SEPTEMBER 2002 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
People around the world speak over 1,000 languages. Languages are difficult to learn, and few people learn to speak and read more than a handful of the languages that exist. This makes it difficult for people to communicate with each other around the world, and it is a problem of current interest now that the Internet makes it easy to send a message around the world. Anyone who writes a web page or posts a message on a mailing list has to choose a language for their message. It might make sense to choose a global language, but up until now there is no effective global language — and so, in one of the ironies of our time, a writer must select a national language for a global message.
Why are languages so difficult to learn? It is an inevitable result of human nature. People make any system, including languages, progressively more complicated until the complexity causes problems for most of the people involved. Only then do people tend to look for ways to start simplifying.
Actually, national languages are intentionally difficult to learn. A major part of the original purpose of a national language is to provide a way to distinguish nationals from foreigners. This works only if a language is so complicated that a foreigner cannot completely master it in just a few years. The suggestion that this complexity is intentional might come as a surprise, but it should not. European languages from Portugal to Sweden have mostly the same roots — Gothic, Latin, Celtic, and a few others — but as separate nations formed, they discarded many of the common elements of languages in favor of distinct elements. When German-speaking Prussia went to war with France, no one in France wanted to say even a single word that might sound German. When Normans from France were occupying England, the English people on the street expressed defiance by developing a new language — modern English — that was as different from French as they could manage. This effect was reversed when Normans based in England were occupying parts of France. Conversely, when Germany was formed out of a dozen or so smaller countries, some aspects of the regional variations in the German language were discarded.
The elements of a national language that were made to trip up foreigners serve no purpose in a global context, when a writer or speaker wants anyone to be able to understand a message. Global messages have been with us for decades, primarily in operating instructions for appliances, but they are becoming much more prevalent as people make more information available on the Web. Fortunately, a message written in a national language can still be global in style. A global style minimizes the use of national elements and stays as close as it can to the easy-to-learn core of the language.
Guidelines for writing in a global style are not yet commonly available. If you want to write in a global style, there are existing styles you can look to for some guidance. The clarity of formal business writing is created by employing well-known meanings of words whenever possible. It emphasizes words with clearly distinct meanings instead of trying to say everything with common words that may have a wide range of meaning. These same qualities are useful in global writing, regardless of how formal or informal it is. However, if you are writing an informal global message, try to avoid the other qualities that make formal business writing so formal.
The kind of writing that is written or selected for language students provides other elements that are useful in global writing. Language-student literature minimizes the use of idiomatic expressions and cliches — short phrases like “luck of the draw” and “by and by” that have a meaning unrelated to the usual meanings of the words. It tries to use common words like “doorway” in place of less-common words like “vestibule.” It uses simple grammatical constructions for most sentences.
After a few years of trial and error, we will have a much clearer idea of what makes an effective global style. Eventually global dialects of national languages will develop. This is already happening in languages such as English and Spanish that are native languages on multiple continents. It will happen too in languages such as Italian that are used mainly in a single country. Even in these languages, global communication will be important enough to create its own distinct style.
Fish Nation Information Station | Rick Aster’s World | Rick Aster