The author perpetuates a myth. Greek did not go down before an all-powerful Latin. The eastern part of the Roman Empire was dominated by the Greek language. The split of the empire into east and west reflected the linguistic division.

To spend time learning a language that one does not use outside of the classroom is a waste. Learning a language in itself yields nothing of an alternate worldview. Language is a tool to enter into another culture. The tool must be used to have meaning. Unless those who learn the language have contact with native speakers, become familiar with works in the language or become familiar with the history, culture and politics of the area where the language is a living one the student's time would be better spent in other learning.

david f,

Moreover, there is a distinction between Attic Greek and Koine Greek. Much of the knowledge lost during "The Decine and Fall of The Roman Empire" [Gibbon] was because folks wrote in Vulgar Latin and Koine Greek.

English become degraded to with loss of punctuation and grammar, over the past thirty years. Today, the finger still writes, "and having writ moves on" [Khayyam] to lesser literacy.

“For some reason, our politicians - and supposedly, our public - are desperate to be reassured that all these new citizens will have a command of English, but indifferent whether they retain their linguistic links with the cultures of their families.”

Well, of course! Proficiency in the language of the country in which they live is paramount if they are to succeed or even get by. The language of their birth is their responsibility to keep if they wish to.

I agree with david f. Unless you live with people whose language you wish to learn, you are wasting your time. Teaching languages in primary and secondary schools will help you only in making a fool of yourself if you are ever silly enough to use what you have ‘learned’.

Australian kids have much more important things to learn than someone else’s language

While I agree that learning another language broadens the mind in any number of ways, I'd be happy if all Australians learned to speak and write English correctly. It is evident to anyone who reads this forum regularly that the English language skills of many contributors are woeful, and in some cases the article authors aren't much better.

These language education threads seem to keep proving the point: an openness to learning other languages helps greatly for better understanding English. The respondents so far have seriously misread the article.

Ostler did not push a myth at all, but quoted Valerius Maximus' supremacist myth-making against Greek. What the writer implied - and it seems well supported by sources - is that Latin overtook Greek as the language of higher learning in those areas of Rome's closer supervision. Note Ostler's words: "regime of Greek-speaking in the Levant". That translates roughly into david f-ese in his clunkier "The eastern part of the Roman Empire was dominated by the Greek language".

So any dominance by such views limiting the learning of languages would apply to these first respondents, but that would be a pity. Ostler again: "To discard (languages) knowingly diminishes all of us", which can shift its meaning for this case to assert that ignorance of other languages degrades our command of our first language.

Such attitude could have severe results if Right's approach gained influence. Botching your English comprehension so badly could make it much harder to be trusted with learning another language, as the education mandarins could say: "better to spend the resources where it would count more efficiently", etc.

And david f's "Learning a language in itself yields nothing of an alternate worldview" is so wrong. For example, in "dura" we can know the Slavonic view's closer meanings for two separate concepts in the English "stupid" and "crazy", and it took me none of david f's special conditions for me to learn that.

Again proving my and CJ's points (if you missed it):

david f: "alternate [sic] worldview" - I'm sure you meant "alternative".

mil-observer wrote:

"david f: "alternate [sic] worldview" - I'm sure you meant "alternative".

I did not mean alternative. In my unabridged dictionary alternate is an alternate usage for alternative. Where there are two forms of a word allowed I generally pick the shorter as I appreciate simplicity in language. eg. I prefer 'preventive' to 'preventative.'

Estelle Morris’s decision was an act of educational vandalism!!

It is as much a crime to deprive school students with language aptitude of their right to learn a language, as it is to deprive a child with musical talent of the right to learn music, or an athletic child of the right to learn a sport.

Thankfully, despite all the best efforts to kill off language curricula in schools, the wider world does not reflect the same myopia. Language schools are booming. Languages are still the staple of adult community classes. Language teaching is still a favoured backpacker fall-back plan. And Kevin Rudd has made Mandarin sexy.

Some endangered languages – like Welsh and Hebrew – have come back from the brink and been taken off life support. Many Aboriginal languages that have shrunk down to single-digit speaker numbers are being saved by conscientious wordies.

At the same time, English is suffering from its own imperial overreach – descending into a kind of hip-hop-IT-soundbite fusion patois that will probably fragment even more over time.

As for me … Decades after leaving school, I still love the buzz I get from being able to use my motley high-school German and French from time to time, although I know it’s unlikely that I will ever be obliged to converse in them. And on the June long weekend, I’m off to a 3-day Irish Gaelic language school in Sydney – attended every year by upwards of 120 people.

One person’s squandered world is another person’s savoured passion.

PS Don't anyone DARE correct my grammar or spelling!

david f, what dictionary are you using? Two of mine would have it that your "alternate" is a malapropism, supposed to mean instead "by turns, reciprocal", etc., as in alternating. Maybe the dictionaries I use are out-of-date tomes making myself and others fuddy-duddy pedants - shudder! Pity about any confusion with "alternative"; how much more muddled does the language have to become for non-native speakers?

I agree with your preference for more efficient spelling, though; I choose US spelling for that reason when it is shorter, which is 95% of the time.

mil-observer asked what dictionary I was using.

"Webster's New International Dictionary" published by G & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, US in 1976 gave me alternate as an alternate for alternative. I also have the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. For origins of words I have "Origins" by Eric Partridge. For nuances of words I have Partridge's "Usage and Abusage". "Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society" by Raymond Williams, "Dictionary Terms of Literary Terms and Literary Theory" by Cuddon, "The Complete Plain Words" by Gowers and The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought" edited by Bullock and Stallybras are books I also consult.

I am fascinated by words, can read mathematical books in German and French and am still learning about the English language at 82.

Two things I learned recently:

In Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" there is the line: "The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed."

Mock in Shelley's time meant 'to imitate' - not ridicule. 'Mock'd them' simply means that the sculptor created an accurate image.

When the adage "The exception proves the rule" was first used the prime meaning of 'prove' was 'to test'. If there is an exception the rule has been tested and found false. The way people use it now is nonsense. A rule with an exception is not a rule.

I learned Latin and continued the study until I could read poetry by Catullus and Ovid. Latin has helped me recognise the origin of words and given me a feeling for the structure of language with its elaborate grammar. I was fortunate enough to go to high school during the Depression. Highly educated people were teaching school because that was one of the few jobs that were available. My teachers were probably much better than most of the current crop.

I am from the United States and enjoy the Australian language. My objection to language teaching would disappear if the teaching were done in depth, and the language was actually used for some purpose. I think teachers' pay should be comparable to that of lawyers.

3 cheers, david f: an enlightening and incisive account of some recent and lively history of English. At last I know where this inflection for "alternative" comes from; makes sense too, given how little the original usage seems to apply nowadays. It also seems that the Webster may make OED look very stodgy (I'd have to check Macquarie too in that comparative sense).

Referring back to your earlier point about worldview, I think there's one useful irony from our exchange worth comment. I gained a peek into a more American worldview just from this examination of English usage. Besides, your account would prove that we also glean worldviews from centuries past just by studying language "in itself".

I'm concerned that only one of your three criteria for foreign language study can apply to your own mastery of Latin. But those 3 criteria are precisely those dynamic opportunities to be offered in any serious approach to language education, so maybe your earlier post was too pessimistic?

I must support mil-observer's point: "an openness to learning other languages helps greatly for better understanding English" and I would add understanding ourselves through understanding others. Discovering the beauty and wisdom in other languages and thus their speakers makes you a little less certain that your cultural group is the supreme. God's Chosen People, the Master Race, Best Little Country in the World, Land of the Free, and all those other nationalistic epithets that cunning people use ultimately to send young men to war and mothers to proudly weep as they commit them to destruction of other young men and enormous amounts of property. Ah, but it is such good business.

Human history is full of rulers not only discarding languages but whole peoples. Literally diminishing all of us. Ignorance of other languages not only degrades our command of our first language; it limits our thinking and com-passion. We believe the propaganda about the 'Hun', the 'noggie' or the 'Towel Head'. We dismiss the humanity of the Serb, Croat, Hutu, Zulu, the latest passing news story. They're like cartoon natives in a Phantom comic. Nobodies, trash whose “names will not even be remembered by history”, as that loving imperialist and racist Winston Churchill described the 11000 slaughtered Muslims at Omdurman in the Sudan. Hey, most everybody was racist and imperialist at that time. We are the great grandchildren of Winnie’s and Billie Hughes’ generation. Have we progressed? The wounds inflicted over generations imprint on victor and vanquished alike, as evidenced in the bitterness in South African president Thabo Mbeki’s speech in Sudan in 2005 – about Churchill and colonialism.

I support mil-observer: The education mandarins when choosing to spend the resources more efficiently than on foreign language study, deny children the chance to enter and feel an appreciation of alternat(iv)e worldviews. To get the other story from the inside. Social Sciences cannot do this if, for example, academics who claim to be experts on Central and South American Politics do not even speak Spanish or Portuguese. Annoyed that I would suggest it! Gegen Dummheit kämpfen selbst die Götte vergebens.

If current adult decision-makers - policy makers, public servants, school principals, media - are so uncaring themselves about the benefits and dire necessity for languages skills, or politically motivated to (in effect) keep the masses predisposed for war, for Mr and Ms Normal there are, besides, more immediate concerns like teen violence, drinking and suicide, child abuse, obesity, mortgage stress, the road toll, the economy, etc

The role that study of other languages and cultures might play in lifting people out of their parochialism, self absorption, materialism and soap operas, make them reflect on values, their own and those of others in the remote and recent past, and elsewhere now, to consider how lucky we are, and what we can admire about other cultures, how we should care about all people, this boring moral argument doesn't impress. Even the blatantly obvious economic benefits of languages don’t get them aroused.

A language teacher colleague invited the principals of both his primary schools to attend an online session he is leading at 7.30 in the evening. They don't even have to leave their own homes to log on. Both, allegedly, replied: "That's State of Origin (rugby) night. Sorry, I'll try to find time to watch the archive of your seminar." Their free time, fair enough. What can you say?

What I say is that sustained learning of other languages is the opposite of racism. It is a reaching out to others, their representation of the world and life, heritage and dreams. It is the sincerest form of respect. Australians are not into that in a big way. Are we afraid that it also effects changes in the learner, in outlook and values, not just word power or mental agility? Are we afraid that people may come to see that euphemisms like “protecting our national interests” are code for taking over other people’s lands, oil, rights and lives for our commercial gain? That we may be tempted to fraternize like the WW1 soldiers that 1916 Christmas? Harder to shoot people when you’ve just shared baby photos and communicated about simple, shared, human things.

mil-observer wrote:

I'm concerned that only one of your three criteria for foreign language study can apply to your own mastery of Latin. But those 3 criteria are precisely those dynamic opportunities to be offered in any serious approach to language education, so maybe your earlier post was too pessimistic?

Dear mil-observer;

Ostler's article encouraged language teaching in the school system. That may not be the best place as language may be taught in isolation. The author also did not seem to mention providing motivation.

My son is a polyglot but learned no languages in primary or secondary education. He is fluent in Portuguese on a number of levels. He lectured in the Federal Union University in Brazil, advised poor Brazilian farmers and written government grants in Portuguese bureaucratese. He is married to a Brazilian woman. However, she comes from an educated family so her speech has little in common with that of the not-too-well educated Brazilian farmer. He learned Brazilian Portuguese partially by getting American movies edited with subtitles meant for the average Brazilian. He learned to read Dostoyevskii and Tolstoy in the original and then talked with native Russians. He is an anthropologist and lived with a Brazilian tribe. The Summer Institute is a Christian Fundamentalist institution which translates the Bible into various indigenous languages. Although my son is an atheist he learned Kayapo at the Summer Institute as they were the best place to learn it. He continued to learn Kayapo after he went to live with the tribe. His other languages were the consequence of various motivations.

Language teaching in the schools should provide motivation, direction for its use and a possible exchange program so the student can practice the language with native speakers. A two year high school program in a foreign language in isolation from other use of the language is what I am afraid could result. The student's time might be better spent.

I agree with Ostler's recommendation that students with a family background in some foreign language be encouraged to continue study in that language.

I fully agree with the views re motivation of students themselves.

While parents may be fully aware of the advantages accruing, students themselves, not at an age where they are renowned for their capacity to look at the bigger picture, may themselves need convincing. A foreign exchange programme not only provides motivation but lands them completely into a different culture. Which is the most efficacious way of learning.

At the university that I work at in China some students, who have been taught English all through their school years, can barely articulate more than a greeting. Many are offered opportunities for exchange programmes to countries all over the world on a one year basis.

This serves as a great motivation and every year students, who were originally apathetic about learning English, go in large numbers to places as diverse as Sweden, Mexico, New Zealand or Canada, while large numbers of students from those countries come to study Chinese here. Many end up returning to their host country after their year is over and/or traveling to other countries and learning other languages.

While those who don't expect ever to travel from their home country nor work in a field where another language is needed, might not see much point to second language acquisition,the chance actually to spend a year in another country sometimes changes their minds - if not their lives.

To Phillip Mahnken, david f & Romany,

Apt that Phillip refers to some important European history, lest we forget how imperialism generated such deep racism against non-Europeans, and even hysteria against other, more closely related Europeans in the WW1 case. The Churchill factor evokes that historical evidence of imperialist narcissism and brutality, which keeps nagging for a conclusion that we were actually on the wrong side leading up to the Dardanelles debacle and then worse...(sorry to digress again!)

Maybe the community has higher expectations for language teaching than for other subjects. I cannot recall anyone expressing as much dismissive regret about wasted resources all because most adults forget trigonometric formulae, Shakespearean soliloquies or the periodic table. Yet how many Australians unfairly decry their shaky recall of just smatterings of greeting phrases from secondary language classes?

I agree with david f's concern for the actual teaching process and its results. I just think it is a more profoundly ideological challenge that should apply to many other subjects too. As it stands, the resources and real opportunities for more effective language study appear around citizens too often unfit for the task. For every Rudd there is not only an offspring of an apparatchik's family like Downer, but now several more whose main "gift" would seem to be little more than a keen desire to imitate such commissars of liberalism and Lockean property worship.

Although far better than previous eras' wholesale waste, programs for preserving family-inherited language skill appear more like a band aid, hardly a language strategy. I believe the best response would be streaming into dynamic tuition for a wave of functionally competent student elites. Our current elitism is bogus social engineering of that hackneyed, neo-Darwinian style I depict above.

That is where I support Romany's emphasis so wholeheartedly about motivating students and sponsoring exchanges, etc. However, I have seen many cases of waste from in-country study where political, commercial or privilege motives, even blatant class discrimination, override actual merit in student selection.

“Here's little story” (thx for the intro kief, though I'll try to go easy on the Überschmaltz). My daughters were both graded as “gifted” (top 5%) in their first year of schooling but, like many of their so-graded peers, could not pursue the special tuition because the fees were beyond working class mum and dad. More “aspirational” parents, on the other hand, lobbied successfully to get their kids into such classes where their gradings just scraped into the top 10%, 15% or some discreetly profitable proximity. I understand that such commercial imperatives can apply even more severely through to under- and postgraduate levels too. Yet my daughters' experience is in the very small minority of primaries that even bother assessing for gifted students. I think that tiny, exceptional (and relatively positive) microcosm in formative education indicates the scale and nature of the problem.

And david f, if we look more deeply into the experience of polyglot and gifted students, we may indeed find that they are “exceptions proving the rule” i.e., they are often deemed to have broken or evaded a rule of mediocrity, thereby exposing the mediocrity of those others supposed to match or at least approach the talented linguists' levels of ability. Another part of such “rule breaking” I detected from you was the marriage to a non-English-speaking (or non-native ES) national, which I know too as a similar source of friction with the monolingual English speakers when chatting easily in the spouse's tongue (many other such marriages I see compel English as another conformist and hegemonic “rule”).

If we really want any education revolution to work - in languages or other fields – we cannot perpetuate the established systemic obstructions to children's natural yearning for competition, incentive and achievement. To do so would be to entertain so much hypocrisy of economic brahmins who claim to have created the most “efficient” system; it would also support traditions of a dysfunctional liberalist social engineering that dare not speak its name.

mil-observer wrote:

"Maybe the community has higher expectations for language teaching than for other subjects. I cannot recall anyone expressing as much dismissive regret about wasted resources all because most adults forget trigonometric formulae, Shakespearean soliloquies or the periodic table. Yet how many Australians unfairly decry their shaky recall of just smatterings of greeting phrases from secondary language classes?"

There is a TV program called "The Einstein Factor". People who have a great array of facts in a particular area exhibit the contents of that memory. That was not what Einstein was about. I don't know whether he had a particularly good memory or not, but the man could think. He could ask questions and see relationships that other people could not see. It is more fun to try to do a little thinking than to marshal great arrays of fact.

Whether or not people forget trigonometric formulae, Shakespearean soliloquies or the periodic table is not important. Whether they still have an interest in mathematics, Shakespeare or chemistry is. It takes special talents to develop mathematical ideas, write plays or make chemical discoveries. However, a good education in those areas can give almost anyone the background to enjoy mathematics, Shakespeare and chemistry. They all are subjects one can enjoy as one enjoys going to concerts and athletic contests.

Number theory can be the source of great fun. "Recreations in the Theory of Numbers - The Queen of Mathematics Entertains" contains many enjoyable problems in that area. All you need is as much mathematics as the average high school student gets.

One can read Shakespeare with spouse and kiddies and have fun acting out the plays.

My wife enjoys chemistry. She has a spinning wheel and makes yarn. She gathers material and experiments with making dyes to colour her yarn with. She produces many beautiful colours and designs garments.

Whether it is language, mathematics, Shakespeare or chemistry a good education will make these areas part of your life and a pleasure all of that life.

davidf, in another thread I posted a link to research done on the benefits of learning another language. It improves critical thinking and problem solving skills, so like the maths many students learn and never use again it improves thinking skills.

Not only that, it certainly improves skills in one's own native language.

But..., it is as some have pointed out, vitally important how the other language is taught.

English is my second language, I've been educated in another language. I was taught English as a foreign language. My children have all been educated here in Australia and with all of them I've been insistent that they learn another language.

All I can say is that foreign language teaching in Australia is utterly woeful. After 3-4 years of foreign language learning most kids here cannot read a basic book or magazine in the language. What a lot of effort for little gain, what a waste of time.

My youngest daughter is presently doing her high school through French immersion. She is taught French rigorously by French speakers. She loves it, because she can actually, after one year, understand quite a lot of French.

She also recently tested at 99 percentile (nationwide) in English, all her classmates perform at a higher level in English and science. This after only one year.

The globe is full of foreigners who speak from basic to excellent English. We wouldn't be able to do that if we were taught English the way English speakers here are taught another language. Think about that.

LOTE is important for various reasons. All eloquently argued by various contributors. It should be compulsory for a minimum of 4 years for all students. But it needs to be taught with the same rigour as is maths, science or indeed English. Though how the latter is increasingly taught is a whole other debate.

People -

I don't want to derail this thread too much so I am starting another in the General space. I am sincerely interested in HOW you this language is most efficaciously taught.

I offered an opinion about incentive but, given that, what technologies or tools do you consider work well? One poster used the term rigorous - what did she have in mind? Drilling vocab. grammar? Insistence in full immersion in the language during class time (i.e. not even using native language for explanations)? As a language teacher I would like some feed back.