Postcard - Worldview

Here I post long "letters" that embody my thoughts on languages at any given time. Some are actual emails to friends, others are personal essays. I admit, this section might just be turning into a blog.

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7 - Make It Rain Languages

My favorite tool for instantly making friends with people anywhere on the planet is Facebook. Whatever nationality of a person you want to meet, facebook has a group for that country. The site also offers groups for many cities within each country, as well as schools, companies, and hobby clubs. Say for example you want to learn more about Tasmania. Type "Tasmania" into the Facebook searchbar, and a list of groups, fan pages, and people associated with Tasmania will appear. I prefer groups as a starting place. Most groups are open to the public, so click the "join" button. Once inside the group, you can view all of the other people in that group. If you open up the list of members, each name has the option to "Add as Friend". When I join a group, I might request 10 people as friends, and add a small friendly note to let that person know how I found them. With that nice introduction, usually about half of the people accept me back. Once you're friends with that person, you have an instant connection for messages and chat. This method is fantastic for zero-ing in on target locations and populations. If you want to learn a specific language, say Javanese, but there are no Indonesians in your city, this is the best method for locating a native speaker. Once you make the connection, video chat is right around the corner. This is a great way to scout out foreign natives on a budget, especially compared to sitting on a plane and flying over an ocean.

Letter #6 - Esperanto

Well, a couple things happened recently that will probably change how I think about languages forever. First, one of my facebook friends from Slovakia asked me for help correcting the grammar in her English paper. It happens, and I'm happy to do it. Then I thought I could advertise the service, and if I had enough demand while I was doing it for free, I could slowly bump up the price. What easier way to make a few bucks on the side than correcting grammar in English papers? So, I set up a section on this website (homework help) . I wanted to capture more international traffic, so instead of just writing in English, I used Google Translate to rattle off the same text in about 30 major languages. I made sure to keep the grammar of the English text super clean and simple, so that even a rough machine translation would be understood at least 90%. Behold, Google generated 30x the content for me that I would have had otherwise, and I was happy.

Next, I figured it was time to write something about machine translation on this site, since software is starting to kick humans' ass in the translation field. So, I started researching how the software works behind the scenes. One thing leads to another, and I found this video called "The Language Challenge". Now, five days later, I'm racing towards fluency in Esperanto. I had always known about Esperanto, and pretty recently bashed it on my homepage. It seemed like just a tired old bastard euro-rehash. Furthermore, it represented the "metrication" of language, which didn't seem appropriate. Languages should be wild and woolly, mysterious, textured, and challenging. I always enjoyed wrestling with heaps of noun cases, difficult vowel tones, and exotic scripts. Esperanto is the opposite of all that. It's logical, transparent, and easy as hell to learn. The whole struggle that made learning a language fun is gone from it. BUT, it unleashes a much bigger idea: what if everyone in the world could talk to each other?

English represents the dominant culture in the world, but the language is too complicated to be useful. Sure, most kids around the world are learning English in school now, but they forget most of it by adulthood. Only 5% of the world speaks it natively, and another 5% speaks it well enough to converse in. We just accept that most people around the world can't understand each other, since that's how it's always been. There's a parallel to this condition, and it was found in China. In 1900, China was using traditional, complicated characters for its writing system. Only 10% of the population had the time, education, and resources to master the system, and the other 90% (mostly farmers) were illiterate. Over the last century, however, China brought in reforms to simplify the characters, as well as a romanization system (pinyin) as a way to help kids learn the characters. Within a few decades, pinyin boosted literacy to 90%. The inventor of pinyin, Mr. Zhou Youguang, gets the credit for helping ONE BILLION PEOPLE how to read. Why would China make such a big change? They were under pretty heavy pressure from white Europeans and their cronies (Japan) to pull their shit together.

So, we're not allowed to complain anymore about foreign accents or funny languages. We actually have a universal language now (Esperanto) that is extremely effective and useful. If everyone took about a month to practice it, we would have no more excuses for not understanding each other. Language barriers would drop, and talking to foreigners wouldn't even be a big deal anymore. Most people wouldn't believe it could be this easy even if you told them. Racist and cultural stereotypes are just too entrenched, and people aren't ready to accept that international communication could be that easy.

So, I'll end with this. Having already started reading websites in Esperanto around the internet, I find it totally eerie that I can read and understand a text, and have absolutely no idea which country it came from. I consider myself an open minded guy, but having a universal, neutral medium this useful and easy still feels super weird.

Letter #5 - Indian Telemarketers

I am an American, and I enjoy phone calls from Indian telemarketers. I've taught myself a few pleasantries in Hindi, and I always try them out when I get the chance. The classic question I ask is "Kya ap Hindi bolte hai?" (Do you speak Hindi?). Very, very rarely will they reply in Hindi. Most are trained to say, "Yes sir, but for quality assurance purposes I am required to speak English". So, even if you can speak it, you face insurmountable obstacles. I once tried to fluster a woman caller with the phrase "Mere kyalme ap bohot khubsurat he" (I think you are very beautiful), but she brushed it aside and stuck to her script. All business.

Another time, I was able to turn the tables effectively during a chat spam session. Some Indians friended me on Facebook, only to open up a chat box to promote their I.T. company. I quickly summoned the power of Google Translate, and was able to keep up my end of the conversation, completely in Hindi. Given, it's machine-translated Hindi, so it sounds f-ed up, but for all they know, I just learned it wrong.

But, I digress. Today I took a phone call from an Indian survey company, and the agent began asking me for my opinion on numerous global issues. I turned the conversation to the IMF loan to India in 1991 and the 2009 election. Was the election of a reformist politician linked to the Structural Adjustment Programs so often demanded by the IMF? He assured me the two were unconnected. However, he and I soon found common ground on our countries' heritage with the British Empire. He told me that India was excited to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010 (basically an Olympics for former British Empire colonies). Sadly, I was at the office of my day job, and I had to end the conversation before I could really express myself.

Letter #4 - Full Spectrum Dominance

    Languages are secondary to history. History is shaped by money, resources, technological innovation, and militarism. Long story short, the United States picked up where the British Empire left off. We are also picking up where the Spanish Empire, French Empire, Dutch Empire, Portuguese Empire, Danish Empire, Russian Empire, and Japanese Empire left off. More accurately, those empires did not "leave off", but rather had their guts ripped out by the American Mega-Empire. Only in their wildest dreams could any of those old-world European empires imagined controlling so much of the world as the United States does. Our domination is so vast, it has become unnoticed as the new stage and framework upon which all other events occur. We lie about our true control on every map, slapping a meaningless skin of "countries" upon the lands of the globe. American corporations, intelligence agencies, and elite military units pull the strings of foreign lands economically and politically from behind the scenes. We stop short only at sticking a flag in the soil and renaming the country "New America". Our nuclear-powered submarines fill every ocean. Our militarized satellites fill the skies and space above us. An industrialized, European-style empire is finally achieving full-spectrum dominance. I'm just glad it's us and not someone else.

Letter #3 - Global English

    I think and write a fair amount about how English is growing and marginalizing other languages. What amazes me, is that we don't have to open English schools to persuade foreigners to learn it. They are demanding it and approaching US to learn it. I guess we accomplished this by engineering a world where English is the most monied language on the planet. I couldn't have done it better myself. Our large-cap international corporations already demand that employees speak English. Our universities create significant financial pressure for international students to improve their English before they can advance academically. What could be more effective? Maybe we could only give candy to children who can ask for it in English! Only feed milk to foreign babies whose first word is gurgled out in English. 100 years ago, Hebrew was brought back from extinction using this method.
    I wrote earlier about all the messy pidgins and creoles that pop up when people learn English half-baked and mix it up with their native language. I think the upper classes in those countries all speak flawless English. It's probably even better than mine. They have the resources available to learn it perfectly, and they do. It's the lower classes that make a mess of it, and the most marginalized people who learn the least, if any at all. Need proof? Go read up on "Singlish".
        Is it important that the whole world speaks English? It's a pride issue to spread our cultural empire, but it creates competition for us! Look at the service jobs in tech support outsourced to India - if it hadn't been for the British influence, those Indians wouldn't be able to compete for those jobs. Consider the global presence of Spanish; is it helping Spain at all to have every country in Latin American speaking Spanish? Ecuador might as well speak English, because the United States exerts much more influence over them now than Spain. So, what's in a language? Is it only a matter of pride if you can force your colony to learn your royal language? The money talks louder than whatever language. So does sex. And for that matter, Britney Spears should be on the payroll of the CIA, since she does a better job pushing English internationally than 100,000 stupid ESL schools.

Letter #2 - Portuguese

I read a sentence in wikipedia that stopped me in my tracks. How so? I no longer hate Portuguese, in fact, I embrace it. But why? Here is the sentence:

(excerpt from sino-tibetan family article)
"The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers."

I have always been gambling on English to keep the #1 spot on the top ten list. Chinese is the only competition. But now I see, my scope has been too narrow. All European languages carry the same roots (DNA). Even if Portuguese were #1, it would still champion the PIE roots. Thus, language vs. language is only a small battle. The grand war is roots vs. roots. And, if you believe wiki, Indo-European roots are winning. Hooray!

* Further note on Portuguese: I have been reading about this unlikely love affair between Japan and Brazil. 500 years ago Portuguese merchants and missionaries dropped some words into the Japanese language. 150 years ago Japanese peasants flocked to Brazil and dumped Japanese culture into Brazilian Portuguese. Peasants were farming sugar, and higher classes were raising cattle. Now in 2009, those Portuguese-speaking Japanese Brazilians are moving back to Japan, and bringing Carnaval and Portuguese with them! Portuguese has even entered the top 5 list of foreign languages learned in Japan, after Chinese and Korean. Whoa.
** Last note of Japanese and Portuguese. Portuguese replaced all the L's from Spanish with R's. Japanese can't pronounce L's anyways. It's a match made in Heaven!

Letter #1 - Global Effort Allocation to Languages

Languages. I can speak five, can read about ten, and know phrases from about fifty. They are enjoyable and have much in common with math, since both have rules and formulas. To succeed at acquiring new languages, you must be able to memorize and use these rules. You will also learn new vowels and consonant sounds. This is doable, since all humans are born with the same mouth, teeth, and tongue, and every language on the planet uses that same hardware.




	About Us Videos Quiz List Advice Column Confessions Urban Legends Keyword: Krazy Worldview Gift Shop Services Beta Lab Contact	Worldview Here I post long "letters" that embody my thoughts on languages at any given time. Some are actual emails to friends, others are personal essays. I admit, this section might just be turning into a blog. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 - Make It Rain Languages My favorite tool for instantly making friends with people anywhere on the planet is Facebook. Whatever nationality of a person you want to meet, facebook has a group for that country. The site also offers groups for many cities within each country, as well as schools, companies, and hobby clubs. Say for example you want to learn more about Tasmania. Type "Tasmania" into the Facebook searchbar, and a list of groups, fan pages, and people associated with Tasmania will appear. I prefer groups as a starting place. Most groups are open to the public, so click the "join" button. Once inside the group, you can view all of the other people in that group. If you open up the list of members, each name has the option to "Add as Friend". When I join a group, I might request 10 people as friends, and add a small friendly note to let that person know how I found them. With that nice introduction, usually about half of the people accept me back. Once you're friends with that person, you have an instant connection for messages and chat. This method is fantastic for zero-ing in on target locations and populations. If you want to learn a specific language, say Javanese, but there are no Indonesians in your city, this is the best method for locating a native speaker. Once you make the connection, video chat is right around the corner. This is a great way to scout out foreign natives on a budget, especially compared to sitting on a plane and flying over an ocean. Letter #6 - Esperanto Well, a couple things happened recently that will probably change how I think about languages forever. First, one of my facebook friends from Slovakia asked me for help correcting the grammar in her English paper. It happens, and I'm happy to do it. Then I thought I could advertise the service, and if I had enough demand while I was doing it for free, I could slowly bump up the price. What easier way to make a few bucks on the side than correcting grammar in English papers? So, I set up a section on this website (homework help) . I wanted to capture more international traffic, so instead of just writing in English, I used Google Translate to rattle off the same text in about 30 major languages. I made sure to keep the grammar of the English text super clean and simple, so that even a rough machine translation would be understood at least 90%. Behold, Google generated 30x the content for me that I would have had otherwise, and I was happy. Next, I figured it was time to write something about machine translation on this site, since software is starting to kick humans' ass in the translation field. So, I started researching how the software works behind the scenes. One thing leads to another, and I found this video called "The Language Challenge". Now, five days later, I'm racing towards fluency in Esperanto. I had always known about Esperanto, and pretty recently bashed it on my homepage. It seemed like just a tired old bastard euro-rehash. Furthermore, it represented the "metrication" of language, which didn't seem appropriate. Languages should be wild and woolly, mysterious, textured, and challenging. I always enjoyed wrestling with heaps of noun cases, difficult vowel tones, and exotic scripts. Esperanto is the opposite of all that. It's logical, transparent, and easy as hell to learn. The whole struggle that made learning a language fun is gone from it. BUT, it unleashes a much bigger idea: what if everyone in the world could talk to each other? English represents the dominant culture in the world, but the language is too complicated to be useful. Sure, most kids around the world are learning English in school now, but they forget most of it by adulthood. Only 5% of the world speaks it natively, and another 5% speaks it well enough to converse in. We just accept that most people around the world can't understand each other, since that's how it's always been. There's a parallel to this condition, and it was found in China. In 1900, China was using traditional, complicated characters for its writing system. Only 10% of the population had the time, education, and resources to master the system, and the other 90% (mostly farmers) were illiterate. Over the last century, however, China brought in reforms to simplify the characters, as well as a romanization system (pinyin) as a way to help kids learn the characters. Within a few decades, pinyin boosted literacy to 90%. The inventor of pinyin, Mr. Zhou Youguang, gets the credit for helping ONE BILLION PEOPLE how to read. Why would China make such a big change? They were under pretty heavy pressure from white Europeans and their cronies (Japan) to pull their shit together. So, we're not allowed to complain anymore about foreign accents or funny languages. We actually have a universal language now (Esperanto) that is extremely effective and useful. If everyone took about a month to practice it, we would have no more excuses for not understanding each other. Language barriers would drop, and talking to foreigners wouldn't even be a big deal anymore. Most people wouldn't believe it could be this easy even if you told them. Racist and cultural stereotypes are just too entrenched, and people aren't ready to accept that international communication could be that easy. So, I'll end with this. Having already started reading websites in Esperanto around the internet, I find it totally eerie that I can read and understand a text, and have absolutely no idea which country it came from. I consider myself an open minded guy, but having a universal, neutral medium this useful and easy still feels super weird. Letter #5 - Indian Telemarketers I am an American, and I enjoy phone calls from Indian telemarketers. I've taught myself a few pleasantries in Hindi, and I always try them out when I get the chance. The classic question I ask is "Kya ap Hindi bolte hai?" (Do you speak Hindi?). Very, very rarely will they reply in Hindi. Most are trained to say, "Yes sir, but for quality assurance purposes I am required to speak English". So, even if you can speak it, you face insurmountable obstacles. I once tried to fluster a woman caller with the phrase "Mere kyalme ap bohot khubsurat he" (I think you are very beautiful), but she brushed it aside and stuck to her script. All business. Another time, I was able to turn the tables effectively during a chat spam session. Some Indians friended me on Facebook, only to open up a chat box to promote their I.T. company. I quickly summoned the power of Google Translate, and was able to keep up my end of the conversation, completely in Hindi. Given, it's machine-translated Hindi, so it sounds f-ed up, but for all they know, I just learned it wrong. But, I digress. Today I took a phone call from an Indian survey company, and the agent began asking me for my opinion on numerous global issues. I turned the conversation to the IMF loan to India in 1991 and the 2009 election. Was the election of a reformist politician linked to the Structural Adjustment Programs so often demanded by the IMF? He assured me the two were unconnected. However, he and I soon found common ground on our countries' heritage with the British Empire. He told me that India was excited to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010 (basically an Olympics for former British Empire colonies). Sadly, I was at the office of my day job, and I had to end the conversation before I could really express myself. Letter #4 - Full Spectrum Dominance Languages are secondary to history. History is shaped by money, resources, technological innovation, and militarism. Long story short, the United States picked up where the British Empire left off. We are also picking up where the Spanish Empire, French Empire, Dutch Empire, Portuguese Empire, Danish Empire, Russian Empire, and Japanese Empire left off. More accurately, those empires did not "leave off", but rather had their guts ripped out by the American Mega-Empire. Only in their wildest dreams could any of those old-world European empires imagined controlling so much of the world as the United States does. Our domination is so vast, it has become unnoticed as the new stage and framework upon which all other events occur. We lie about our true control on every map, slapping a meaningless skin of "countries" upon the lands of the globe. American corporations, intelligence agencies, and elite military units pull the strings of foreign lands economically and politically from behind the scenes. We stop short only at sticking a flag in the soil and renaming the country "New America". Our nuclear-powered submarines fill every ocean. Our militarized satellites fill the skies and space above us. An industrialized, European-style empire is finally achieving full-spectrum dominance. I'm just glad it's us and not someone else. Letter #3 - Global English I think and write a fair amount about how English is growing and marginalizing other languages. What amazes me, is that we don't have to open English schools to persuade foreigners to learn it. They are demanding it and approaching US to learn it. I guess we accomplished this by engineering a world where English is the most monied language on the planet. I couldn't have done it better myself. Our large-cap international corporations already demand that employees speak English. Our universities create significant financial pressure for international students to improve their English before they can advance academically. What could be more effective? Maybe we could only give candy to children who can ask for it in English! Only feed milk to foreign babies whose first word is gurgled out in English. 100 years ago, Hebrew was brought back from extinction using this method. I wrote earlier about all the messy pidgins and creoles that pop up when people learn English half-baked and mix it up with their native language. I think the upper classes in those countries all speak flawless English. It's probably even better than mine. They have the resources available to learn it perfectly, and they do. It's the lower classes that make a mess of it, and the most marginalized people who learn the least, if any at all. Need proof? Go read up on "Singlish". Is it important that the whole world speaks English? It's a pride issue to spread our cultural empire, but it creates competition for us! Look at the service jobs in tech support outsourced to India - if it hadn't been for the British influence, those Indians wouldn't be able to compete for those jobs. Consider the global presence of Spanish; is it helping Spain at all to have every country in Latin American speaking Spanish? Ecuador might as well speak English, because the United States exerts much more influence over them now than Spain. So, what's in a language? Is it only a matter of pride if you can force your colony to learn your royal language? The money talks louder than whatever language. So does sex. And for that matter, Britney Spears should be on the payroll of the CIA, since she does a better job pushing English internationally than 100,000 stupid ESL schools. Letter #2 - Portuguese I read a sentence in wikipedia that stopped me in my tracks. How so? I no longer hate Portuguese, in fact, I embrace it. But why? Here is the sentence: (excerpt from sino-tibetan family article) "The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers." I have always been gambling on English to keep the #1 spot on the top ten list. Chinese is the only competition. But now I see, my scope has been too narrow. All European languages carry the same roots (DNA). Even if Portuguese were #1, it would still champion the PIE roots. Thus, language vs. language is only a small battle. The grand war is roots vs. roots. And, if you believe wiki, Indo-European roots are winning. Hooray! * Further note on Portuguese: I have been reading about this unlikely love affair between Japan and Brazil. 500 years ago Portuguese merchants and missionaries dropped some words into the Japanese language. 150 years ago Japanese peasants flocked to Brazil and dumped Japanese culture into Brazilian Portuguese. Peasants were farming sugar, and higher classes were raising cattle. Now in 2009, those Portuguese-speaking Japanese Brazilians are moving back to Japan, and bringing Carnaval and Portuguese with them! Portuguese has even entered the top 5 list of foreign languages learned in Japan, after Chinese and Korean. Whoa. ** Last note of Japanese and Portuguese. Portuguese replaced all the L's from Spanish with R's. Japanese can't pronounce L's anyways. It's a match made in Heaven! Letter #1 - Global Effort Allocation to Languages Languages. I can speak five, can read about ten, and know phrases from about fifty. They are enjoyable and have much in common with math, since both have rules and formulas. To succeed at acquiring new languages, you must be able to memorize and use these rules. You will also learn new vowels and consonant sounds. This is doable, since all humans are born with the same mouth, teeth, and tongue, and every language on the planet uses that same hardware. Across the globe, languages are grouped into families. There was a time when each continent had a handful of language families, and within each family, there were thousands of related languages. All of that changed five hundred years ago when Europeans began sailing around the world killing people and taking their land and resources. No continent was left unaffected by the Europeans, the only question was how severely the native culture of each continent was damaged. Asian cultures fought back the hardest and largely survived. Australian cultures were completely destroyed and their people were slaughtered. This history has enormous impacts on the distribution of modern languages. Wherever Europeans went, they did their best to destroy native languages and replace them with their own. This process has continued for the last five hundred years, it is happening today, and it will keep happening tomorrow. Today, one of the extensions of Europe, the United States, is the prevailing power in the world. The ancestry of its residents is about 75% European, 12% African, and 13% Central and South American. The Europeans and Africans in the United States all speak English natively, and the Hispanic population speaks mostly Spanish. As a general rule, the majority English speaking population of the United States is famous for being monolingual. Americans are typically exposed to a foreign language for a few years in their late teens, then forget everything in adulthood. Many blame themselves for struggling with new languages, some blame their parents. However, it is more likely that the U.S. government is to blame. The United States military, the most powerful in the world, runs a very effective language training facility called the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. It quickly trains Americans to speak dozens of strategic languages for espionage and combat around the world. People who have spoken only English well into their thirties routinely emerge from the DLI fluent in another language. Languages which are most dissimilar from English are deemed the most difficult, and entrants are screened by a test to determine who will learn which language. This test, the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, is famously rigorous. (see footnote 1 below) Now we turn our attention to money. Consider the situation for funding foreign language classes in public schools. Suppose a school can offer a certain amount of its budget, say $1000, for one year of foreign language training for one student. Clearly young children can internalize and retain a new language faster than older teenagers, so the resources are best spent sooner than later. However, in most U.S. public schools, students must wait until the high school level to enroll in foreign language courses. Therefore, based on the military's proven capabilities in linguistic training and its discretion to select how funds are allocated in public schools, it seems that the United States government is intentionally maintaining a nation of monolingual citizens. Perhaps it benefits a powerful nation to have citizens who only speak English. As other global citizens seek access to American wealth, they are forced to learn English, and in doing so help import more American influence back to their home country. As it stands, the population of the world is approximately 6.5 billion. In very rough numbers, 500 million of those people speak English natively. As predicted, the other 6 billion are now stampeding into classrooms to learn it. English is the destination language of the entire world. No wonder then, that the general population of the United States stays content to only dabble in other languages. People learn as a hobby, for a brief vacation abroad, or to satisfy a token school requirement. There is no compelling need to learn anything but English. The big picture is one of asset allocation, however instead of money, the resource is human lives. The power of English compels a greater number of humans across the globe to spend their lives studying English, and by choosing English, they largely choose to ignore other languages. As a result, thousands of languages are dying from neglect. Thousands have gone extinct already. The trend in languages, like all other fields, is towards homogenization. So long as humans across the world are united by instant electric communications, we will gradually speak fewer and fewer languages, until only one remains. footnote 1: I once nearly enlisted myself into the military on accident, just for the chance to take it. By the way, don't tease a military recruiter - those dudes mean business. I walked into a recruiting station to ask about the DLAB, and wound up taking the ASVAB test just for fun. I'll never forget, the very first vocab word on the ASVAB was "maim" )