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File Group I:
Which Language Can Be the International Language Now?

  • In a sense, English is the universal language.
  • About one-half of the world’s newspapers are written in English, and approximately two-thirds of the world’s radio and television stations broadcast in English and several other kinds of communication are done in English.
  • Meaning is determined mostly by the position of the words (for example, the man bit the dog/the dog bit the man) and partly through word parts (for example, the “-ed” ending signals past tense in most verbs).
  • English is vocabulary is a combination of the world’s major languages.

    English has many drawbacks as an international language:

  • Non-English-speaking people, particularly those in Asia, would view an attempt to make English a universal language as imperialistic.
  • In addition, English has difficult consonant combinations (desks), subtly contrasting vowel sounds (cut, caught), many words with more than one meaning (saw = did see or cut wood with a saw; can = metal container or the ability to do something), and confusing spelling patterns (though, doe, thought, caught, caw).

    Other languages present similar difficulties:

  • French and Chinese have difficult sounds.
  • Russian and German are structurally complex.
  • Languages are more complex than their vocabularies.
  • Concepts in one language often cannot be translated into another one.
  • Pitch and stress and intonation differ in importance in various languages, too.
  • Whatever happens, almost everyone agrees that the time for a practical international language is now!
  • The world cannot exist much longer as a kind of huge Tower of Babel.

    Excerpted from The People’s Almanac
    by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, page 751.


Our Queer Language

When the English tongue we speak,
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it’s true
That we say sew but likewise few?

And the maker of a verse
Can not rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard sounds not the same as heard,
And cord is different from word.

Cow is cow, and low is low.
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of rose and close and lose,
And think of goose and yet of choose.

Think of comb and tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll and home and some,
And since pay is rhymed with say,
Why not paid with said, I pray?

We have blood and food and good.
Cough is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done but gone and lone?
Is there any reason known?

I shall wonder ever after
Why slaughter doesn’t rhyme with laughter
Thus, in short, it seems to me
Sounds and letters disagree.

—Anonymous

No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined.
No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled.
No life ever grows until it is focused, dedicated, and disciplined.

—Harry Emerson Fosdick


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