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 Maybe the dictionaries I use are out-of-date tomes making myself and others fuddy-duddy pedants - shudder!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.