I was sorry that the friendly banter on another thread (which began as comments on the use of the Italian language), devolved into a far wider and interesting discussion, finally became slanging match and needed (?) to be closed.

Sorry mainly because a question was posed about why the members of the EU retained their mother tongues and yet all had agreed to a 'second/main language' (French or English).

Before anyone lays the onus of this decision on the British, remember they were NOT founder members at the Treaty of Rome which was signed in 1957. Britain, Ireland and Denmark did not join until 1973.

But just think about the current global financial situation we all find ourselves in... We have governements 'bailing out' banks and financial institutions, trying to save their people's savings and ultimate ruination and Stock Exchanges in almost 'free fall'.

I'm not talking about the reasons that these actions are needed (or not), as the case may be, but rather the way the various governments in Europe have chosen to each select their OWN SPECIFIC way of supporting their people and their country's financial institutions.

They really had no choice but to do it this way... had they taken a JOINT DECISION and all piled thier cash into a central (European) safety net can you imagine the furore back at the ranch? EVERY populace would be up in arms asking why THEIR TAXES should go to bail out THIS or THAT country??? This way, each is liable for it's own 'rescue plan' and liable to find the money to put it into place.

Now if we (Europe) were the United States of Europe then things may be different. We may have ONE language. We may have ONE central government. We may have ONE King, Queen or President. But we aren't - are we? We all, as countries value the strength that the EU can offer while at the same time valuing our own identities!

Is that really such a bad thing?

This group couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery.

quote:

So much for European unity. Less than 24 hours after leaders of the European Union's four largest countries gathered in Paris Saturday to pledge a collective defense in the global financial crisis, the strategy crumbled in the face of a still worsening credit crisis in Europe's banks. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, faced with the breakdown of a government-brokered deal with German banks to save one of Germany's biggest mortgage lenders, announced that all German bank deposits would be guaranteed by the government, causing consternation and anger among her European neighbors, many of whom felt compelled to follow suit.

Europe's inability to rise above its "each nation for itself" mode bodes ill for the prospect of broader international coordination to shore up credit markets in the face of a global crisis of financial confidence. If countries that have long vaunted their joint destinies can't work together, it seems all the more difficult to envisage a global response of governments and regulators toward a financial sector that itself cares little for national borders. Certainly Germany's unilateral action didn't help European markets resist a strong downward trend from Asia, and indexes plunged on Monday, with the FTSE 100 in London, the CAC 40 in Paris and the DAX in Frankfurt each falling around 6% as morning trading opened. By midmorning, Iceland had suspended trading altogether in financial shares.

The gap between Saturday's rhetoric and Monday's reckoning was amply visible in advance. For all the brave-sounding statements about a common response at French President Nicolas Sarkozy's conclave on Saturday, he and Merkel, along with Prime Ministers Gordon Brown of Britain and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, couldn't agree on substantial international measures to shore up Europe's beleaguered financial markets; they in fact had little standing to do so. By Sunday, the national governments in the 27-member E.U., including the 15 that use the euro currency, all seemed concerned first and foremost with the conditions of their own imperiled banks. Nowhere more than in Germany, where the Finance Ministry enjoined German banks to double their commitments to bail out troubled mortgage giant Hypo Real Estate AG. A rescue deal that was hailed last week at a total cost of $48 billion had crumbled; now it is pegged at a minimum $69 billion, $21 billion of that from state coffers. Some analysts voiced concerns that even that might not be enough.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1847433,00.html

It’s never quite clear to me what this “identity” is about.
In the extremely unlikely event of the United States of Europe, what would people fear they might be losing?
Wouldn’t Italian ice cream still be the best in the world in a USE? Wouldn’t Manchester still produce the Stone Roses? Would Goethe be forbidden?

I don’t know. What are people REALLY scared about in the event of a further European integration?
Ms. Marple's England is dead and gone anyway.

Facts, please.

Wow, Carole, you've opened up a subject of endless chat. Personally I think the EU should never ever try to emulate the US: I rather enjoy all those languages, cultures, idiosyncracies.

I think Europeans are still trying to come to grips with having to all live in the same pantyhose but not losing that quirky je ne sais quoi that keeps them different from each other.

BUT, the EU definitely has to get its act together: why won't my French plug fit into an Italian socket? Squabbling over how many languages need to be official means they aren't watching the economy--and look what happened!

LOL! This is a candid camera!

Yes, this financial crisis originated in Europe.

A lot of clueless Americans buy houses they have got no income for, Wall Street vultures steal people’s money, the White House eejits don’t move a finger, the disease infects the rest of the world, and the meltdown is due to European countries speaking different languages.




I go out now.
Gotta meet Jimmy Dean, Elvis and Santa Claus for a round of poker.

asset strip poker, I presume...

Could it be we have countless different languages because we are countless different countries, not just different states of an homogenous whole? Having said that I feel some European countries get on better with each other than with all. But a lot of that is down to history and immigration.

quote:

Yes, this financial crisis originated in Europe.

A lot of clueless Americans buy houses they have got no income for, Wall Street vultures steal people’s money, the White House eejits don’t move a finger, the disease infects the rest of the world,

I see Prufrock has put a lot of effort into understanding the global financial crisis. Quite a well-informed analysis.

Hey folks, can we at least make an effort NOT to get this thread closed down too?

PLEASE!

Banter and leg pulling is (IMHO) fine. Even the odd bout of 'handbags at dawn' is OK on occasion. But aren't we all old enough (and ugly enough) to ensure that snide sarcasm is beneath our dignity and as such is left to other forums who are 'thus inclined'?

Expats, in my view is NOT the place for such behaviour!

I can't see a United Europe adopting one common language on a day to day basis. After all, it is too large an area to naturally have one common language without some serious oppression going on. (The USA didn't originally have one common language either!)

quote:

Originally posted by C in Bo:
I can't see a United Europe adopting one common language on a day to day basis. After all, it is too large an area to naturally have one common language without some serious oppression going on. (The USA didn't originally have one common language either!)

I think you are right. Added to which - to achieve such an outcome would probably take almost a century.

On the basis that national interest/sheer impracticality rules out the adoption of one member state's 'mother tongue' as the single common EU language, Esperanto's day has at last surely arrived. The experience of x-hundred million people all driven to learn a brand-new language from scratch will quieten things down for decades; flummox Americans; generate trillions for the sign-writing industry; and end the Eurovision Song Contest. All worthy aims, you have to agree.

Esperanto flummox Americans? Are you kidding? Have you made a call recently to any US government agency? First you get the Spanish option, and in case you didn't get over that hurdle, you're sunk: no answers today, sorry. And Esperanto looks a whole lot like Spanish.

Esperanto is a dumbing down of a lot of mainly Romance languages, so no one growing up on Esperanto would be able to read, say Shakespeare or Dante. And while those two authors probably won't help you figure out how to salvage what's left of your meager savings, it would be a shame to lose them.

But totally on board re the Eurovision song contest!

Frankly it doesn't matter which single language EU chooses, if any. The matter arose from a closed thread in which a couple of members were arguing about which language is better. Similar to arguing about which color is better, green or violet? Or which note is better, A or C#?

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the "is of identity" from the English language. (The "is of identity" takes the form X is a Y. e.g., "Joe is a Communist," "Mary is a dumb file-clerk," "The universe is a giant machine," etc.) In 1949, Dr. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be" and the Bourland proposal (English without "isness") he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

To begin to get the hang of E-Prime, consider the following two lists, the first written in Standard English and the second in English Prime.

1. The photon is a wave.
2. The photon is a particle.
3. John is unhappy and grouchy.
4. John is bright and cheerful.
5. That is a fascist idea.
6. Beethoven is better than Mozart.
7. Lady Chatterly's Lover is a pornographic novel.
8. Grass is green.

1. The photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments.
2. The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.
3. John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office.
4. John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach.
5. That seems like a fascist idea to me.
6. In my present mixed state of musical education and ignorance Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me.
7. Lady Chatterly's lover seems like a pornographic novel to me.
8. Grass registers as green to most human eyes.

In the first example a "metaphysical" or Aristotelian formulation in Standard English becomes an operational or existential formulation when rewritten in English Prime. This may appear of interest only to philosophers and scientists of an operationalist/phenomenologist bias, but consider what happens when we move to the second example.

Clearly, written in Standard English, "The photon is a wave," and "The photon is a particle" contradict each other, just like the sentences "Robin is a boy" and "Robin is a girl." Nonetheless, all through the nineteenth century physicists found themselves debating about this and, by the early 1920s, it became obvious that the experimental evidence depended on the instruments or the instrumental set-up (design) of the total experiment. One type of experiment always showed light traveling in waves, and another type always showed light traveling as discrete particles.

This contradiction created considerable consternation. As noted earlier, some quantum theorists joked about "wavicles." Others proclaimed in despair that "the universe is not rational" (by which they meant to indicate that the universe does not follow Aristotelian logic. ) Still others looked hopefully for the definitive experiment which would clearly prove whether photons "are" waves or particles.

If we look, again, at the translations into English Prime, we see that no contradiction now exists at all, no "paradox," no "irrationality" in the universe. We also find that we have constrained ourselves to talk about what actually happened in spacetime, whereas in Standard English we allowed ourselves to talk about something that has never been observed in spacetime at all -- the "isness" or "whatness" or Aristotelian "essence" of the photon. (Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle and Copenhagen Interpretation, the technical resolutions of the wave/particle duality within physics, amount to telling physicists to adopt "the spirit of E-Prime" without quite articulating E-Prime itself.)

The weakness of Aristotelian "isness" or "whatness" statements lies in their assumption of indwelling "thingness" -- the assumption that every "object" contains what the cynical German philosopher Max Stirner called "spooks." Thus in Moliere's famous joke, an ignorant doctor tries to impress some even more ignorant lay persons by "explaining" that opium makes us sleepy because it has a "sleep-inducing property" in it. By contrast a scientific or operational statement would define precisely how the structure of the opium molecule chemically bonds to specific receptor structures in the brain, describing actual events in the spacetime continuum.

In simpler words, the Aristotelian universe assumes an assembly of "things" with "essences" or "spooks" inside of them, where the modern scientific (or existentialist) universe assumes a network of structural relationships. (Look at the first two samples of Standard English and English Prime again, to see this distinction more clearly.)

Turning next to the enigmatic John who "is" unhappy and grouchy yet also "is" bright and cheerful, we find a surprising parallel to the wave/particle duality. Remaining in the reality-tunnel of standard English, one might decide that John "really is" manic depressive. Or one speaker might decide that the other speaker hasn't "really" observed John carefully, or "is" an "untrustworthy witness." Again, the innocent-looking "is" causes us to populate the world with spooks, and may provoke us to heated debate, or violent quarrel.

Rewriting in English Prime we find "John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office" and "John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach." We have left the realms of spooks and re-entered the existential or phenomenological world of actual experiences in spacetime. And, lo and behold, another metaphysical contradiction has disappeared in the process.

To say "John is" anything, incidentally, always opens the door to spooks and metaphysical debates. The historical logic of Aristotelian philosophy as embedded in Standard English always carries an association of stasis with every "is," unless the speaker or writer remembers to include a date, and even then linguistic habit will cause many to "not notice" the date and assume "is" means a stasis (an Aristotelian timeless essence or spook.)

For instance, "John is beardless" may deceive many people if john becomes a wanted criminal and alters his appearance by growing a beard.

"John is a Protestant" or "John is a Catholic" may change any day, if John has developed a habit of philosophical speculation.

"John is a plumber" also contains a fallacy. John may have quit plumbing since you saw him last and may work as a hair dresser now. Stranger things have happened. In E-Prime one would write "John had a job as a plumber last I knew."

Trivial? Overly pedantic? According to a recent article Professor Harry Weinberg once tried to emphasize these points to a class by trying to make them see the fallacy in the statement "John F. Kennedy is President of the United States." Dr. Weinberg pointed out that the inference, Nothing has changed since we came into this classroom, had not been checked by anybody who insisted the statement about Kennedy contained certainty. Weinberg, like his students, got the lesson driven home with more drama than anybody expected, because this class occurred on November 22, 1963, and everybody soon learned that during that class time John F. Kennedy had died of an assassin's bullet and Lyndon B. Johnson had taken the oath as President of the United States.

That makes the idea kind of hard to forget, doesn't it?

-From Quantum Psychology by R.A. Wilson

Don't forget President Clinton's famous grand jury testimony- "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement"

quote:

Originally posted by Bill 2:
Don't forget President Clinton's famous grand jury testimony- "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement"

A classic moment in American political history!

Yes, thinking of it, Esperanto should be the rational choice, no doubt.
Unfortunately there are not many cases of an artificial language that’s become standard everyday language. Hebrew springs to mind but it was not really artificial, since the basis of modern Hebrew was the language used for prayers during the diaspora and anyway there was a strong common drive to make it an everyday language and a sign of identity.
Though I can’t really see the languages we know and speak today dying any time soon – or ever, the idea of a vehicular language for all official purposes in an organism as complex as the EU, in order not to have to translate every single official line into a cacophony of languages, well, why not? It’d play the role Latin has played for one thousand year or thereabout: no-one really spoke it on a daily basis, but it was the lingua franca in virtually the whole of Europe.

As for Esperanto being “a lot like Spanish” (sic), well, English is a lot like English yet people from the four corners of the world can and do learn it.
I’m sure anyone can learn Esperanto. It’s easy, neuter, fair, egalitarian and guarantees the same opportunities for all (we’re all at box 1 as we start). Is there anyone against same opportunities for all? Guess not.

Alfred Korzybski appears to me like a prat*.
(which is absolutely acceptable: who can argue with ME what something appears to ME?)

The Spanish language has solved this existential riddle by creating two verbs of state, namely “estar” and “ser”.
John es triste = "John is sad" (an Aristotelian intrinsic characteristic of poor John)
John està triste = "John is sad" (i.e. he worked for Lehman Brothers but he’ll soon find a job at KFC and will no longer be sad)

Easy, innit?


* Just joking. The point he's making is interesting, seriously.

So the first example is saying "John is a sad sack"? Or is there another way of saying this?

Yeah... technically "John es triste" would seem gibberish, as it's equating a thing with an idea, unless you have named the idea of sadness "John", and it's not actually referring to a human being. I do hear ser used this way a lot though at least in SoCal "spanglish"... I find the choice of Spanish as an example puzzling though, as these differentials stem from the latin root and exist in many romance languages. But for some reason english, with all it's specificity and sheer volume of words, somehow got away with the linguistic generalizing of concepts like "to be" and "love"... go figure!

I'm taking conversation lessons with a friend. She tried to explain a grammatical point by using the verb "to love". She was saying, in Italian, "I am loved" which when you hear it in Italian, is acceptable, but I had to explain that this is a bad example in English as we would more likely say "I am loved by..." In fact I think the only acceptable English equivalent would be "I am beloved" which is archaic!