I've always been grateful I was born speaking a bastard tongue,
English being - by virtue of its colonising tendencies - one of the
most mongrel of the lot. Pace Sir Philip Sidney, the successive
impacts of French, Italian and whatever else on English has made it
one of the most flexible instruments for poets, capable of everything
from lush Italianate sensuousness of Keats, to the harshness of
someone like Howard Barker to the Latinate baroque of David Jones and
so on and so on. - There are obviously problems with such a
carnivorous language, not least the vanishing of (mainly
non-European) languages, but these problems are also among its
fascinations. I am not arguing with you about the necessary vitality
of exchange between languages.
At 11:38 PM +0100 28/5/02, Erminia Passannanti wrote:
>I think one of the most tragic cultural fact that the English speaking
>world suffers from their language have became ‘lingua franca’ is that they
>acquire this mental indolence and resistance to learn or acquire a foreign
>idioms. And here you have a nation with a very limited proportion of the
>young individual able to speak or understand another foreign idiom. Don’t
>you think this is a major damage the English themselves suffer from ?)
>
Which English?
Best
A
--
"The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
Albert Camus
Alison Croggon
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