From: mvinuela@CC.GETTYSBURG.EDU (Miguel Vinuela)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.spain
Subject: Oxford Companion to English (fwd)
Date: 6 Oct 1992 07:56:04 -0500
Organization: ESPANA-L - soc.culture.spain Gateway
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Reply-To: Miguel Vinuela <mvinuela@CC.GETTYSBURG.EDU>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 11:21:03 CST
From: P Hellander <phelland@ADAM.ADELAIDE.EDU.AU>
To: Multiple recipients of list LANTRA-L <LANTRA-L%FINHUTC.BITNET@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Subject: Oxford Companion to English

Friends,

The following appeared in the London Times. I hope it is of some interest.
The content sounds fairly chauvinistic; what are other list-members' views?

Paul

PUB DATE         24 September 1992
PUBLICATION      The Times
TYPE             Features
BYLINE           Jim McCue
HEADLINE         Prostitute of tongues;Books

  THE OXFORD, COMPANION TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, Edited by Tom McArthur,
  OUP, Pounds 25

  The triumph of English is nearly complete. From being the language of
  about four million people in Shakespeare's day, it has exploded, and is
  now used by perhaps 700-800 million worldwide. In all, 1200 million
  people live in countries where English is an official language. Nothing
  can stop it; no language can catch it. Spanish will not take over in
  the United States, because English is so prestigious. Chinese is not a
  single language but a group of languages, of which the main varieties
  ``are as distinct from one another as English from Danish''. English is
  the basic language of the air, the sea and science.

   The world's wish to speak English is one of the undeclared themes of
  this book. ``English is now widely used for scholarly publishing in The
  Netherlands''; creole in Hawaii and Jamaica is ``moving towards standard
  English''; the last Manx-speaker died in 1974; ``the official language
  of EFTA is English, though none of the members is anglophone''; English
  is the leading second language of the Chinese and Japanese; West German
  pop songs average 56 English words per tune (more, perhaps, than
  British pop songs). Our language and the (American) culture it
  represents are so revered that its words are commonly used, without
  reference to sense, as ornamentation. ``Let's sport violent all day
  long'' a Japanese T-shirt may say.

   There is fierce resistance to English, but economic necessity will
  overcome. In Quebec it is an offence to display an English sign in the
  street, and the language police insist that a hamburger must be called a
  ``hambourgeois''. As a result, 20,000 people a year are leaving the
  province. English, in all its unruly diversity, is probably Britain's
  greatest asset. The world will come to us. Instead of seizing this
  inestimable advantage, we hobble ourselves by submitting to the Babel
  of the European Community, which employs 2,700 people translating
  everything into nine languages. To soothe the pride of the French and
  others, we acquiesce in this nonsense, even though English is the first
  second language throughout the EC.

   Yet such pre-eminence has a dark side. The Companion leans over
  leftwards to distance itself from the ``domination and
  exploitation...inherent in any empire'', and quotes authors from
  several parts of the world who regard the use of English as
  collaboration with the enemy. Often this means the writer cutting out
  his mother tongue to spite his face. Better to find new ways to use the
  colonial inheritance.

   A more profound concern is ``linguicide'' (a term the Companion uses
  but has no entry for). Any language's death diminishes us, for each is
  a unique perspective on experience. Furthermore, languages flourish
  through mutual contact. Indeed, responsiveness and absorbency partly
  account for the success of English, which over nine centuries has
  ``undergone more dramatic changes than any other major European
  language'', according to the Oxford Companion. Linguistic diversity may
  prove to be as necessary as genetic diversity. Yet the predominance of
  English makes it hard to see how the wealth of other languages and
  literatures may be preserved.

   Standardisation can be a great thing, but it is often a curse.
  Universal intelligibility would be a boon, but English might become
  shoddy along the way. The argot of CNN is not encouraging: reporters
  for this first global television network tend to sound like Japanese
  T-shirts.

   This excellent guide to the history, geography and contours of English
  is cautious about classifying usage in terms of correctness (the
  caution itself being politically correct). Yet it adapts James Murray's
  century-old radial diagram from the OED. This envisaged a core of words
  and usage, from which jargons, dialects, slang and so forth diverge,
  the edges of the language being indeterminate. A user of core English
  (see BBC, Oxbridge, King's English, Received Pronunciation passim) is
  able to communicate more fully and be understood more widely than users
  of more peripheral forms. The standard dialect is now ``the only one
  that can be used in discussing such matters as philosophy, economics,
  and literature''. In this sense, core English is better.

   Tom McArthur has succeeded magnificently in setting the bounds of
  coverage. Comprehensive yet focused, the Companion immediately
  establishes itself as a necessary book. As well as obvious entries such
  as novel, euphony and Esperanto, it lists notable publishers, the five
  canons of rhetoric, the protocols of plant naming and the principles of
  translation used for the Authorised Version of the Bible. The short
  essay on how Shakespeare's language differed from ours is a model
  exposition. There is fascinating material, too, on information theory
  (why sloppy writing seems easy to read), and on the hypothetical
  Indo-European language (a single root lies behind the words pole,
  palisade, travel, fang, page and propaganda).

   Sources range from Beowulf to Bondi Beach graffiti. And among the
  individuals marshalled are Barry Humphries, Dr Seuss and Billy Connolly.
  Dan Quayle routs himself under ``Bafflegab'', and Ronald Reagan is
  saluted for revoking an executive order on the use of plain English.
  Earning its shelf-space beside the Oxford Companion to Literature, this
  book gives us English at large at last. What did we do without it?

                       **End of document reached**
--
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