What distinguishes us from animals is essentially
the ability to communicate, i.e, we have the intention
of wanting to say something to someone using words with
meaning. Communication between two
people only occurs when the
receiver realizes what the speaker meant by what he said. And when that doesn’t happen ,communication does not happen as well. Let´s see: when I (Portuguese)
say “fixe” with the intention to say “it´s ok” or “agree”, a native speaker of
English will understand the word as fish (peixe). What happen? The language
that I speak comes from a certain convention, these determined by native
speakers, and even knowing that “fixe” is fish I use the word in a different
context. In Portuguese language however there are words called “estrangeirismos”,
words applied to our dictionary that came from countries like Fance, England,
Germany, and others. In this case communication occurs because most of the
people know the context of the words.
Example: affair (caso amoroso), atelier (oficina), Alzheimer,...
Every nation has their one language but
there is one that every nation answer-
English. Why is that?
I think the reason comes from history - the USA was the only winner of IIWW - they did not fight at their area, so they did not have a lot to repair, and they won the battles, gained lot of gold and weapons, and were considered as heroes. That`s why people admired them and wanted to adopt their language. In addition, Enghlish is not a flexive language => it`s quite easy to learn :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with Andreas and Jitka. History, globalisation, USA economic and many other circustances has made English the world language.
ReplyDeleteAnd as much as I love latvian, I would never insist some one to speak in it. And Jitka is right ' it´s so easy to learn English, at least the basic words and basic grammer . And with portuguese (at lest for me) it´s vice versa. It´s hard for me to spell the majority of the words. So I think, as much as we want to be patriotic about our own language, we should accept that for know, English dominates. Of course we cannot forget to respect other languages and learn how to deal with situations like You described in Your blog.