> can your attempt at putting english at the center of all things
> efficient be a reflection of your monolingualism ? it seems to me the
> only people who think english is the basic world language are people
> who can only interact in english, from that follows that they only
> interact with english speaking locals and the conclusion is that the
> world speaks english.
A: I'm not monolingual.
B: I'm not attempting to put English at the center of all things efficient. Like a lot of political people, you can't seem to distinguish between the two sentences "X is a fact" and "I am advocating X." I was trying to state what I thought to be a fact, which is that, as more and more connections are established between people throughout the world, some sort of general medium of linguistic exchange is needed, over and above translation and interpretation between various language pairs, and therefore such a medium is adopted in practice -- for historical reasons, not because it is "better" in some way or other, but just because it's the way the historical cookie has crumbled.
For example, Aljazeera feels a need to communicate with the world on the Web in a language besides Arabic, since Arabic is not understood by most of the outside world. So it puts up an English web site. That's all I'm talking about.
> to get a grasp of the reality of any "anti-global" thing they'd better
> start with a consciousness of "proximities" involving
> korean/chinese/russian language teaching but that, the gvt does not
> want it. because consciousness is political.
I don't see that the Japanese government is attempting to forbid Japanese people from learning these languages. As you know, NHK has been running instruction programs in them for years, and there are fairly large numbers of Japanese people studying them in other venues also. In some parts of the country, Russian, for example, is of course a more prevalent second language than English, because the local people have more contacts with Russian-speaking than with English-speaking people. But English is still the primary second language, because it is currently more useful than others. No doubt this primary second language status was reinforced by the American postwar occupation. If China becomes the predominant economic center in Asia, and the predominant economic partner of Japan, Chinese might well take over this position from English, especially given the head start Japanese people have with the Chinese characters. But only the future will tell.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt