Top World Language ? May 29, 2009
Posted by cantueso in english, language, market, shakespeare.trackback
They ended up learning English even in Russia and in China.
It was necessary. The technology comes in English first, weeks and months before it appears very poorly translated in other languages.
English is the number one language because of the way England ruled its complicated Empire starting more than 200 years ago, built up its fleet, defeated Napoleon, and then came out poor but victorious in the two terrible wars of the 20th century.
And England also had Shakespeare.
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The Westminster Palace is the United Kingdom parliament where the Empire figured out its framework.
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Windsor Castle : It is the largest castle in the world, probably the most famous, and it has been inhabited all the time for about 900 years and is the Queen’s official country residence.
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The Tower of London. It was a fortress, but also the king’s residence and a prison.
There is a curtain wall of 13 towers, and each tower has its own well-known name. The White Tower is also called the Bloody Tower because it was the scene of some high profile executions.
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Buckingham Palace is the Queen’s official London residence. It is called the Buck House. Her own picture is known the world over, though she keeps herself at an incredible distance :
Here she is, just getting married. Her name is Elizabeth the Second, because there was another queen of that name = Shakespeare’s Elizabeth, a hard act to follow.
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All of this is or was very great, and behind that was the fleet.
And then, as of last century, the cultural hegemony of the United States brought about an immense expansion of English.
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The Tower Bridge with its twin drawbridges. From the bridge you can see Her Majesty’s Ship “Belfast”, a monument to D-Day = June 6, 1944 :
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Below is Blenheim, the place where Churchill was born.
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So the greatest of them all, Shakespeare and Churchill :
Churchill as the greatest military and civil leader, maybe of all times or at least since the Greeks, also as a writer ;
and Shakespeare as the greatest of poets in the Western world.
[Dante, Goethe, the poets of Greece and those of the Bible come second because they are not as widely read anymore and cannot be read by so many people in their original language.]
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Finally, riding the wave, come the global bestsellers : the Beatles, Alice, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter each with an intricate Wonderland of their own :
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The sunset panorama view and the goose with her daisies are from Wiki by Diliff
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I enjoyed this! There is nothing wrong with English – my mother tongue – but I would argue the case for learning and using Esperanto.
Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net
What do you think?
To Bill Chapman:
:-(
When I saw this, I had just written a first draft for a post against esperanto. I am very much against esperanto. I think it is based on a misunderstanding of what language is.
Ich weiss nicht in welcher Hinsicht Shakespeare etwa den Vorrang der englischen Sprache bedingt und wie sich beweisen liesse, dass Shakespeare noch immer mehr Leser findet als Goethe oder Dante. War Shakespeare nicht im 16. Jahrhundert tätig, Goethe aber 200 Jahre später, damit vermutlich sprachlich näher?
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Ulrich says he does not know in what regard Shakespeare would condition the preeminence of the English language and how it could be shown that Shakespeare has more readers than Goethe or Dante. He asks whether Shakespeare wasn’t active in the 16th century and Goethe some 200 years later, therefore arguably closer to us in language.
Your first point is too complicated to explain now. However, as to your second point : the size of the readership would be more or less proportionate to the response his name gets on the net. Compare the hits! It is truly depressing. It means, first of all, that the Germans themselves have stopped reading him.
Yes, Goethe’s language, especially in his first novel, reads like modern German. But that does not get him any readers. And worse:
the other day, to find a Faust quote, I ended up looking for it in English……..
!!!
No problems to read Shakespeare http://www.esperanto.mv.ru/Melnikov/Sonet90.html
Goethe http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/Literaturo/Poezio/romaj_elegioj/milda.html
or Dante
http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/Literaturo/Revuoj/nlr/nlr22/la_menso.html
Try!
Useless. You can only translate content, not its poetic dimension.The greatness of Shakespeare is not in any content.
His content is mostly borrowed.
Chinese is by now considerably more important than English.
I think that the choice, realistically, for the future global language lies between English and Esperanto rather than an untried project.
It’s unfortunate, however, that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
After a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polgar, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Further arguments can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net