Schmear Factor

Having made a definite decision in favor of Moscow has proven a relief. I am spared the anxiety that goes with an extended job hunt, and I find I will now have time for other things.

How much time, exactly, is a bit uncertain. Russia's visa process is likely to be both a blessing and a curse. It will be a blessing in the sense that I will definitely not have a repeat of what happened with my visa situation in Taiwan. Russia is both more straightforward and more clear in its visa procedures, so I will not be entering on the wrong visa and end up making visa runs out of Russia (which would prove difficult in any case, as Moscow is hundreds of miles from any border). But it is a curse in the sense that it could take a while.

The first step in the process is for my school to obtain what is called a Letter of Invitation, which I will submit to the nearest Russian consulate. I had a communication from the woman who handles obtaining LOIs, and she indicated there would be a letter in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure if she meant by this that she will have the letter in a couple of weeks and then send it on to my by post (which would take a couple of weeks more), or if she meant that I will have it in a couple of weeks. So as I said, timing is a little indefinite.

In the meantime, I will have the opportunity to learn a smidgin of Russian. I've bought the self-study book and CD set that had the best ratings on Amazon, and I expect it will arrive about the time my Letter of Invitation is ready (or reaches me, as the case may be). I may also look into doing an online language exchange with a Russian speaker who wants to learn English.

But until my Russian books arrive, I have free time on my hands. Today, I spent a little of that free time at the central library in Wichita, perusing through yet more books on the development of language.

Today's perusal led me to a book that dealt with, among other things, the ways the human race can deal with linguistic diversity. To give a measure of the problems linguistic diversity can at times cause, this book noted that there are now twenty languages that have official status within the European Union, and into which EU documents have to be translated. Immense problems can arise when, for instance, a document has to be translated from Finnish into Portugese, because there are few people in Europe who speak both of those languages. Sometimes, this leads to a relay solution--the document is first translated from Finnish into a minor dialect called English, and then from English into Portugese.

Translation is, of course, the main solution the human species has developed to deal with its plethora of tongues. But there are others. The creation of artificial languages like Esperanto is another. But artificial languages suffer from two main problems. The first is that a lack of native speakers would require getting people all over the world to start learning a language they cannot really hope to speak with anyone immediately. No artificial language has built up a significant core of native speakers. Even Esperanto, which counts among its native speakers George Soros, has fewer than 2,000 speakers who learned the language the way American children learn English or Russian children learn Russian.

The other major hurdle for artificial languages is that not one is as universally easy to learn as it claims. Esperanto, the most successful of artificial languages, is much similar in its syntax, phonology, and vocabulary to European than to Asian, Australian, or African tongues. Mandarin speakers, for instance, would probably find Esperanto no easier to learn than English, and far less useful, given that there fewer Esperanto speakers in the world (native and non-native) than there are Jews.

The third way of dealing with linguistic diversity, and the one most relevant to the topics of this blog, is the adoption of one naturally occuring language as a world language. This solution at least has precedents. Before becoming the preserve of the Talmud, Aramaic was spoken as a lingua franca all over the ancient Near East. Latin spread throughout the Roman Empire. And English is no spreading to lands that not only are not now, but have never, been under the Union Jack.

Observers seem to be of two minds about what is happening as people around the globe scramble to learn English. Some believe that English is killing off local languages as it slips onto tongues from Nairobi to Novosibirsk, leaving the world essentially monolingual and depriving it of much of its cultural richness. Others believe that English will simply split into several, mutually inconsistent dialects, much as Latin did after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. My experience in Taiwan showed me that, for all the enthusiasm for English there, people are far from failing to transmit Mandarin and Fujanese to the next generation. Nor can I imagine that stage would ever be reached. The languages that seem to be vanishing around the world are generally ones wtih few speakers, in isolated parts of the globe like central Africa, or ones that have been undermined by actual, as opposed to lingustic, genocide. People around the world may want their children to learn English for business, but the other languages of the world aren't about to disappear.

The other possibility--that English will divide into mutually unintelligible dialects--strikes me as equally improbable. The book I read today noted the many local flavors of English--Singlish (Singapore English), Hunglish (Hungarian English), Runglish (Russian English) and the like. The the first and most widespread, BASIC English (yes, the BASIC of BASIC English is actually an acronym), has been around since the 1930s and was at one time endorsed by such luminaries as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It consists of a mere 850 words, which, combined in various ways, can allegedly convey all of the meanings possible in standard British, American, or any other variety of English. But the description I read of it today hardly made it appear promising. Many of these combinations are intensely unwieldy, and BASIC is now largely a historical curiosity. Other simplified systems of English (most notably, Globish) have not fared better.

So is there a solution to the schmear factor? In my opinion, no. The time is not forseeable when English will be pared down this way. The trend in all languages that succeed is toward more words, more borrowing, not less.

But then, the schmear factor is not, in my opinion, a problem that truly demands a solution. Local words crop into English specifically because they fill a cultural need. Many of these words are for local food, flora, or fauna. If English survives in Taiwan, I would not at all surprised if it appropriated from Mandarin or Fujanese names for all of the foods I saw at the Jhong Li night market. Schmear seems to exist in this kind of ecosystem. Upper West Side Jews need a short, simple word for something they use so regularly and demand in such a hurry--something that isn't a mouthful (yes...go on and groan) at the local bagel shop. And perhaps, not uncoincidentally, Upper West Side Jews also feel a need for words that keep them separate from the rest of the English-speaking world.

Where does that leave the potential for English as a language of global communication? How can English retain coherence and intelligibility when words like schmear and dairy (in the sense that New Zealanders use the word, to refer to what Americans call a convenience store) abound?

The answer, I think, is in travel. The world's Anglophones come into contact with each other more and more each year, not less and less. When I took my CELTA training in New York, I took it with, among others, an Irish woman, a Minnesotan, and a lovely lady from Poland who had herself learned English as a second tongue. Somehow, we understood each other, despite using words like pants to mean different things (in British and Irish English, the word denotes what Americans call panties) and having a few local words like schmear.

So English's prospects of fulfilling the role once intended for Esperanto are good. It has a massive number of native speakers--around 500 million. For all of the reasons I have mentioned, it is unlikely to break up into mutually unintelligible dialects, even if it is peppered with words like schmear, tote, and dairy. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but on the British language, I venture to say it never shall.