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It's time to get serious about Amendment 1 on the
Colorado ballot, which would enshrine English as the
official language
of our state, but would not change
Colorado's name to Red.
Nor would making English the official state language affect any federal laws which concern bilingual ballots, bilingual education, etc. Such federal laws would remain in force. Official English would merely make a statement, a statement that many people would understandably interpret as an insult.
Beyond that, there is no better way to ruin the English
language than to make it official.
As languages go, English certainly has flaws. It's
highly idiomatic, so that a literal interpretation of what
you say is often the exact opposite of what you meant: I
could care less.
Your check is in the mail.
Our orthography is, to put it mildly, inconsistent.
George Bernard Shaw once noted that we should spell
fish
as ghoti
-- the gh
of
cough,
the o
of women,
and the
ti
of motion.
English punctuation is another nightmare. Judging by
what I see in correspondence, on signs, and in newspapers,
not one Coloradan in 10 can distinguish among plurals,
possessives, and contractions -- just look at the house
signs that say the Smith's
or all the printed
confusions between its
the possessive and
it's
the contraction.
But all living languages have flaws, and the virtues of English have allowed it to become the most widely used language on earth. English is most flexible, as reflected in the dialects you can hear at any city bus stop: melodious pidgins, jive-talk Black English, languid Southern drawls, Kansas twangs, cowboys with hyperbolic metaphors. None of those is or ever could be official, but we generally manage to understand each other.
English is also extensible. We grab words and phrases
all the time: opossum
and moose
from
Algonquian Indians, boss
and waffle
from the
Dutch, carburetor
and faux pas
from the
French, weltanshauung
from the Germans, and so
forth, for thousands of words. It is almost amusing that
some supporters of Amendment 1 have referred to English as
the lingua franca
of our society.
Making English official will destroy the flexibility and
extensibility that make English so useful. Some
governmental body will have to decide what meets
official
standards. Do we want to be like the
French, with their official academy which keeps French
pure, so that they're stuck saying pomme de terre
(apple of the earth), while we were free to adopt the Taino
word, potato
?
Official academies freeze an official version of the
language. Over time, the ruling and educated classes will
use one language, and the general public another. That
happened in Europe, when unchanging Latin was the
official language
of the bureaucracies, while the
public used vulgar variants that became Spanish, Italian,
French, etc. That might explain why those days are known as
the Dark Ages.
Making English official will put the control of our language into the hands of government. Governments are among the foremost abusers of English; the incomprehensibility of bureaucratic jargon is legendary.
Governments always use language to obscure truth.Recall
the proposed revenue enhancements
from a Reagan
administration which opposed tax increases
? Or
Richard Nixon's insistence that we did not invade
Cambodia, an act of war; it was just a harmless little
incursion
?
As George Orwell put it in his essay, Politics and
the English Language
: Defenseless villages are
bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on
fire with incendiary bullets: this is called
pacification.... People are imprisoned for
years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or
sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of undesirable elements.
Orwell made another point in another work, 1984. A government with the power to control the language thereby has the power to control thought. While this may be appealing to some authoritarian types, it is a long ways from what America is supposed to stand for.
If you cherish your freedom to think, you don't want an official language. And if you love English and delight in it, you will want to keep our marvelous language out of the hands of government.
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