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If the polls are right, Colorado is going to end up with an official language this year. Although many well-meaning people have decried this, there isn't much chance of stopping it. But if we're going to have an official language, we might consider which language to select.
At first, English seems like the logical choice. After all it, it has been spoken, off and on, in Colorado since Zebulon Pike visited in 1806.
But consider the complexity of English. Our schools spend years trying to pound grammar into kids, and adult prose still teems with dangling participles and pronouns that don't agree with their antecedents.
Also note that English lacks the precision we need in an
Official Language. How many hours are spent in court,
trying to decide what the words in a contract really meant?
Or what the original intent
of the Founding Fathers
was when they wrote the First Amendment?
We could consider a historical approach to an Official Language. Spanish-speakers arrived here long before English-speakers did. Just a month ago, I ventured to San Luis, Colorado's oldest town, and I didn't hear much English being spoken by the patrons of Colorado's oldest business, the R&R Market there.
So history and tradition might favor Spanish. But then again, Spanish very likely has the same problems of imprecision and widespread poor usage, so it wouldn't be suitable as an Official Language.
Among our earlier inhabitants were the Cheyenne and Arapaho, who spoke related Algonkian dialects. They camped and hunted together, but did not bother to learn each other's spoken language. Instead, they used sign language for inter-tribal communication, which also enabled them to trade insults with their persistent enemies, the Utes, who seem to have been in Colorado longer than anyone.
Despite the obvious virtues of Great Plains Sign Language, it would be difficult to put those gestures on paper. So we should look elsewhere.
During an Olympic year, you notice that many products --
candy bars, film, cars, etc. -- are advertised as The
Official Whatever of the 1988 Olympics.
Companies pay
considerable sums for this privilege.
Which leads to a way to help our strapped state
treasury. The next time Gov. Romer goes abroad, he could
solicit bids from foreign nations for the one-year right to
have their tongue designated The Official Language of
Colorado.
If Taiwan came up with the money, we'd be writing in ideographs and learning to talk in tones. Perhaps Israel would pay us to forego vowels and write right to left. Should the Vatican dispatch funds to Colorado, Latin would be a living language again. For a reasonable fee, Comrade Gorbachev could promote glasnot and international understanding by paying Colorado to adopt Ostyak, Tadzhik or Kalmyk. And we won't have to worry about Spanish creeping in, since Mexico doesn't have any money.
This is the computer age, of course, and Colorado is trying to establish a high-tech reputation. So perhaps our Official Language should be a computer language. Programming languages may be difficult to learn, but on the other hand, they're precise and definite. No more expensive trials as lawyers argue in courtrooms over the meaning of a clause -- just feed in the data, and read the output.
But there are scores of computer languages: APL, BASIC, C, Logo, Pascal, COBOL, Assembler. Which one do we pick?
Our state government is also promoting ABC
-- an
abecedarian acryonym for Always Buy Colorado.
So
state policy pretty well decrees that our Official Language
be a Colorado product.
Most languages for personal computers come from California and Washington. I know of only one that qualifies a Colorado product -- SNOBOL4+, implemented and marketed by a friend and neighbor, Mark Emmer.
Certainly it would help the economy hereabouts if 2.3 million Coloradans were forced to buy copies of SNOBOL4+. Instead of getting corrupted by Shakespeare's occult MacBeth, our schoolchildren could retain their innocence while constructing pattern-matches and devising replacement algorithms.
Among other things, SNOBOL4 is used in artificial
intelligence research, and for good reason. It's pretty
smart. If load it into your machine and feed it a statement
like EQ(Official Language, Bigotry)
, it replies with
Success
-- which means there is an equality between
Bigotry and Official Language.
Which is something a lot of people don't seem to have figured out yet.
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