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From: comm@zeus.bris.ac.uk (M. Murray)
Subject: Re: Single European language: *NOT* European english
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Date: Thu, 7 Nov 1996 19:32:37 GMT
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Paul O Bartlett (pobart@access.digex.net) wrote:
: On 6 Nov 1996, Ari Papasakellariou wrote (excerpted):
: 
: > In every European country, children learn at least two languages,
: > and one of them is always English. When two non-native English
: > speaking persons meet, chances are that 99.99% of the time they'll
: > talk in English.
: 
:     Quite frankly, I have a very difficult time believing this without
: seeing a study to back it up.  Do you mean to claim that if a modestly
: edudated (European) Turkish laborer and a modestly educated Polish
: laborer meet in a train station in Vienna, is 99.99% likely that they
: will converse in English?!?  I find that kind of hard to swallow.

Perhaps Ari should more correctly have said "99.99% of the time, if they
communicate at all, they'll talk in English", and I think 99% might have
been better. Remember that if said labourers had been teenagers since
about 1970, they would have been exposed to pop songs in English. Paul's
specific case is slightly unfair; they would quite likely speak in German,
since a high proportion of Turkish and Polish labourers work from time to
time in Germany. 

It's for reasons like that that I am quite attracted by Phil Hunt's 
Eurolang. I've been able to read it fairly easily whenever I've seen it, 
because I'm a native English speaker with good German and passable 
French. Esperanto is just a bit too artificial to be easy. Eurolang builds 
on previous language learning.

I'm reminded of a clause I first saw over thirty years ago in a little 
book published (in German) in Austria. It listed locomotive factories 
throughout Europe, and translated the official title "when the vocabulary 
of a central European of average education would not suffice". Thus 
"lokomotivfabrik" and "centralny" don't need translation, but "zawod 
parowozy" does.

-- 
Martin Murray :: School of Chemistry, Bristol University, BS8 1TS, England
