Comments on: Languages – What Extinction Can Mean http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4666.html Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above. Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:18:20 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Ginny http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4666.html/comment-page-1#comment-23945 Ginny Tue, 02 Jan 2007 06:08:45 +0000 http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/004666.html#comment-23945 Perhaps to reinforce your sense of India as the future of English-speaking lit, my husband, a native Texan, just got a note from the Indian editor of a Cambridge series; the note was about my husband's entry on one of the great Victorian sages. This is at once a sign of the gift of English thinking to these two ex-colonies - and of how the ex-colonies keep alive the ideas of the English. Perhaps to reinforce your sense of India as the future of English-speaking lit, my husband, a native Texan, just got a note from the Indian editor of a Cambridge series; the note was about my husband’s entry on one of the great Victorian sages. This is at once a sign of the gift of English thinking to these two ex-colonies – and of how the ex-colonies keep alive the ideas of the English.

]]> By: Lexington Green http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4666.html/comment-page-1#comment-23836 Lexington Green Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:40:07 +0000 http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/004666.html#comment-23836 I don't much like Mencken, actually, in his usual mode of jeering, smug, purported urban sophisticate. But his writing about the English language was based on serious and deep, if amateur, research. English has been an open source project for a millenium. Good English is what its best practitioners can convince others that it is, with clarity and simplicity always being the keynotes. We have never had anything like the academie francaise, let alone a mandarinate. We had Dr. Johnson, and Noah Webster, and Fowler, and the guys who put the OED together. Self-appointed, and willing to plunge into the marketplace of ideas to struggle for acceptance. And our openness has served us well in many ways. We have adopted massive numbers of words from foreign sources, giving Anglophones an enormous toolkit to work with. As Mencken notes, you can get by at the level of "me sell, forty dollar" and it is very easy to learn at this bottom-rung level of basic communication. Or you can rise to the highest possible levels of literary subtlety and sophistication, and you can make your own list of literary heroes here. In India, which is the future heartland of the next golden age of English literature, there is English all up and down the scale. As you say, "easy to learn but hard to master." But to just get by, you don't need to master it. And if you do master it, you will be richly rewarded. I think the glories of our language are not being abandoned, since they were always only appreciated by a small minority, but are being appreciated by a more widely dispersed community. Or so I hope. I don’t much like Mencken, actually, in his usual mode of jeering, smug, purported urban sophisticate. But his writing about the English language was based on serious and deep, if amateur, research.

English has been an open source project for a millenium. Good English is what its best practitioners can convince others that it is, with clarity and simplicity always being the keynotes. We have never had anything like the academie francaise, let alone a mandarinate. We had Dr. Johnson, and Noah Webster, and Fowler, and the guys who put the OED together. Self-appointed, and willing to plunge into the marketplace of ideas to struggle for acceptance.

And our openness has served us well in many ways. We have adopted massive numbers of words from foreign sources, giving Anglophones an enormous toolkit to work with. As Mencken notes, you can get by at the level of “me sell, forty dollar” and it is very easy to learn at this bottom-rung level of basic communication. Or you can rise to the highest possible levels of literary subtlety and sophistication, and you can make your own list of literary heroes here. In India, which is the future heartland of the next golden age of English literature, there is English all up and down the scale. As you say, “easy to learn but hard to master.” But to just get by, you don’t need to master it. And if you do master it, you will be richly rewarded. I think the glories of our language are not being abandoned, since they were always only appreciated by a small minority, but are being appreciated by a more widely dispersed community. Or so I hope.

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