, in baseball, I got it (orally waving
off teammates for a fly ball).
*
Get me to the church on time (deliver).
If you go to a dictionary, you’ll get a lot more meanings
for “get.”
If definitions of even our simplest words challenge English learners,
imagine how vexing pronunciation must be for them. Could any
word be more difficult for foreigners to learn to pronounce correctly
than any word containing the letters “ough?” Take a
look at the following sentence:
“A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode
through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough,
he coughed and hiccoughed.”
That’s nine . . . count ‘em . . . nine different ways
to pronounce “ough,” although a couple are virtually
limited to English speakers in England.
I’d like to claim credit for composing the example above.
But I can’t. I found it at a United Kingdom web site called,
“Have Fun with English,” at:
www.fun-with-english.co.uk
Maybe we Americans take for granted that English is easy to learn
because so many people speak it worldwide. We should thank the
19th Century colonialist Brits for spreading it. Once upon a
time the sun supposedly never set on the British Empire. And
for those countries the Brits passed up, we followed up by becoming
the world’s super power after World War Two, a century or
two later.
So, why should we bother to learn a foreign language when everybody
else is learning English?
During my first visit to Europe in 1964 people I met in just
about every country frequently asked, “Why don’t you
Americans ever learn to speak a foreign language?”
My answer was simple: “Which one?”
That seemed to stump them.
About a year after my European vacation, a colleague at the newspaper
I worked for took his first trip to The Continent. He was to
visit six different countries and prepared by studying the language
of each country. Well, not exactly the entire language. He targeted
one word, and learned how to spell and pronounce it perfectly
in each language so that he would never be misinterpreted.
The word was “eel.”
The Dutch, I discovered during my trip, do languages properly.
They start teaching English to children in the first grade. As
one Hollander told me, “We have to. Nobody is going to learn
Dutch.”
We wait too long. We, too, should start teaching our kids a foreign
language in first grade. Which one? I’d recommend Chinese,
the way their economy seems to be growing. And China is homeland
to one helluva lot of people.
Maybe someday we might be manufacturing products again and start
exporting stuff to them. It might be helpful if we could speak
their language.
That’s enough for this week. I'v got to get out of here.
I've got to go.
©2007 by Len Klempnauer. The cartoon
illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco
Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first
posted May 28, 2007.
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