My piece over at Telegraph Blogs about language teaching and learning in UK schools has attracted 226 comments so far.
First, an apology to Will Hutton. My piece said that Hutton’s Guardian article on this subject did not make clear that learning languages is hard work. Openmind2010 points out that he did in fact do so. In all the drafting excitement I somehow missed that rather basic fact. Old age.
Otherwise the usual stream of collective consciousness and sub-consciousness, some but not all on the immediate points raised:
I always considered if you listened to Labour the British empire was something to be horribly ashamed of that we should continually apologise for and make sure we paid trillions of people back with ‘integration’ and ‘multiculturalism’.
The haughty bougeoise attitude (always expressed in ‘caring’ terms a la Horrorperson) of NuLab, Ltd’s elite towards the general population is nowhere better illustrated than in this matter. The children of the great unwashed were too stupid to learn foreign languages, and so they should not be ‘forced’ to try to learn them. To do so was not ‘inclusive’, and was probably somehow ‘racist’
Liberalism; what your country turns to when the race is to the bottom and lowest common denominator in every category of society. Forget those stupid Russians and those impetuous Chinese, we are going to – once again – do the impossible and produce a silk purse using a sow’s ear. Education is like that and there are even "advanced degree programs" for those liberal losers who can decry the silk purse in florid, fluid fluttery. You can’t eat it, but you do know the way to the government benefit office.
… it is sensible not to force pupils down a road they don’t wish to go and give them flexibility. The curriculum should not be too proscriptive where foreign languages are concerned. It just makes a mockery of Crawford’s statement "thanks directly to Labour Party policies language learning in British education is disappearing from British state schools and fast becoming an important reason to send a child to private school (if that can be afforded)." Public schools are not bound by gov’t legislation but it shows that on the issue of voluntary languages after 14, Labour and public schools were at one. Crawford is the odd one out and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
‘Chinese is on a totally different order of complexity – and inaccessibility.’
That’s absolutely not true. Chinese is structurally and grammatically an extremely simple language and far simpler than English (no verb conjugations, no singulars and plurals, no gender, no inflections, no agglutination, no almost anything that can make many European languages such a slog to learn). It’s just that it has absolutely nothing in common with the Indo-European languages with which most Europeans are familiar. Anybody who has a good ear and can be bothered to sit down and methodically learn 2,000 or so Chinese characters can learn it (and by extension acquire around two-thirds of Japanese and Korean vocabulary into the bargain).
But then there’s also this, from Cutley: Sorry, seems a good piece, but I hate the illiterate use of "insofar" rather than "in so far". I couldn’t go on reading after that.
Illiterate? Moi? Here’s what I wrote:
[Hutton] is coy on the causes of this phenomenon. Insofar as he calls anyone in particular to account, it is the
I have to say that I have been labouring (sic) under the impression for most of my life that insofar as used in this sense is one word, not three. In so far as feels oddly clumsy. Yet it seems that this usage is hotly contested by Cutley and maybe by other purists.
My two volume Oxford Dictionary indeed does not have insofar listed. Eeek. My Chambers Dictionary does have it – with a qualification: See in
The Internet has thoughts firmly working in my favour. See eg here. Wiktionary says insofar is an Americanism. Yet Webster’s Online Dictionary traces the word back to 1514 or earlier, suggesting that it was not – at that point at least – very American.
Meanwhile my English dictionaries all have inasmuch as one word. Then there are all those excellent legalisms such as hereinafter, wherein, thereinbefore and so on.
Conclusion? It’s a bit harsh to call insofar as an illiteracy. It may not be ‘pure’ English English, but it’s surely within the range of the reasonable. And as readers here know all too well, what is English and what is American comes and goes down the decades: see honor and honour.
Where I myself do draw the line is underway, as opposed to under way. Yet that ugly thing is fast establishing itself, as in underage and underwear.
No-one has an answer to when a determined effort should be made to defend a language point and when to let grammar and spelling wash dreamily away. Are we now under the torrent of techspeak and instant messaging moving back towards the freeform English of the Shakespeare era when people wrote the language largely as they thought fit? Look at Bulgarian, which has dropped many of the familiar Slav endings. Life in
These details are why learning foreign languages is such a hard job, a point on which Will Hutton and I can warmly agree. As this curious linguistic insofar point itself shows, learning accurate English is difficult enough
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