Tongue-Tied America: A True National Crisis In Education

Today, we live in a world constantly shrinking, brought about by vastly-improving communications and transportation. Persons of language- and nation- backgrounds of which many of the rest of us knew decades ago but vaguely, if at all, are now becoming our near neighbors. Those of us descended from forefathers who also lived on this soil generations ago, are baffled to hear of such languages as Tamil, Aymara, Guarani, Yoruba, Zulu, etc. At the same time, first-generation foreign immigrants to America are equally-baffled, if their nation had no previous historic relation to other nations, and are not inclined to learn the other's language for the sake of getting acquainted in this salad-bowl land called America: The Hispanic will learn Hindi, the Chinese will learn Arabic, and and the Frenchman will learn Malay-Indonesian when pigs fly. Yet every one of these afore-mentioned languages are major in the world scene, being used by well over one hundred million people.

The computer virtually assures to English the number-one position as the world's premier international language. Furthermore, that position is further-guaranteed by the vast number of languages from which English borrows. Nevertheless, this fact does not presage the disappearance of other languages from the face of this earth any time soon, especially those languages which are written, have a long tradition of literature, and whose speakers number in the several or many millions. Therefore, living in a multi-lingual world and knowing only one language is like living in a huge multi-chambered mansion and yet staying only in one room.
Thinking in terms of another language is not just an idle exercise in lexical translation only. It is looking at the world around us through a different prism, a different perspective, from that which we know in terms of our own language. Very often, any given language will have vocabulary items not precisely translatable into other languages, because said vocabulary items refer to experiences more-or-less unique to the society of speakers of the language in question. Sometimes, too, ideas common to all people may be expressed differently from one language to the next, as the society may have a unique perspective on the matter. For example, there are several Asian languages which have two distinct personal pronouns for the first person plural "we": listener included, or listener excluded. In Tamil, the notion of possession is differentiated between whether the possessor is actually the owner of the item possessed, or whether a third party possesses the item, and it is just temporarily in the possessor's keeping. In Hindi, possession is indicated in three ways: is the thing possessed an abstract concept? Is the thing possessed readily transferable from one person to another, or not? In Russian, if you care to announce your success in accomplishing a particular task, you use a separate verb to indicate that you got it accomplished within a time limit, as distinguished from saying you had the physical strength and/or mental acumen to accomplish the task. Especially fascinating is the phenomenon of gematria in Arabic and Hebrew: this is the assignment of numerical values to each letter of their respective alphabets, and is associated with messaging in religious concepts. For example, Hebrew: the gematria of "KHAY"(the word for "life") is 18. We live best when we are closest to God. If we add up the number of festive days commanded by the Torah, we find for the Passover, 7 days; for the Shavuot, one day; for Rosh Hashanah, one day; for Yom Kippur, one day; for the Sukkot, 7 days; and for Shemini Atzeret, 1 day. Total of all holy days=18. They are both life on this earth and a preview of life to come, as we live closest to God on those days.

So, speakers of other languages do not all look at the world the same way. This creates a serious communication gap which may not always be successfully bridged by English alone. Decades ago, there was a standing joke about computer translation of one language to another. Enter into the computer in one language, "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak". Translation into the other language: "The liquor is great but the meat is atrocious." Can computers be programmed to have the same contextual intuition the human mind has? Maybe. But many jobs requiring such intuition, now occupied by human beings, will not be totally filled by computers any time soon.

At the present time, many universities and colleges are making progress in the quality and quantity of foreign languages they teach. But the preparatory public junior high and high schools are a very different story. This is just at the crucial time when younger people are more capable than older adults to learn a foreign language; and yet, for the 21st century, the foreign language instruction curriculae in most secondary schools is altogether inadequate and unsatisfactory.

All too often, the justifications given for studying foreign languages in educational institutions are negative: some other country is a military/ideological threat to us, or else it is a major economic competitor. An institution truly interested in academic excellence for its own sake should offer study of language for reason of positive scientific, technological and cultural contribution a particular peoples and civilization have made to the world scene. What can we learn, too, by examination of the literature of other languages? What, even, can we learn about the history of peoples, by comparison of historically-related or geographically-proximate languages? For example, the Western Romance languages--French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Catalan--evolved from ancient Latin more-or-less together. But "that other" Romance language--that Eastern one called Romanian--while also definitely of Latin origin, is distinctly different in grammar from the Western languages. What does this tell us about the history of the Roman Empire? And why do two closely-related Western Romance languages--Italian and Spanish--have the same words for "father" and "mother"(i.e. padre and madre), and yet have divergent words for "brother", also a familial kinship word: "fratello" in Italian, but "hermano" in Spanish? And how do the two languages have the same word for "sky"--"cielo"--albeit pronounced slightly differently--and yet their words for "bird"--that animal which flies through the sky--is different between the two languages: "uccello" for Italian, and "pajaro" for Spanish. From whence come these lexical divergences, if both languages are derived from Latin? And why divergence on these vocabulary items and not on others? Investigation into such scholarly questions as these, for what light they can shed on past human history, ought to be the real , positive reasons justifying the study of various languages in public schools, and not the negative reasons relating to politics and economics.

America misses many opportunities for improved relationships with the rest of the world, through its collective non-acquaintance of various foreign languages. Even our own English would be given a great lift of appreciation through the study of foreign languages, when the extent of foreign language contribution to it is seen. Honey attracts more flies than vinegar, and were America to sell its manufactured products abroad in the language of the local folks, they may get more customers, once the prospective customers understand in their language properly, what is the purpose of the item being sold. This, as opposed to the linguistic and cultural embarrassments American corporations have faced abroad in the past, by not packaging their products in terms of correct linguistic jargon of the local populace. To be sure, proper language packaging of American products alone does not guarantee a sale abroad, the item itself might be culturally offensive to other societies. For example, no reference to pigs and alcoholic beverage in Islamic countries, please! Some American TV shows sent to Islamic countries have had to thusly modify their content, in order to be popular there.

In summary, the ability to communicate through knowledge of other languages is crucial to the ability of the American nation to live in good harmony with the rest of the world. Even though English is the linguistic "king of the world", it is still true that the more languages each of us knows, the more access to knowledge and understanding of the perspectives of other peoples in the world we have. It should be added that mere understanding between governments is not sufficient to create a true climate of friendship between nations: the ordinary common people of the various countries, too, must take some degree of responsibility for the creation of good will between the denizens of the various countries through foreign language-learning.

The United States of America is not by far and away the only country failing to acceed to all possibilities in international relations improvement through knowledge of other languages: other nations are also undoubtedly just as guilty, and there is universally a certain amount of "Archie Bunker" in everybody. The author of this article, for example, is not holding his breath for a definitively scholarly book on the history of the United States to be written by a Chinese or a Japanese any time soon, despite the fact that both East Asian peoples in significant numbers have chosen to make America their home. Nevertheless, America and the American people, as the world's last standing global power, would do well to take the initiative to set the example to the rest of the world.

-Lawrence K. Marsh