Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thank God and May God continue tobless the English Langauge

Ken:

And if I may push your interesting angle a little further along in part, the recent path embraced by those of us with enduring youthful popular music enthusiasm.

Those following the popular music trend in the West in the past few months (a definite hunting grounds for comparatists) would have noticed the decisive musical shift towards English/Spanish bilingualism in popular music ushered in with the shattering of the chart index in Desposito by the trio of Justin Biebre, Louis Fonci and Dady Yanki. It sustained No1 position in more than 110 countries world wide simultaneously, maintaining this top position for more than 12 weeks in the UK alone.  

This was followed by Enrique Iglesias and Jamaican patois maestro Sean Paul's 'Subeme La Radio'  and in the past few weeks by the resplendent Little Mix and CNCO's collab (the other dominant buzzword in current western popular music ) Reggaeton Lento among others.  Why?

Puerto Rico voted massively to drop its commonwealth status in the US June 12 2017 to become the 51st state.  Although Congress has the final say on this eventuality, it seems the die is already cast.

I say this because of your reference to the unofficial status of Spanish in the US.  It is no wonder that Washington is dragging its feet in recognition of the 51st state because it hastens the possibility of official recognition of the US as a bilingual state (its already a bilingual polity by your analysis.)

Why the foot dragging?  It would be recalled that the US (by the Montesquiuan categorisation) became the first officially monolingual empire in history (as you implied) with the English forebears defeating their European rivals on the battle field and divesting them of their American possessions (Louisiana Pact e.t.c) the case of Puerto Rico in the 1898 Spanish-American war.  

Because Puerto Ricans are in fact already American citizens it means the US is in fact a bilingual country but unwilling to officially declare this status for fear of handing victory back to the defeated Spanish 'enemy.' However, !Que sera sera!

Yes, you are indeed right that empires in the past were necessarily multilingual.  This was why non Europeans were intrigued by the movie of Cleopatria depicting a caucasian monarch on African soil. They did not quite understand the ptolemaic dynasty (Greek) left behind at the centre while majority of Egypt still remained non-caucasian Egyptians.

People also forget that for centuries the language of the court in the UK was different from the language of the commonalty, being at various times Latin and French depending on who was the reigning conqueror of the English. 

 So at that time no one could argue that Latin helped to weld together the English, the French and the Spanish because the overwhelming majority of the English were illiterate in Latin & French!

This was how the English were able to reclaim their language and impose it on the Court.

So any one arguing for the reclaiming of indigenous languages in the British Commonwealth will not be engaging in acts opposed to the British way of life.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>

Date: 03/09/2017 03:38 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thank God and  May God continue tobless  the English Langauge

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Hi cornelius

I find this idea (language holds the empire together), very intriguing. And perhaps there are more than one kind of empire, material, political, military etc. empire endures on the strength of more than conquest by force.

The word I need to through into the mix is ideology; thinking gramsci, of course.10% force, coercision; 90% consent, ideological integration. This was ultimately the case in africa, as elsewhere.

The trouble is empires were very multilinguistic, multinational, multi race, multi cultural. More than nations, that want to impose single rule of language and state. empires seemed more intriguingly multiple: am thinking of the austro-hungarian and ottoman in particular. But the romans had a latin core and a non-latin periphery, not just ruled via latin. The elite became latinate, which explains how romance languages developed in germanic lands.

Then there is something like an empire—the u.s.—that imposes, imperfectly, english, but tolerates an enormous amount of spanish throughout much of the country, and a multiplicity of languges in the cities.

Could the claims about single language be pre-global? I say that thinking that the global dominant language, that is english, is really enormously inflected by dialects that are quite different.

ken

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, 2 September 2017 at 16:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thank God and May God continue to bless the English Langauge

Let me guess : Farooq Kperogi


On Saturday, 2 September 2017 23:38:01 UTC+2, Olayinka Agbetuyi wrote:

Well, dont be too shocked.  Someone on this forum used a similar argument not too long ago...

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>

Date: 02/09/2017 22:17 (GMT+00:00)

To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Thank God and  May God continue to bless the English Langauge

I read this paragraph and gasped, that apart from a shared history etc. it's indeed the English Language that is holding an empire like the Federal Republic of Nigeria together:

Joseph Brodsky's 55 page line by line commentary

on

"September 1, 1939" by W. H .Auden

Pages 309-310 of - Less Than - One Seleceted Essays by Jospeh Brodsky

"Some twenty years later, in a poem written in memory of Louis MacNeice, Auden expresses a desire to " become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe". This is an extremely significant admission , and the crucial word here is , believe it or not , not Goethe but Atlantic. Because what Auden had in mind from the very outset of his poetic career was the sense that the language in which he wrote was transatlantic or, better still , imperial: not in the sense of the British Raj but in the sense that it is the language that made an empire. For empires are held together by neither political nor military forces but by languages. Take Rome, for instance, or better still Hellenic Greece, which began to disintegrate immediately after Alexander the Great's own demise ( and he dies very young). What held them for centuries , after their political centres collapsed , were magna lingua Grecae and Latin. Empires are, first and foremost, cultural entities; and it's language that does the job, not legions. So if you want to write in English, you ought to master all its idioms,from Fresno to Kuala Lumpur, so to speak. Other than that, the importance of what you are saying may not go far beyond your little parish, which is perfectly commendable, of course; what's more, there is that famous"drop of water" (which reflects the entire universe) approach to comfort you. That's fine. And yet there is every chance for you to become citizens of the Great English Language"

Professor Harrow, do you agree?

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