ttbn, in my house at present, there are several languages spoken: Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Niugini Pidgin, English and a "ples tok" from the Bulolo region off the top of my head. Malik speaks 7 languages fluently, some of which are pretty obscure (he's keen to learn Farsi next), I can manage a couple with varying fluency, Mark speaks 2 natively, Barry speaks 3. I'm not sure whether Stu speaks a language other than English, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Then there are the other languages, like C, matlab, Java, Python and various variants of mathematics that a couple of us speak reasonably well.

We use English as the lingua franca, since it's common to us all.

It's long been an open secret that educators and politicians turn a blind eye to proselytising in "science" classes. Global warming, er, oops, climate change is so secure it has announced the apocalypse several times; but the grass is green, dams are full and it is a COLD October.

Parents volunteer and PAY to go to Catholic schools, but are forced to pay for the biased Gulags of the State system.

Hi Craig,

Yes, people can speak many languages AND use one of them as a lingua franca. In South Australia, back in 1845, when the Governor (Grey) went out of his way to encourage missionaries and others to record local Aboriginal languages, the explorer E.J. Eyre published a book of the vocabulary of the Upper Murray people (not a single word was similar to the language of the Lower Murray people, by the way). The Protector wrote in his Forward to the book that he has noticed that, when Aboriginal people met, they tended to converse with each other in English as a common language - but of course, they still knew the language of their own country, but used English words for any 'new' phenomena or terms.

This contrasts with the use of Maori in New Zealand, the one and only Indigenous language there (plus dialects) which incorporates (and has done since the beginning) new words INTO Maori, and thus keeps ahead of the game. That has almost never been done with any Aboriginal language, so they have become more and more irrelevant to modern daily discourse.

As for any religious-based schools, of course their curriculum should be monitored to ensure it does not conflict with general Australian values such as the equality of men and women (boys and girls), equal treatment before the law, and encouragement for all manner of scientific investigation. Schools which refuse to include these values in their curricula should be closed.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe,
Up in PNG it's Niugini Pidgin, which evolved from a simplified trading creole that's the lingua franca and I understand that a creole (Kriol) is beginning to develop within Northern Australia among disparate language groups that allows for modern concepts to be captured within a fluid language framework.

Bahasa is a formalised language group now that would have started the same way. I'm making a very desultory effort to learn Bahasa Malayu from a friend at the moment and it's quite interesting that there are some common words with Pidgin: susu, for example, is milk in both languages. In Pidgin it's been expanded to also mean breast, which of course, is where susu is found.

Hi Craig,

Yes, number systems are similar too, from Indonesia through the Pacific. As for 'milk', or 'breast', 'milk' in Vietnamese is 'sua'. So maybe it's all down to the Austronesians trading around that region over the last few thousand years, given that it's usually traders who develop basic number systems.

I lived in New Zealand for a couple of years and had friends from the island of Niue, more or less east of Tonga, south of Samoa: one time, the sister of one of them, maybe taking pity on me, gave me a shirt, with the comment that we were about the same size, she 'was pretty big in the huhus.' Mmmmmm, she was too. I was extremely grateful.

Cheers,

Joe

Ah Joe,
I should have realised you'd be a sucker for a nice pair of huhus...