I thought Anatoly Vorobey’s Avva post (in Russian) was of enough general interest to translate it here; Anatoly and his wife, of Russian origin and living in Israel, are both fluent in English:
R. and I have a bit of a problem at home with switching to English in spontaneous communication without really meaning to, and in the last couple of years, our older child has enthusiastically joined in. Every now and then I catch myself and try to put an end to this depravity by saying something like “today everyone is going to speak such and such a language,” but it never works. Yesterday I accidentally discovered a very effective remedy, which I’m sharing: when, for example, a child says something in English for no particular reason, I add “Yulia said in English.” As soon as I starting doing this, it turned into a competition within the family, and we all “catch” each other using English, including me (“Dad said in English”), and we try to watch ourselves and not switch in the middle of a sentence unless there’s a good reason.
In our family, the main way to get people to do something less is to make a joke out of catching them doing it. I don’t know what that means, but it’s a fact.
I think this is what the kids call a “lifehack.”
switching to English in spontaneous communication without really meaning to
Anglicae est imperare orbi universo …
Though the current US regime is tirelessly working to undermine Anglophone cultural hegemony, so the world may yet be saved from ending up as linguistic grey goo.
Upon waking up I would sometimes speak to my ex (who I knew very little Bulgarian) in Bulgarian, until I adjusted. She did not do that with German. Our common language is English.
There was an Accra-resident couple I knew in Ghana (the husband, a doctor, cured me of my first-ever bout of malaria) whose respective parents had no language in common. Though they themselves, like many Ghanaians, were proficient not only in their respective mother-tongues, but in Twi and English too. They spoke Twi and English to each other and to their children (who had also picked up Gā from their playmates and schoolfriends.)
Maybe I’m missing something about the couple’s backstory, but why would two L1 Russophones not in the presence of outsiders and not living in an “officially” Anglophone society involuntarily or accidentally speak to each other in English? Do they speak English so frequently outside the house in Israel (and Russian so rarely, despite the substantial presence of other Russophones) that it has become their default setting? Did they live in an Anglophone society for a significant time after leaving a Russophone society but before settling in Israel? Are they trying to model Hebrew-speaking for their child by self-consciously refraining from speaking Russian around her, but then the wires get crossed? Other? And why can’t they simply speak French to each other, the way Russians do in the old books?
“Voilà” said Zebedee, in French.
“[T]oday everyone is going to speak such and such a language” seems to imply that there are least two languages other than the undesirable English being spoken in the house – primarily Hebrew-speaking children?
It does seem like it would be easier to switch accidentally if you’re already in the habit of switching deliberately, but no doubt everyone will come along and prove that’s not true.
David’s gray goo (okay, “grey” in Foreign) comment made me wonder about the impact-if-any of Brexit on communications at the Brussels headquarters of the EU leviathan. UK withdrawal led to a 90%+ drop in the EU’s L1 Anglophones, leaving only most of the Irish and a subject-to-debate moiety of the Maltese. Has it led to any perceptible drop in the use of English as a mutually-convenient L2 among everyone else? Of course, Switzerland has avoided the EU and has three-or-four perfectly good languages of its own, yet I may have told the story here before of last fall meeting a very competent Lithuanian bartender working in a posh hotel in Basel who spoke none of the Swiss languages and was getting by in English.
Maybe I’m missing something about the couple’s backstory, but why would two L1 Russophones not in the presence of outsiders and not living in an “officially” Anglophone society involuntarily or accidentally speak to each other in English?
They are both fluent speakers of English and enjoy using it. Israeli society is neither here nor there.
Has it led to any perceptible drop in the use of English as a mutually-convenient L2 among everyone else?
I am quite sure that the rules, preferences, and other bureaucratic paraphernalia of the EU and other Brussels-adjacent entities have approximately zero to do with international use of English, which is guided by its overwhelming cultural and online dominance, which in turn has nothing to do with Brexit.
I understood JWB’s ‘everyone else’ as meaning ‘everyone else in the EU’, which has *something* to do with Brexit.
My (very vague) belief is that an English version was the usual basis of written translations at least, since it’s easier to find translators who can work between language A and English (and so on) than between any given pair of EU languages A and B – so it’s quite possible that nothing much has changed in that sense.
‘everyone else in the EU’, which has *something* to do with Brexit.
Brexit has to do with the EU for sure, but JWB’s anecdote about “a very competent Lithuanian bartender working in a posh hotel in Basel who spoke none of the Swiss languages and was getting by in English” suggested to me that he was not talking solely about official EU communications.
It could have been to do with the Gin and Tonic Directive.
We just had a great dinner with my ex at a burger place next to Sofia University — that burger place had had won some award for best burger place in Europe. Well, that’s what they told us 🙂
https://restaurantguru.com/The-Rusty-Grill-Sofia#gallery — I think that’s the place, I recognize the the bald guy. Hi, bald guy! Извинявам се че не се запознахме. Утре ще дойда да видим за Шри ланканто нещо. English — I’ll message him this thread, so that he will messagage this to the Sri Lankan guest chef, which is next week.
When I first attended an EU-affiliated event a few years ago (i.e. not just an international meetup that happened to take place in Europe) I was stunned by how almost everybody just casually knew French and conversed thusly with service providers and other locals (the meeting took place outside Paris). So arguably it’s (still) a lingua franca among the europhile crowd in the EU, although I’m guessing there will be a pushback for official primary status from some German-speaking nationals. If anything, maybe Brexit makes it more comfortable to use English now that it’s more neutral, politically.
Has it led to any perceptible drop in the use of English as a mutually-convenient L2 among everyone else?
No drop whatsoever. There is apparently no acceptable alternative – French and German speakers are seen as chauvinists by speakers of smaller languages (and there is a lot of historical baggage). The exit of the UK in some ways makes English even more acceptable as a “neutral” pan-EU language, which I find extremely unfortunate, but I am in the minority.
It seems to me obvious that Spanish has all the characteristics desirable for a lingua franca – fairly easy for other Europeans to acquire, global language, direct descendant of Latin, no recent history of violently invading other European countries and supressing their languages (yes, Catalans and Basques may disagree but the Welsh and Irish also have complaints), and already widely if superficially learned by Europeans as tourists. Still, status conscious EU bureaucrats and businesspeople stubbornly stick to English.
Though the current US regime is tirelessly working to undermine Anglophone cultural hegemony
David, you are an optimist. My impression is that the current regime is making English more popular as a common communication tool for right wing propaganda and memes among the sort of nationalists and right-wing extremists who might have rejected US culture earlier, while people opposed to the current US regime are still too invested in their years of Anglophone education and cultural exposure to ever give it up.
I had had the same thought as Vanya re Spanish being an obvious “neutral” L2 that Continental Europeans could coalesce around to contrast themselves with the Anglosphere — at least assuming that now that over three centuries has passed there is no significant resentment in Brussels regarding long-ago Spanish rule. But maybe the problem is that the *lack* of any recent Spanish cultural hegemony (not only as compared to English but as compared to French, German, and Russian) extending past the Pyrenees means that other Europeans don’t resent Spanish but instead just don’t take the language seriously, and/or associate it primarily with Latin America which they (rightly or wrongly) feel themselves superior to?
The other approach, if a revival of Latinity is not on the table, would be to arbitrarily pick a minor (and thus “mostly harmless” from a political perspective) language and decide collectively to rally around it as the mutual/neutral L2. Could be Breton, could be Estonian, could be something else. Anything’s gotta be better than English.
Of course depending on whose stats you believe the U.S. may have approximately as many Hispanophones as Spain itself these days (tied for third worldwide, a little bit behind Colombia and a little ahead of Argentina although of course Mexico has more than #2 and #3 combined). Perhaps we can be hegemonic in multiple languages.
Danish is mostly harmless, just sayin’.
@Lars: Maybe Faroese would be even better, since Europe-adjacent but principally spoken outside the territory of the EU proper?
i hesitate to suggest it, but i think this could at last be the moment for which dr. zamenhof estis esperanto.
but if not, i think the proven record of ottoman turkish speaks for itself as the proper candidate.
I like Etienne’s previous suggestion of Haitian Creole. Ideal for an international language. One would have to do a bit of preparing the ground, linguistically, of course, by clearly explaining to the stakeholders* that it is not French …
* Is that the word I’m looking for? It sounds suitably bureaucratic, anyhow.
All nice ideas, but English is now so entrenched as the language of international business and international communication*) that substituting it would require the rise of a new, non-anglophone hegemonic power that imposes its own language by dint of political pressure and cultural hegemony. The only at least somewhat credible candidate for that I can see is China. Do we really want to see the Brussels mandarins speaking Mandarin?
*) Is there any non-anglophone country in Europe where English is not the default first foreign language taught in school?
Is there any non-anglophone country in Europe where English is not the default first foreign language taught in school?
Good one. Andorra? Kosovo?
Ed.: This is a map of second foreign languages in Europe. According to the comment beside it, Flanders and Luxembourg are the only non-anglophone ones where French is the first foreign language.
Ed. 2. Kosovo is English too.
Ed. 3: In Andorra, it’s French.
@Hans
All of them nice? Including proposing Esperanto or Ottoman Turkish? I can’t even figure out which is the least realistic idea of the two.
The de facto official language of a political entity is the language it does its press conferences in. For the EU that’s English and this won’t change.
Including proposing Esperanto or Ottoman Turkish?
You do understand that that proposal was clearly tongue in cheek?
where English is not the default first foreign language taught in school
Perhaps more interesting to look in multilingual states at teaching of, and relative fluency in, English vs “National Other”
Even beyond “soft power,” or what Hans calls “political pressure and cultural hegemony,” it should probably be acknowledged that one causal factor in the current dominance of English in Continental Europe was undoubtedly the massive U.S. military invasion and conquest (alias “liberation”) of the Continent in the middle of the last century. But we wouldn’t have invaded if the Continent’s non-Anglophone decisionmakers hadn’t conspired or collaborated (or some verb that goes with a tragicomedy of errors) to give us a pretext, so perhaps the blame lies with them.
Ostler’s _Empires of the Word_ has some examples of languages that spread widely w/o military conquest being a substantial cause as well as many that spread with that as a factor. Maybe modern Europe lacks the capability to emulate the first scenario, though. Romansh might be another good candidate for a neutral and “mostly harmless” compromise L2 for the EU. Centrally-located, yet not really spoken in the EU itself.
@J.W. Brewer
I don’t want to discuss such topics because the host has expressly forbidden it. I’ll just drop an innocuous hint. American treasure and troops decided the first war too. No pretext was given there. I’ll leave it at that. Feel free to contradict me with impunity. I won’t reply.
@Vanya
Lange nicht mehr so gelacht
All of them nice? Including proposing Esperanto or Ottoman Turkish? I can’t even figure out which is the least realistic idea of the two
None of them being realistic is exactly what makes them nice ideas.
Re Esperanto, I read a book by an Esperanto enthusiast back in the early 80s who argued for Esperanto being the best fit for an EU official language, and if one considers how Esperanto is nowadays frequently criticized for being too Euro-centric, he may actually have had a point. But it’s still snowballs and hell.
@JWB: that certainly played a role.
There’s a popular Russian children’s’ TV show called “Masha and the bear”. My nephew is currently a fan of it. I agreed to watch two episodes of it with him. The theme song is eerily similar to Tom Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go”. Funny as shit.
I have no doubt told this anecdote before, but back in 2006 I happened to be vacationing in Trieste with my late first wife and there were posters up indicating that I had unfortunately missed by a few days the chance to attend a Solemn Mass celebrated in Esperanto in the local cathedral, in observance of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of some association of Catholic Esperantists. The idea of celebrating Mass in some sort of trans-national auxiliary language not tied to a particular ethnicity or government seemed so obviously clever that I wondered why Vatican 2 hadn’t promoted such a concept rather than encouraging Babel-like linguistic division.
@CJ: No doubt Woodrow Wilson has much to answer for, but imho regardless of the impact of American actions in 1917-18 on the actual outcome of the war itself and its geopolitical aftermath, I don’t think the nature and extent of US cultural/linguistic influence in Continental Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s was all that much different from what it would have been if the US had stayed out of the war and it had eventually ended in some different fashion.
Yeah, let’s let that drop; since I’ve forbidden CJ to engage in the discussion, it doesn’t seem fair to continue arguing his ideas.
I don’t understand how that works in my simple Feldwebel mind. I think lack of realism is the very definition of a bad idea.
Those who criticize Esperanto for eurocentricm are misguided. It’s like criticizing a modern house builder for using concrete instead of mud as mortar.
Zamenhof wanted to construct a linguistic utopia. The only materials available for constructing doable utopias were European. If he had made a conlang without any relation to living European languages, Doctor Hopeful would be as unknown as the other desperate souls who have done conlanging over the ages.
Zamenhof’s brilliance lay, paradoxically, in his practicality. Anybody can construct a utopia. But it takes a sense of practicality and huge amounts of talent to convince others to subscribe to your construct. That’s why in my view Zamenhof was hands down the greatest linguistic utopianist of all time.
one causal factor in the current dominance of English in Continental Europe was undoubtedly the massive U.S. military invasion and conquest (alias “liberation”) of the Continent in the middle of the last century.
A rather minor factor I think, in the big picture. Everyone is aware I assume that the British Empire dominated the globe in the late 19th century, and also won WWI and WWII. It’s not as if the Americans showed up with a new language in 1917 or 1944. The US invasion was actually not that massive compared to the Soviets, (particularly if you subtract the British, Canadians and other allies) nor was the occupation that obvious to the occupied after 1955 or so. US troops probably did advance the popularity of American music and films a little faster than might have otherwise happened, but Germans were already complaining about the “Americanization” of their popular culture by the 1920s. Notably knowledge of English in Italy and France showed no real uptick until the 21st century suggesting the dramatic increase in English as a lingua franca is probably more due to long term US commercial and cultural dominance than the physical legacy of the invasion and occupation.
It’s really only with the past 15 years that education systems on the Continent seem to be shifting from teaching British English as the standard to American. That is also mostly due to the influence of social media, not some lingering effect from WWII. Possibly some Brexit Schadenfreude as well.
The integration of the EU has also created a more urgent need/demand for a lingua franca than was the case 30 years ago. That shouldn’t be ignored.
The idea of celebrating Mass in some sort of trans-national auxiliary language not tied to a particular ethnicity or government seemed so obviously clever that I wondered why Vatican 2 hadn’t promoted such a concept rather than encouraging Babel-like linguistic division.
Wasn’t that called Latin?
I think Vanya is right about the history of the dominance of English.
Vanya’s timeline points are fair, yet what caused US “commercial and cultural dominance”? I’m not saying it all simply came out of the barrel of an M-1 Garand or a subsequent M-16, but it seems implausible that military factors played no significant part. Now, even after Britain lost its Empire, it had some Cold-War-era “soft power” via rock music, e.g. vaguely-dissidentish teenagers in Communist Bulgaria passing around samizdat cassette dubs of Uriah Heep tunes as a token and foretaste of the freedoms the regime was denying them. Which helped develop ineffable cool-factor associations for the English language. But where did the Brits get the idea of rock from?
In hindsight, come to think of it, was Abba winning the 1974 Eurovision song contest with an English-lyrics version of the song they had won the Swedish preliminary competition with the Swedish-lyrics version of an important signpost along the road all of Europe subsequently traveled?
it seems implausible that military factors played no significant part.
Why? The French lost the Napoleonic Wars, but that didn’t stop French from becoming ubiquitous as a high-end cultural language in Europe. I’m pretty sure military conquest leads only to forced and temporary use — cf. the fate of Russian in the ex-COMECON countries. Cultural spread is a whole different animal.
I think the answer is a resounding “sometimes.”
The spead of Latin in Western Europe surely has something to do with military conquest; on the other hand, Latin made almost no inroads in the equally-conquered Hellenistic East.
Arabic has largely (sometimes totally) supplanted languages within the mediaeval Islamic empires when those were also Afro-Asiatic; but it didn’t supplant Persian, or Turkish, Romance, Slavonic, Albanian or any of the Indic languages. (We were discussing this not long ago.)
But certainly temporary military subjugation, however thorough, seems unlikely (by itself) to effect profound linguistic changes.
I, too, have read that Brexit has led to a greater comfort with using English as an interlanguage within the EU, just because the language is no longer associated with a major EU member (sorry, Irish Hatters.) It’s rather reminiscent of the handy ethnic neutrality (in local terms) of the former colonial languages in India and Africa.
I suppose that, as the US continues its geopolitical and cultural self-sabotage, that too might paradoxically increase the use of English as a kind of free-floating interlingua, no longer closely associated with any particular state or culture. Stealth Esperanto.
Something similar seems to have happened with Aramaic in the last millennium BCE.
Second language education in Europe seems more complex than what I wrote earlier. This document (p. 154 et seq.) indicates that in various countries, the first second language taught is the local minority or regional language, or at least that’s the way it was in 2012. In some cases numbers are provided: in Spain, slightly more schools offer Catalan before English, and in Romania, slightly more schools offer Hungarian first. Surely those are the great majority in Catalonia and Transylvania, respectively. Perhaps some Europeans here can clarify this.
The spead of Latin in Western Europe surely has something to do with military conquest
Maybe, but suppose that the Romans, instead of being the all-conquering
assholesmighty warriors that they were, had been content to sit in the Italian peninsula and develop their economy and culture to the point that all the barbarians of Europe wanted to be like them, having been enticed by all the trade goods and traveling performers (to get the jokes, you have to know the language) — wouldn’t they have been likely to learn Latin without the glowering legionnaires waving vexilla at them?My sister worked for the European Commission for a while c.2000. If two Irish wanted a private* word with each other they just talked English really fast. I wonder if the increase in streaming at 1.5× speed will banalise this secret power.
* personal-life private, not national-security private
DE: Surely French in western and central Africa is an example of what you’re talking about?
Sure.
In the Francophone West African country I know best, Burkina Faso, Mooré and Dyula are more widely used as interlanguages, but Mooré is of course associated with the Mossi (though not as tightly as you might think, given that a fair number of smaller ethnic groups now mostly speak Mooré in place of their old heritage languages), and Dyula is associated with Islam. So French is the most neutral language – though with its own baggage even now.
The Francophone countries have done a much less thoroughgoing job of (as it were) denaturing the old colonial language than Ghana and Nigeria have. (Liberia is a weird special case of its own, Because History, and I don’t know much about Sierra Leone in this regard. I fondly remember a Sierra Leone lady who was a patient of mine in the UK, who spoke to me entirely in Krio, presumably under the impression that it’s all English. Perhaps if you speak Krio loud and slowly enough …)
I don’t think that if the Americans hadn’t joined WW II or if they had gone back to isolationism like after WW I and basically left Europe to the Soviets, English would be in the dominant position it’s now in in Europe. That doesn’t mean cultural or economic factors didn’t play an important role, either. Social developments rarely have only one reason.
@mollymooly
Regarding “My sister worked for the European Commission for a while c.2000. If two Irish wanted….”
I am familiar with “Irish” as a plural noun meaning ‘Irish people’, as in “The Irish will not stand for that,” but not with “two Irish” (presumably also “few Irish,” “many Irish,” and so on).
Is that an established usage or a slip of the pen?
Seems fine to me (and I’m not even Irish.)
“Two English” sounds OK to me too – though not “two Scottish.” Likewise, “Remarkably few English are fluent in Lithuanian” strikes me as entirely cromulent.
I suspect “Irish” behaves in a different way from “Scottish” here, because there is no simple equivalent of “Scot” – you need to say “Irishman”, “Irishwoman” or whatever.
I suppose one might try to save the phenomena by decreeing that “two Irish” was an instance of ellipsis (“two Irish [people/men/women]”), but ellipsis, in syntax, is one of those too-powerful analytic tools that all too readily “explains” things that really could do with a deeper analysis. (I find. Me. That’s what I find.)
@Eddyshaw
While Arabic didn’t supplant all the languages of whatever regions Arab troops occupied at some point, it had a profound impact on all the major Turkic and Iranian languages and well as all the languages of the Muslim Indies. Ottoman Turkish was lexically far more Arabic than Turkish.
While Latin didn’t supplant Greek, its influence on colloquial Greek was actually at least as significant as the other way around. I happen to be familiar with colloquial Greek because I live in Crete. The Greeks call their house *hospitium (σπίτι), their sausage *lucanicum (λουκάνικο), the sow *scrofa (σκρόφα), a rod *virga (βέργα), a whip *flagellum (φραγγέλι), a stable *stabulum (στάβλος), their church bell *campana (καμπάνα), their oven *furnus (φούρνος), a ladder *scala (σκάλα) etc. Besides the Romans Greece also served other Romance-speaking overlords, including the valorous French knights of late medieval times, the fierce Catalan mercenaries, and of course the enterprising Venetians.
About the influence of the French colonists I’m not sure, they probably exerted more influence on the colloquial of Cyprus than that of Greece proper. But the Catalans and most prominently the Venetians left obvious and enduring linguistic marks on the modern Greek colloquial. The famous παρέα is likely a Catalan loanword, likewise the word for grandma, γιαγιά.
As you surely know, the Albanian language comes from an unidentified ancient Balkan tongue. At any rate its lexicon is overwhelmingly of Latin origin, no less than that of French, even as Latin never supplanted the unknown Paleobalkan language that gave rise to Albanian. I recall reading somewhere that the ancient language that is ancestral to Albanian was on its way to full Romanization but that this process was abruptly stopped sometime in Late Antiquity, around the time the Goths were ravaging the Balkans in the aftermath of the famous battle of Adrianople in 378. I’ll look up the Albanian case again.
So we shouldn’t underestimate the influence of political and military events on linguistic developments.
“Remarkably few English are fluent in Lithuanian” may be cromulent as a matter of syntax but surely as a matter of pragmatics it’s as non-cromulent as “my hovercraft is full of eels.” I suppose there’s also the question of whether “English” in this sense should be a mass noun rather than a count noun?
I can’t say “an Irish”, mind. (Well, I can, but you know what I mean.) Plural-only for this kind of thing.
Disappointingly, CGEL doesn’t seem to address this, apart from the case with the definite article (“the Irish.”) And the other examples that it gives there, like “the poor” (the ones who are always with us) seem to be less flexible than ethnonyms. Not sure about *”Few poor live in Mayfair”, for example. (OK, but rarefied-poetical?)
there’s also the question of whether “English” in this sense should be a mass noun rather than a count noun?
No, that would have to go *”Remarkably little English is fluent in Lithuanian.” English mass nouns agree like singular count nouns (doubtless as a result of Kusaal influence.)
“England collapse before lunch” is relatively unalarming (depending on how committed you may be to cricket.)
“England collapses before lunch” is disturbingly ambiguous.
as non-cromulent as “my hovercraft is full of eels.”
says the man who’s never had to deal with an eel infestation of his hovercraft.
If you saw Eels on a Hovercraft (with Samuel Jackson), you’d understand that it’s not laughing matter.
@JWB, LH, LH is a fluent Russian reader. I’m a fluent English reader and a fluent speaker of broken English (I think in it, I speak it with L2 speakers, I write in it here). I can’t say I “enjoy” it. I want to enjoy it, but for this I need to hear it from L1 speakers and it’s desirable not to hear it and about it in certain contexts where it is spoken about as something boring.
It happened to me that said something in Russian, relying on the meaning of an English word, and found that Russian does not have a word with such meaning and I need to reformulate what I said. But I’m not tempted to switch to it.
So I think JWB’s perplexion is natural. Fluency might be a necessary condition, but I don’t expect from a fluent L2 speaker the temptation to switch to the language she’s fluent in.
___
@JWB as I hear there are businesses in Israel (IT in particular) where English is the working language.
___
His child does it and I think they have experience of talking with the children in English…
This just in from Nigeria: an educational-policy initiative to de-emphasize English in schools in favor of local L1’s has been reversed in favor of re-emphasizing English. As explained by the BBC in Nigeria’s English-lexifier de facto national language. https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/articles/c5ylw01x1edo
Yes, the problem is that although practically everyone agrees in principle that the previous policy would be great in an ideal world, in practice it’s unworkable.
I think it is workable at least in areas where Hausa is the predominant L1, or widely known as a L2, and, I daresay, Yoruba, though I know less about that (the Igbo seem to be oddly ambivalent about their language); but implementing the policy selectively, however rational in purely linguistic terms it might be, would be a real can of worms politically.
But the fact is, yer average Taiwo or Audu in the street is more concerned with their kids being able to earn a decent living in a hard world when they grow up, than with the languages being used at school, regrettable though that is for lovers of linguistic diversity. And who can blame them?
In Ghana, kids who get to go to school seem to pick up not only English, but also Twi, the de facto national language alongside English, despite not being formally taught it at all. More goes on in schools educationally than what’s on the syllabus.
“worms”
@DE, which way?
Taiwo speakers will say “why Hausas study in Hausa and my children have to study in English?”?
Hausa speakers will say “why Taiwo study in English and my children have to study in Hausa?”?
Both?
And if they say it – say, “both” – why not do what they want and revert it to “Hausas study in English, Taiwo study in Taiwo”?
“unworkable”
Problematic, not “unworkable”.
Problematic means leads to a problem.
Unworkable means the problem can’t be solved in principle. I don’t think this problem can’t be solved in principle.
@LH, think about India.
It was not “cultural and online dominance” that earned for English its status there. It was top-to-bottom spread which you say isn’t a factor.
School plays a role here. When English is not taught [well], the country won’t be as succeptible to “cultural and online dominance”.
Also exams and tests. (I think it’s silly that a talented Iranian researcher needs good English to study in Europe. It is not “English” which you need to understand the math in a work you read. And to understand texts-with-sceintific-terms you don’t need good English, you need to understand meanings of the terms. But she’s required to know English well)
Also translations. The two strategies are “translate everything” or “expect that readers know the language” (which leads to “teach the language”).
I spoke about these strategies here. Macaulay’s Indian argument mentions them too.
I think Brussels does make decisions that affect such things.
“Macaulay’s Indian argument”
(where Russia is mentioned there as an example of successful “translate everything”)
@drasvi
I think the “can of worms” is that when people are forced to achieve some level of fluency in a language that is not their L1, they can perceive it as unfairly favoring those for whom it is an L1 (or those who for socio-political reasons are more motivated to acquire it). Some people in Ireland felt and still feel that obligatory Irish in school puts their children at a disadvantage in obtaining jobs and university places.
The other feature is often “which language(s)/dialect(s) should be taught?” This was also an issue for Irish, because there has never been a standard spoken form, and the official written standard went back to the 1600s, after which the language was no longer used officially.
It was top-to-bottom spread which you say isn’t a factor.
No, I didn’t say that. (I wish people wouldn’t argue by pretending the other person said some distorted/extreme version of what they actually said.) I said “Maybe [it has something to do with military conquest], but [it could have been other factors].” Do you see the difference?
@LH, I mean, you say that Brussels’s decisions are not a factor for English in Europe.
That’s how I understand you (without wanting to understand you so or pretending to).
India is not Europe. But I think if one analyses the mechanisms of its spread in India, she will find mechanisms Brussels does not control in Europe and mechanisms that work in Europe and are controlled or affected by Brussels
And I gave examples of such mechanisms. I think Brussels does not tell anyone “teach English in school” and whatever Brussels tells, English is taught everywhere (not “everywhere” in those Arab countries that learn French, but the factors at work in those countries don’t work in Europe). I understand it.
But how well it is taught may depend on Brussels.
@LH, I mean, you say that Brussels’s decisions are not a factor for English in Europe.
I just reread all my comments and I haven’t said anything remotely resembling that. What are you talking about?
Also I “studied” or “read in” maybe 15 languages and I do NOT like the idea of good English (or good French or anything) in Russian school. Or even any English.
Or any Russian in Lezgian school.
I love diversity.
I do NOT think that “spread of English [or Russian] is bad [for lovers of diversity] and school lessons [particularly good lessons] are good and such a good thing can’t be a factor in such a bad thing”:)
@LH, the comment I quote above.
Where you speak about “cultural and online dominance”.
Ah, right — I missed that (sloppy reading!). But I still agree with myself rather than you: I think the decisions of Brussels affect mainly the bureaucracy, and ordinary people use English for entirely different reasons.
I wouldn’t have thought Brussels would have much influence over teaching curricula in the EU at all. Contrary to mendacious Kipper propaganda*, the EU is just not that kind of institution.
https://commission.europa.eu/education/policy-educational-issues_en
* To say nothing of lunatic American parareligious fantasising:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth
@LH, my argument is:
fluency depends on 1. schooling 2. exams and tests 3. the choice of strategy for translations.
Why do Tunisians know French so well? It were Tunisian elites who decided that Tunisians need it and made Tunisian school speak French. They also decided that Tunisians don’t need beards and Ramadan (and Tunisians were ready to do without beards but not without Ramadan).
It was not the French army. And not French cinema watched by bedouin boys and girls in the medina. The elites learned French, sciences, laïcité à la française and nationalism from the French and decided that Tunisians need this all.
As for Brussels, my guess (not “knowledge”) is that Brussels does work on linguistical “penetrability” of European space and on L2 fluency without naming the L2.
(What I know is that European kids learn 2 languages. That’s Brussels that wants Europeans to understand Europeans)
“beards” – a good example, by the way.
I’m not aware of beard bans (but not sure I would be aware of them). What I’m aware of is that Tunisians were (and maybe are?) required to shave for photographs.
And thus what could and was meant to be technicality was made a weapon.
I recall from the days of my youth being told that bearded people were not allowed to enter Albania (this was in Enver Hoxha’s day.) Apparently facilities for shaving were provided at the border, however.
There is quite a long tradition of various regimes associating beards with verboten brands of Islam, and persecuting the bearded accordingly.
The Emperor Julian would have sympathised with the victims:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misopogon
(French version because the philistine English version does not explain the context at all.)
Beards are ideological. There’s just no getting away from it.
Regardless of whatever reasons English came to have the enviable status that it has – being the only language in history that can legitimately claim to have achieved a truly globe-spanning presence –, I am happy that it was English that came to be that language because frankly it’s awesome. I feel it has many features that are sadly underappreciated. Among them are its minimal infection, its flexible word class conversion, the clear distinction between tense and aspect, the rigid yet expressive word order, a truly humongous hybrid vocabulary, an unusually high proportion of monosyllabic words, a certain conciseness (due to short words and minimalist morphology) so well tailored to advertising and journalism, its high productivity in compounding and phrasing and last but not least its neutral aesthetic for global audiences. Because English has been influenced by many languages it often feels less tied to single ethnic identity as well as more stylistically costumizable.
Beards were made a standin for undesirable ethnicity in one phase of national right-wing rhetoric here trying to skirt outright racism, with the statement that obviously no real Dane would want to be treated by a doctor with a full beard. (Think big noses and turbans with that). Little did they know that I was undanishly managing a central bit of Danish payment infrastructure at the time.
We actually had an exchange student in high school from Kosovo who was a refugee during the war, and we had our history class in English as an experimental programme — our history teacher was an exchange professor from the AUBG for an year. I’ve also recounted how my first high school history class went before that here previously : ВСОР. My first teacher was really intrusive and had to explain what ВСОР means — THE GREAT SOCIALIST PATRIOTC WAR practically shouting 🙂 — as in WWII from the Stalinist perspective.
I remember my father observing, many years ago, that since France’s North African colonies were so close to European France itself, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be a lot of French cultural influence in places like Algeria and Tunisia (as well as the reverse—African cultural influences in France). Obviously, what this has meant in practice during the period of decolonization and into the post-colonial era has been very different between Tunisia and Algeria. One may come up with plausible explanations for the differences (e. g.: “Tunisia is basically a city-state along pre-modern lines, but with an almost-three-thousand-year history of cosmopolitanism”), but those, while often suggestive or interesting, are likely to be unfalsifiable.
Hm, the link did not work. Can you delete it, Steve?
https://www.aubg.edu/region-selector/
seems to work, if this is what you meant.
Hm, it works now, for half an an hour ago.
Peter the “Great” was anti-beard w/o having any anti-Islamic axe to grind. Although maybe he would have made an exception for Julian the Apostate?
@JWB, as I told, a part of what distorts Russian perception of Muslims (and Islam, but*) is the problem of God and Allah.
Say: what does a Russian (a believer or an atheist) feel when looking at a church? A part of this is also what a Muslim feels when seeing a masjid. I remember a picture, the view (with a mosque) from a child’s room in an Egyptian primer. It does mean “mosque is a good thing” but it also means “mosque” is meant to be a comforting image. But when a Russian sees a mosque, the image is threatening. All you hear about Islam is 1. conquests 2. “an excessively strict religion”. And I think this “threatening” feeling is not analysed, but projected on Muslims: they’re people who choose threatening places to pray.
Russians understand that “Allah” is “God” but the Muslim practice of borrowing Arabic terms without translating them is a nice symbol of what I mean.
I deal with it by saying “religion” when what is meant by “Islam” is basically “the religion” or “her religion” and peculiarities of Islam are not really important in the context.
I have no idea if this has anything to do with Muslim practice or theology (it does has to do with the division between Europe and the Muslim world) but the Muslim world was not as technologically (and sceintifically) developed as Europe.
Nationalists thought that to develop the country they need to do something about their religion.
If peculiarities of Islam have to do with this, then I can also say “to do something about Islam”.
I don’t know about Peter. “His religion” does not tell men to wear beards, the sunnah does.
But:
– Europe (the Model) was not atheistic.
– I don’t know how, but customs and faith merge in believers’ minds. (not in mine)
So maybe his logic is similar…
___
* but I can’t know or understand what is “Islam” (ideal, Platonic). I can read the Quraan, but that’s “my interpretation of Quraan” (or even “what I read into Quraan”).
All I can and want to do is to understand how a given Muslim sees God.
If you believe wikipedia, back in the 1930’s Yemen introduced a tax on clean-shaven men, as the symmetric opposite of Petrine Russia’s tax on the bearded.
fluency depends on 1. schooling 2. exams and tests 3. the choice of strategy for translations.
Not true. Fluency depends on using the language, end of story. Plenty of people have years of schooling, exams, and tests and yet never learn the language. The only way to become fluent is to use it, and the reasons for that have nothing to do with school or bureaucracy.
All I can and want to do is to understand how a given Muslim sees God
I would suggest asking some, if you know them well enough. Sounds as if you probably do.
You’ll get quite a range of answers, just as you would if you asked Christians. The answers will vary just as much as mine would from J D Vance’s. (Well, perhaps not that far, if your Muslim acquaintances don’t trend so far into the Psychopathology of Religion, as I hope they don’t.)
Yemen introduced a tax on clean-shaven men
And quite right too. (Though exemptions should be granted on production of supporting medical evidence. One must temper justice with mercy.)
Fluency depends on using the language
Absolutely. Much like any other real-time skill.
Why do Tunisians know French so well? It were Tunisian elites who decided that Tunisians need it and made Tunisian school speak French. They also decided that Tunisians don’t need beards and Ramadan (and Tunisians were ready to do without beards but not without Ramadan).
It was not the French army. And not French cinema watched by bedouin boys and girls in the medina. The elites learned French, sciences, laïcité à la française and nationalism from the French and decided that Tunisians need this all.
But why did the Tunisian elites decide that? Because they grew up and had to learn French for their careers in a country colonized by France. And came away with a mindset that French was the language of progress and culture, that the Arabic language and Islam were holding back the development of the country, and that Tunisia had to become more European, mediated through French, if it was to have a future. So, the French army didn’t impose this, but military conquest was the first step that set a development in motion.
If Tunisia would have become a British colony, the predominant language would be English today.
“the Arabic language”
@Hans, as I told: Lebanon is the country where schoolkids suck at literary Arabic, or so I heard.
Tunisia (and I think Algeria? but it doesn’t attract tourists…) is a country I will recommend to any fus·ha learner. She will be able to find there local students able and willing to (comfortably) converse in it. Which is NOT “normal” for Arabic speakers.*
In 70s educated Algerians (speaking good fus·ha) complained at Egyptians who expected bad Arabic from “colonised” Algerians, complimented their Arabic etc. And in 10s a Egyptian complained to me that they (children of Egyptian elite, like him) who went to English schools don’t know literary Arabic well.
Normal Egyptians who go to normal schools do.
They take fus·ha seriously in Tunisia and Algeria.
Tunisia, Algeria… and I think Arabia, but I don’t really know anything about Dubai (maybe you can tell?) and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia repels tourists:)
* And which as LH seems to firmly believe has “nothing to do” with Tunisian schools and decisions of Tunisian elites:/
@Hans, you are talking about why the attitudes of the elites are so. I DO agree. I will also agree if you say that Bourguiba and Ben Ali and the moron* that runs it are boys while folks in Brussels can be girls.
But what LH says is attitudes of the folks in Brussels whatever they are don’t have any effect on English in Europe.
(IF you say that those folks aren’t as “elite” as Bourguiba in Tunisia, I will maybe agree. But LH was not talking about what shapes the attitudes of the “elites”, LH was talking about whether a given attitude can shape anything)
*not sure. You know what I think about what’s going on in my country and what I know about him made me unwilling to learn about him. I don’t want two depressive sights:)
@LH, er.
1. what about those Indians who complain that they don’t know thier L1 well?
This DOES have something to do with schooling. They grow up in schools where everyone speaks English to everyone.
2. what about those who have Latin or Greek in school? They don’t necessarily want it, and if the school did not teach it, they would NOT practice them.
3. do you realise that an educated Russian will fail at the exam for the Russian certificate (which an L2 student may need)?! I saw their C1 (not even C2). Maybe I can tell a texts written in 30s from a text written in 70s by its style, but one of the assignments was imitating a scandal with an imaginary guy in a train who gave you dirty bedsheets, making him call his boss and threatening this boss. And I don’t do that:) I do not threaten people.
4. what about China? Chinese schoolkids I met speak good English. With good accent.
Iranians do not.
Of course schooling is important; I didn’t say it wasn’t. My point is that schools can be mandated to teach kids some language the government thinks is important, but if the kids have no use for it they won’t learn it (cf. Irish in Ireland). For people to learn a language well en masse, they have to have a good reason to want to know it (good in their own terms, not the authorities’).
4. what about China? Chinese schoolkids I met speak good English. With good accent.
Was that mainland Chinese schoolkids? I haven’t travelled there since 80’s/90’s, but there seemed to be only fixed phrases.
In Taiwan, all kids are schooled in English (well, American). To Hat’s point, most of them lose it after school, except if they go on to work in ‘international’ professions. (Or Military service, where the equipment is US-supplied.)
There’s an older generation who kept up their American from when the place was full of GIs and exchange students.
These days, Japanese is as likely to be as useful as English: lots of (annoying to me) bip-bip-kapoww video games on their phones.
In Taiwan bip-bip-kapoww video games are of lingustic interest since the syllable “bip” is cromulent within the phonotactics of Taiwanese/Hokkien but not in Mandarin.
@Brett, by why “French” and not “Italian and also French, Greek, Spanish…”?
Note that Sicily spoke Tunisian Arabic (and the Vikings who controlled it also controlled a part of Tunisia).
Tabarka was Genovese. (not the part of Tunisia where tourists go)
I don’t know why “city-state”. Maybe Russia is… But from any perspective I think of I can name important places which are not the city of Tunis. Say, “the prestigeous” part is the Sahel and I think the capital. Same for “prestigeous dialects”. Sahel is its vertical (Eastern) coast with important port cities (and tourists, hotels etc.)
“not the part of Tunisia where tourists go”
The part where Tunisian tourists go. Snow, hiking in the forest. Houses with pitched roofs. Andalusians. (I mean the part of Tunisia, not Tabarka)
@LH make good Klingon necessary for everyone who wants to study computer science.
Make everyone take (a) a serious math exam (b) serious Klingon exam.
Everyone will learn it.
I’m disappointed by exams that Iranians who want to study in Europe take fo a reason. I know what it is to talk about sceince (and I don’t mean ‘linguistics’) in a langauge interlocutors don’t know well. It’s doable. And I think it is not scientific advisors tired of bright students who speak broken English who came up with the idea. I think it is bosses of their bosses of their bosses. But for an Iranian girl who’s good at sceinces and knows how to study sceinces and doesn’t know how to study languages not spoken in Iran this exam is a Serious Problem. Even earning the money she needs to pay for it is a problem. She will prepare to it for years, earn the money, pay, take it, fail, and prepare for years. Which is a depressive sight for me.
I’m not telling the idea is idiotic – I don’t know what they want and don’t know if I would disagree if I knew. But such things come from the above and have a serious effect on those below.
A Tunisian girl I know knew maybe 10 langauges when she was, say, 19 (I met her when she was 21 and wanted Russian). She says she “doesn’t know Italian”. But she speaks it, I retold that conversation here.
I think what you have in mind is mechanisms that work for her.
But I think the mechanisms of language shift (!!!) in Russia have to do with exams.
If you are satisfied with compulsory school and want a good job, you maybe need good Russian and a Russian school and school exams aren’t serious. (Or maybe (if you don’t speak Russian well) you’ll think your children will have same jobs as you and don’t need such a school).
But everyone thinks that a degree is also necessesary. What I hear (from those who do speak good Russian and whose children speak it too) is that if their children won’t go to a Russian school, children from Russian schools will outcompete them.
I remember even complaints (and a scandal) about symbolic Buryat lesson in a school in Buryatia. I don’t know why “music” lessons don’t lead to this:/ I think one can find in the curriculum lessons which are ballast from any (‘copmetetiveness’ and ‘development’) perspective. One approach schools that want the status of “good” or “prestigeous” take is having lessons like “ballroom dance”. But it’s the symbolic language lesson that leads to scandals.
Russia is not Korea (where exam preparations are scary). But everything depends on how well you perform at the exam. Your carreer, who you will marry, whether you go to the army or not. (Unlike in Korea, prestige of the degree isn’t a part of it).
Everyone thinks about this competition. Competition for jobs is not understood as a competition, it is thought about in terms of “having” the skill, knowledge experience and acquitances, and a failure is not scary.
Everyone will learn it.
No they won’t, they’ll learn exactly enough to pass the exam and then forget it.
LH, English is taught to toddlers in Moscow. I mean, your daughter is 3 and you think she must attend some секция or кружок and you find a convenient place with those and they have 10 and three of them suit your daughter who’s 3, namely ‘art’, something strange meant to develop her math skills and ‘English’. And your daughter tries them all.
This hardly has anything to do with exams. Everyone thinks English is a “good thing”.
But you seem to think that when one wants to succeed in an English exam or whats her child to succeed, she hires a Highly Professional tutor who knows how to teach “exam preparation” without teaching English.
And doesn’t, say, talk to me to practice her English (I DO warn that my English sucks:)) or watch films. If she’s 18. Or go to such секции if 3.
Ghanaians learn English at school for the most part, but this largely happens because English is the working language of schools beyond the most elementary level, and children pick it up in the same kind of way they assimilate other languages they are regularly exposed to. The result is that Ghanaian English is very much a recognisable thing, despite relatively few Ghanaians being L1 speakers (at least, in the sense that Europeans usually give to “L1.”)
My wife’s experience of teaching French in Ghana, on the other hand, was pretty similar to teaching it in the UK (though the pupils were on average better-behaved, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for the subject, what with us living within spitting distance of two officially-Francophone countries.)
I was taught English privately when I was five, a year before I started formal education. It was actually good — we used IPA, for example. EDIT: I think we stared using IPA at six.
But you seem to think that when one wants to succeed in an English exam or whats her child to succeed, she hires a Highly Professional tutor who knows how to teach “exam preparation” without teaching English.
Good lord, I don’t think anything like that. You don’t seem to be able to understand what other people are saying.
@LH, you can’t read or watch anything in Klingon (even though if everyone studied it even for an exam, that could and would change).
But this is a conversation about English, not Klingon.
Normally Russians don’t read in it and don’t watch films in it. But I don’t understand why a Russian experienced in both things won’t do it.
You either think that itis possible to succeed at those proficiency tests without really knowing English – or that normal preparation to them doesn’t involve listening to English, reading in English, writing in English and speaking English.
You have to pay to take such a test, so you won’t do it ‘for fun’. But if you did, your result would surprise you, I think. I saw (on a forum) how English speakers took a test that L2-speakers from that forum take (to post the result in their profiles).
Those tests are serious.
Mandarin would be a considerably more widespread foreign language (as L3, L4, or even L2) if not for the writing system. If you don’t sit down every day and write a line of every character you know, you forget most of them very quickly, and learning them the first time was already hard enough.
As I’ve mentioned before, the younger generations have been turning English into the de facto national language of both Belgium and Switzerland. Meanwhile, 50-year-olds in Spain still cannot be assumed to know any English, just like in East Germany.
On Esperanto, I’m obliged to mention la Ranto. Excerpt:
At one point in the 1920s, Switzerland apparently almost started teaching it in schools. Then it noticed it would just end up giving itself a national language, and recoiled in horror.
The fact that the US was pretty much all that was left standing after WWII – in business, in culture (Hollywood, rock & roll), in science, anything I can think of at this hour. The only other reasonably thriving countries at the time, all of them numerically insignificant on the global scale, were also anglophone (Canada, Australia, NZ, not sure if South Africa counts) or getting bogged down in military coups & stuff (Argentina).
I don’t think this would be much different if the US had decided not to get involved in WWII in Europe and Stalin had reached Gibraltar in ’46 or ’47 (while exhausting his empire in the process even more than he really did).
I more or less agree with the rest of the list, but this one has me stunned. English has a separate form for each combination of tense and aspect, yes, but the aspects are different ones in different tenses. The difference between I am doing and I was doing is not even comparable to the one between I am doing and I have been doing. The difference between I was and I have been is one of aspect that cannot be expressed in the present or future (and, BTW, doesn’t seem to be grammaticalized in any other language in Europe; I’m told it’s more of a West African thing). The difference between I do and I am doing (similarly restricted in Europe to English, Dutch and western German AFAIK) is completely orthogonal to that between I have done and I have been doing. And so on. The tense/aspect system took me years to learn, and was expected (by the makers of the curriculum and the textbooks) to take years to learn – and I was coming from German, which at least has cognates of all the tenses, participles and auxiliary verbs to the point that the same verbs are often irregular in the same ways in both languages.
I don’t think this would be much different if the US had decided not to get involved in WWII in Europe and Stalin had reached Gibraltar in ’46 or ’47 (while exhausting his empire in the process even more than he really did).
It wouldn’t have made a difference in Oceania, but it would have made an enormous difference in Eurasia 🙂
In any case, while intrinsic difficulties may deter the casual learner, I doubt that they play a role in which language becomes the pre-eminent language of a cultural sphere or the world. Old Irish written in a combination of Chinese script and Pahlavi could become the world’s pre-eminent language if it’s speakers would form the world’s pre-eminent political, economic and cultural power.
@D.M.
English has two inflectional tenses and several periphrastic aspectual constructions. This does create a fairly neat analytical separation: tense is morphological; aspect is mostly expressed periphrastically.
Sure, this can take years to master completely but it’s still a more efficient system for global audiences to learn than having to grapple with the complexities of a system that has a strict perfective vs. imperfective verb system built into the lexicon itself or which fuses tense and aspect into single morphemes or which doesn’t separate them at all.
The part of English that I believe is prohibitively complex for a language with a global user base is rather its phonology. When you couple that with its awful mess of an orthography and the refusal to do some sort of reform, it gets worse.
[One paragraph of historical commentary deleted. Seriously, don’t do that. –LH]
“Mostly” in that the distinction between the past tense (inflectional) and the present perfect (periphrastic) is itself aspectual, and that the inflectional tenses without periphrastic additions express completely different aspects: the present is habitual, but the past is vaguely perfective, and the habitual past is expressed with used to, a construction that doesn’t have (or need) a present-tense form. I wouldn’t call that “mostly”.
The obvious alternative is making all these distinctions optional and leaving them all to the lexicon (and context) instead of the morphology (periphrasis included). Mandarin does that for tense, not too western German does it for aspect.
not too western German does it for aspect
Could you expound on that a little?
German (as She is Spoke) doesn’t grammaticalise aspect (in the perfective/imperfective sense) at all. And good luck to the Germans! Why should they grammaticalise aspect if they don’t want to? Eh?
I feel compelled to mention that Kusaal makes all the tense and aspect distinctions that English does*, but in a significantly more transparent and regular way.
* OK, not the “I am living/I have been living” thing. But then, English doesn’t have an earlier-today-but-not-any-more past tense. You pays your money …
But what happens when you cross the boundary from not-too-western to too-western German?
One presumes that they have been corrupted by the aspect-loving French. Napoleon is to blame.
now i’m idly wondering where the line between too-western and not-too-western germans falls in relation to the line between what alexis manaster ramer, in his case for the polygenesis of western yiddish, calls “westerly yiddish” and “easterly yiddish” (“either along or west (perhaps quite far west) of the Elbe” – corresponding emicly to “ashkenaz” and “poyln”).
Well then, WP says,
Also, are the German perfect and preterite really semantically about the same, as that WP article says? Or is there a trace of aspectual distinction there?
It is never used in writing unless you are trying to represent unenducated speech. The people using it in speaking are a subset of the people who don’t have a distinction in pronunciation between the palatal allophone of ch and sch — which was still unremarkable in the speech of Konrad Adenauer, while people would make merciless fun of Helmut Kohl (who had a doctor in history) not being able to properly pronounce Geschichte.
I have been living in the Rheinland all my life, and I only encountered the rheinische Verlaufsform when I was about ten years old and started learning English at the Gymnasium. One boy suggested this as a German equivalent of the English progressive forms, and the English teacher (who had become fascinated with English language and culture as a POW in the after-war years) told him that that was not proper Hochdeutsch. I found that usage strange and alien.
Yes, in the first approximation, at least. The preterite is rare (but not unknown) in everyday spoken German. There you can hardly go wrong not worrying and only using the perfect tense. Written German is another matter. There are differences in usage (I once read a fat book about that, decades ago), and it has been pointed out that the typical situations where you would use the preterite in written German (in narrative prose, primarily) hardly occur in everyday spoken language, which is why the preterite is rare in spoken usage. But at least as far as I remember, the preterite was never strange for me as a kid: for one thing it was the normal form used when parents told their children stories (fairy tales). And my parents had no higher education; just the eight years of Volksschule obligatory when they were children.
@D.M
Saying ‘mostly’ is still accurate because the only aspectual distinctions English grammatically marks are all done with auxiliaries. The progressive aspect is marked with be + V-ing. No auxiliary means no progressive. The perfect aspect is marked with have + V-en. Again, no auxiliary equals no (clear) perfective aspect. The perfect progressive is marked with have + been + V-ing. The habitual past with used to + bare verb. The prospective aspect is marked with the likes of be going to or will, or shall (though shall is gehoben everywhere expect in Scotland I think). The continuous variation of the prospective adds be + V-ing to the base auxiliary. The default aspect, i.e. where no auxiliary construction appears is always habitual in the present and in the past it’s either vaguely habitual or vaguely perfective depending on context; the simple past is normally employed where a clear aspectual distinction in the past is deemed superfluous by the speaker.
The fact that you need the used to construction to clearly express habitual past just underlines how impoverished English is in inflectional aspect, which is actually a good thing from the perspective of the average international learner. Everybody finds it comparatively easier to deal with auxiliary constructions than a whole heap of inflectional bullshit. Other languages like German or Mandarin deal better with aspect but they bother us with other sorts of bullshit like the weird particle system in the former or the resultative verb compounds in the latter.
So all in all, when it comes to picking a natural language well suited to the demands of a global audience for simplicity, it’s hard to score a lot better than English. Its only serious problem from that perspective is its complex phonology and messy orthography. And for some reason, modern written English seems stylistically impoverished compared to the texts I find from the 19th century up until the 60s.
Fun fact: I said to you previously (in a deleted paragraph) ‘I won’t be replying to your arguments’. Initially I had written ‘I won’t reply to your arguments’ but my grammatical instinct kept bugging me that the ‘more correct’ way to put it is ‘I won’t be replying’ even though both formulations are essentially equivalent semantically. That’s an example of the tyranny of grammaticalized aspectual distinctions. Even when they’re optional they almost feel mandatory.
>the verb sein (“to be”) + am (“at the”) + verbal noun
I get that a true translation of this will give a present progressive. I think it’s interesting how close it is semantically to “What are you up to?”, a formation that isn’t particularly productive in English, with the usage basically limited to that question, and the reply “up to no(thing) good.”
@Ryan
I think the corresponding English form would be something like “at play”, which also does not have too many examples, unless the a’ in older English or dialect (e.g., I’m a’ going / a’ coming home, etc.) is the same.
As ulr says, the perfect is just the normal way to express the past in standard German. You could almost get by without knowing the preterite at all, except with the verb sein. The war– forms in the preterite (suppletive, but the suppletion happened way back in proto-Germainic; the preterite forms were taken from a verb meaning “remain”) are much more common than the preterites of other verbs. Nor are there any contextual restrictions on them (that I know of), like the use of preterites for narration.
@Ryan, PP:
The Welsh periphrastic present is presumably of some kind of similar origin, as in mae’r aderyn yn canu “the bird is singing”, though the Welsh construction actually isn’t limited by aspect: this means “the bird sings” too. The construction has pushed the old synthetic inflected present/future, here canaf etc, into just referring to the future (“I will sing”), with just a handful of holdouts.
The yn before the verbal noun canu is of unclear origin: it doesn’t have the following nasal mutation of yn “in” (= Latin in etc), and is also of a different origin from the yn used predicatively in e.g. mae’r aderyn yn goch “the bird is red”: that one was int in Old Welsh, and was maybe from some form of the definite article (nobody really knows.)
It’s remarkable that some of the most basic grammatical words in Welsh are an outright mystery. Come to that, (y) mae “is” seems to be a mystery too. I vaguely recall reading some implausible attempt to make it into some oblique form of a pronoun, like the Sanskrit dative asmai.
As ulr says, the perfect is just the normal way to express the past in standard German. You could almost get by without knowing the preterite at all, except with the verb sein.
There is a difference between Southern and Northern colloquial German here – in Southern German, vaguely South of the Main river, the simple past is a purely literary phenomenon and outside of the formation of periphrastic tenses, only the perfect is used. DM can probably describe that in more detail. In the North, the simple past is used in colloquial speech, but in less contexts than in literary German and it is much rarer than in English. For that reason, Germans tend to over-use the perfect when speaking English.
@ulr: I grew up with the “Rheinische Verlaufsform”, and so I use it in writing with some verbs in the infinitive without complement (am Essen, am Schlafen, am Arbeiten), but not with objects (ein Brot am Essen), which I reserve for spoken, familiar situations, and I recoil from Ruhrpott monstrosities like double am (am auf am Bauen).
don’t have a distinction in pronunciation between the palatal allophone of ch and sch
well! that’s actually one of the elements in manaster ramer’s argument about the monogenesis of yiddish and the polygenesis of “western yiddish” – and if i remember right, the difference in “iç-laut” is one of the ones defining that “westerly/easterly” separation.
an isogloss, an isogloss, a kinda matching isogloss!
we’ve quips and quibbles, lost in sauce
but nonetheless an isogloss
which i kinda think is, oddly, an totally ambiguous contribution to the rhine/danube debate about the point of origin, but might be able to be indicate some things about timing that could be helpful. if i get around to reading the full manaster ramer paper again, maybe i’ll go on to dovid katz’s bney hes/bney khes paper too.
FWIW, Danish expresses the progressive in the same way as (colloquial) Western German:
jeg reparerer bilen = ‘I fix the car’ / ‘I’ll fix the car’
jeg er ved at reparere bilen = ‘I’m fixing the car’.
It is of course unremarkable that a language should have an adverbial way of expressing some TAM category that’s not in the verb conjugation as such, I only mention this because it’s parallel to the WG form. (Not totally parallel, ved at <infinitive> is more like beim <infinitive> — or since DM capitalized it, is it that weird other verbal noun that wikt.en call the ‘gerund’ and wikt.de call die Konversion des Infinitivs des Verbs.
In Danish we have yet another form, which would be repareren if it could be used in this construction and which is weird-and-wonderfully called the centaur form in linguistic texts, but English conflated it with the present participle and a third deverbal noun (nomen actionis). I’m guessing that it fell together with the infinitive in German, except for being a Noun and making school children hate capitalization rules.
(OT: This seems to be written by a young person for whom non-participial adjectival complements of blive do not concord in gender with the subject. It’s blevet produktivt! Shakes cane. [Past participles lost their common gender forms before my time, but Swedish still has them for strong verbs]).
You get utterly baffled by the construction with an object (ich bin das Auto am Reparieren, ich bin ein Buch am Lesen) and are probably misunderstood a few times because you don’t know the whole Verlaufsform is grammaticalized and not optional.
More on that: 1) it extends along the whole Rhine, well into Switzerland; 2) without an object it occurs elsewhere, but it’s neither fixed in usage nor in form (beim is more common than am, but both occur, where I’m from).
That reminds me of Russian, where the imperfective form of the present is simply the present (…indicative), while the perfective form of the present is the perfective aspect of the future (and the imperfective aspect of the future is periphrastic).
I’ll try…
There seems to be a northerly realm where people generally talk in the passé simple, and when implicitly asked why (on Wikipedia talk pages), they say “it’s shorter”. Which it is.
Then, apparently, comes a zone including Berlin, where people merrily tell each other things like du sagtest, du dachtest, du fandest, but resort to the passé composé for rarer verbs or something.
As you go south, I think, more and more rare or irregular verbs abandon their passé simple forms. (This is actually true of the dialects, according to a map I once saw.)
In the entire south, the passé simple is extremely limited: to “be” and “want” in Bavarian dialects probably generally, entirely absent in Alemannic ones, and mostly likewise in Standard and Standard-approaching registers as spoken in these areas. The “be” and “want” forms are much more common than their composés equivalents, but nonetheless mean exactly the same thing. Konnte and ging, and I think hatte, have been sort of experimentally introduced in recent iterations of Viennese mesolect (this millennium). Hatte in speaking is alien to me, which means I avoid the pluperfect wholesale (my dialect has it, but mechanically replaces it by habe […] gehabt, meaning three words instead of two, which is too obviously dialectal to use near the standard). And that’s not just me.
We’re familiar with the first- and third-person forms of the passé simple from reading, but the second person, which hardly occurs in written narrative, remains utterly exotic; saying du sagtest, du dachtest, du fandest where I’m from would be like, well, showing up in Paris in this year 75 After Present and casually dropping second-person forms of the actual passé simple into casual speech. Or some imparfait du subjonctif for that matter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In writing, the considerations are:
1) The default tense for narrative is the passé simple.
2) For stylistic effects, you can also narrate in the present or the passé composé, but you have to pick one tense and stick with it throughout the whole story, something that would turn ungrammatical in English after two or three sentences!
3) The obvious exception to 2) is when you refer to anything that happened before the narrative. In that case, a good old consecutio temporum applies*: narration in present, earlier events in passé composé; narration in passé simple, earlier events in past perfect; narration in passé composé (very rare), eh, well, you have to resort to the pluperfect because that’s all there is.
I think that’s the complete list.
The names used in school (some of them are also used in foreign-language teaching) are all misleading. The passé simple is called Mitvergangenheit (“with-past”, as if meant to vaguely hint at unspecified aspectual shenanigans that don’t exist) or Präteritum (implying it is the past, which is sort of true in writing), probably not Imperfekt anymore (that must have been purely due to lining up the six German tenses with the six Latin tenses); the passé composé is called Vergangenheit (“past”, see above for implications) or Perfekt (lining up with Latin again).
Once in elementary school, a teacher was asked if there’s a difference and briefly said that the Mitvergangenheit was a recent and the Vergangenheit a remote past; something about last week. She never followed up on this plain falsehood, never used them that way herself (trivially – she didn’t speak in the passé simple!), never corrected anyone’s essays that way that I noticed (no surprise – you have to stick with one tense throughout, and for that she did correct), and altogether she and the whole class seem to have forgotten immediately. I’ve never encountered this myth again. Iä! Iä!
* Quite possibly copied from Latin in the 17th century or something, but I don’t know. Called Zeitenfolge, a calque.
I didn’t even know that one.
I had to; am, beim = an dem, bei dem, containing an article that shows a noun is coming.
More on lack of aspect in German: other constructions that are grammaticalized in English, like “be about to”, are left to the lexicon in German. “I’ve been doing this for three weeks” goes ich mache das seit drei Wochen, literally “I do that since three weeks”.
There is a verb prefix that could have developed into a perfective or completive aspect or some such. But it didn’t: as productive as er- is in some dialects, it still means “to successful completion” and cannot be put on just any verb.
The last remnants of the present participle could have developed into an inchoative aspect in my dialect. But they didn’t; regnend werden “begin to rain” and brennend werden “catch fire” are lexicalized, this construction is never extended to kochend “boiling” or stinkend “stinking” that I’ve noticed, and most verbs simply lack a present participle.
Kusaal has a present, an earlier-today past (with a separate earlier-today-but-no-longer past), a yesterday past, a before-yesterday past, and a before-before-yesterday past; a tomorrow-future, and a day-after-tomorrow future. All of these are compatible with either perfective or imperfective aspect. Yet further tense/aspect distinctions can be made by focusing tense (a thing which happens in some Bantu languages, too.)
Several Bantu languages are similarly well-endowed when it comes to tenses (Derek Nurse wrote a whole Damned Thick Square Book entirely about tense and aspect in Bantu), though this kind of exuberance seems to be relatively uncommon in West Africa.
We discussed this before once (inevitably): I remember the complications that can arise in Bantu tense systems from different ideas about where one day ends and another begins (sunrise, sunset, midnight …)
So you never saw/heard Jürgen von Manger play Adolf Tegtmeier? That’s pure Ruhrpottdeutsch.
A term I have never heard or read. The only name for this tense in German I know is Perfekt.
This HAVE + object + perfect participle construction with strictly resultative aspect (e.g. habeo litteras scriptas – I have the letters done and ready) devolving into the familiar HAVE + perfect participle in Romance is a development we see in unrelated languages globally. But I think that contact between Romance and Germanic speakers in late antiquity and the early medieval period likely reinforced and accelerated the development of those garrulous HAVE-perfects in continental Germanic. Fun fact: despite coming from Austria where such forms are never used colloquially, the infamous dictator clearly preferred to use the Präteritum forms for some odd reason, even the archaic ones (e.g. frug instead of fragte).
No. We did get ZDF, but he was before my time.
No, the other one. Perfekt = Vergangenheit; Imperfekt = Präteritum = Mitvergangenheit.
Yes, that seems to be textbook wisdom nowadays. I’ve also encountered the idea that a Greek construction with an active past participle was at the start of it all.
His speeches/screeches were all in the written register, so this is entirely unremarkable. There’s only one recording of him where he even uses his normal speaking voice (and his accent oscillates); it’s on YouTube somewhere.
That one’s not archaic, it’s an innovation of a particular area on the Rhine.
@DM, so it’s Die Zug hat ausgefallen gehabt where Northern would have Die Zug fiel aus? (This is very relevant when you’re waiting for the last train to Hamburg after a nonconsensual layover in Kassel. I used the latter formulation as my explanation when asking for a refund on my non-cancellable hotel booking in Hamburg, and I got it).
Or is it Die Zug ist ausgefallen gewesen or something? I seem to remember that the nice lady on the tannoys said ist ausgefallen about all the departures.
Nächster Halt Kassel. Die Zug fährt nicht weiter, bitte steigen Alle aus!
e.g. frug instead of fragte
And looking up fragen I discover there’s an English cognate frain (OED s.v. frayne | freyne, Obsolete exc. dialect.: 1803 “Frayn’d by the knight, they told, a beautious maid..Was borne a prisoner”).
I checked a transcript of the recording, even in this colloquial setting he seems to be fond of the Präteritum.
‘Da sagte ich ihm, einen weiteren Krieg in der Ostsee würden wir nicht mehr als passive Zuschauer hinnehmen können. Da frug er mich, wie unsere Stellung in Rumänien sei.’
He tends to employ the Perfekt where the perfective aspect is strongly emphasized, often accompanied by words like nie or immer.
‘Wir haben nie etwas gehört daß Sie die Absicht haben, daß Sie Rumänien überfallen wollen. Sie haben immer gesagt, daß Bessarabien ihnen gehört, aber sie haben doch nie erklärt, daß Sie Rumänien überfallen wollen.’
Hitler clearly made a great deal of effort in his youth to shed his unillustrious Waldviertler background and speak what he thought was a more sophisticated “Hochdeutsch”. As an autodidact with pretensions of grandeur, it is not surprising he overshot the mark and tended to speak in an artificial register. “Mein Kampf” illustrates that very clearly – the language is stiiff and overwritten. He also wasn’t the sort to participate in the easy give and take of colloquial spoken language, even during his Vienna phase contemporaries describe him as a young man who would launch into long monologues rather than converse. Again, speaking in what he probably thought of as a more literary “sophisticated” language.
Simple: der Zug fiel aus
Composé: der Zug ist ausgefallen (not distinguishable from the, uh, stative passive of the present tense)
Plusqueparfait: der Zug war ausgefallen
Periphrasis of the latter in southern dialects, not grammatical in the standard: der Zug ist ausgefallen gewesen
Sei is not remotely colloquial. This is the register of written narrative, spoken as appropriate to diplomatic correspondence.
There maaaaay be (I’ve wondered about this before, in other contexts) a hint of using the passé composé to look at the past from the perspective of the present, as opposed to using simple for self-contained narrative. Or I’m interpreting English into all this. In any case, this quote is not narrative, it’s not a speech, it’s intended as part of an actual conversation, so colloquial enough for the composé.
Innviertler. The Waldviertel is the northwestern quarter of Lower Austria; western Upper Austria including Braunau is the Innviertel – which indeed has a few peculiarities, e.g. [s]- > [h]- (shared with parts of Bavaria across the Inn) and [ʏ] > [ui̯] (shared with Bavaria generally). It only became lastingly Austrian in 1816.
Sei is not remotely colloquial.
It’s possible that it still was in at least some varieties of German 90 years ago. Substitution of the Konjunktiv I by either the indicative or the Konjuktiv II in reported speech is an ongoing process in German that has now reached formal registers where it was unusual 50 years ago (like radio or TV news).
@ulr 21/11:05.20
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upJrQ5tUExE
~13.00 “die diese komische Berufe am s(S)tudieren sind”
I really had to listen to a lot of his recordings to obtain this, it seems he either consciously avoids it or feels it does not suit his declamatory, “Wutbürger/Querulant” speaking style (too “heimelig”?)
The Waldviertel is the northwestern quarter of Lower Austria
I know. This is where Hitler’s family actually comes from, and it was far less respectable than the Innviertel. So embarrassing that Hitler apparently had his father’s village of Döllersheim wiped off the map and turned into a military exercise area.
I have no idea what his native dialect was, but given that his mother was also a Waldviertler and he wasn’t the most social child, probably a lot closer to Waldviertel than Innviertel.
I was reading Peiper’s War by Danny Parker and found this oddity:
As far as I know, ‘Hott’ means nothing in German and certainly not ‘horse drawn’ which would be pferdegezogen. I guess they called themselves hü hott or hotte hü which are equestrian commands like gee up or giddy up. I’ve heard German equestrians shout a plain ‘hü’ but never plain ‘hott’. It was always hü hott or hotte hü.
@cj
Any relation to Armeegruppe Hoth?
Oh. Truppenübungsplatz Allentsteig? That still exists!
Confirming everything about hü & hott.
The first sentence doesn’t follow from the second. The Konjunktiv I did survive long enough to give us a formally 3rd-person imperative – seien Sie – but that must have happened a few centuries ago, and the complete replacement of sind by seien [sãn] in Bavarian dialects could well be older still. Have you ever encountered anything but the indicative in colloquial reported speech?
Would mostly end up with a long vowel; th is generally equated with t, not with tt.
On Hott, see the German WP, scroll down to Hüst und Hott. So Hott alone means “to the right”. But I guess there also was regional variation. Most people nowadays know only the saying Mal Hü, mal Hott sagen “being inconsistent in one’s answers / wishes / instructions” and Hottehü as a children’s word for “horse” (both mentioned in the WP article).
Any relation to Armeegruppe Hoth?
The existence of that may have played a role in the coining. While, as DM said, the vowel length is different between the two words, it’s close enough for a pun.
@DM: One the subjunctive: one can of course explain any use of the subjunctive I in colloquial speech as intrusion from the literary register. There are also people whose colloquial German is close to the literary Standard; mine is in many aspects, including use of the subjunctive. I don’t know when the subjunctive I started to vanish from the dialects, maybe it was much earlier than the 20th century everywhere. But I also think it’s possible that 90 years ago, there were more bürgerliche speakers whose colloquial speech was close enough to the literary Standard that use of the subjunctive I came to them naturally.
The subjunctive is also still part of my everyday language. The Konjunktiv II (usually in analytic forms with würde) is (in my experience) quite common in everyday speech, even where standard grammar would demand the Konjunktiv I. I remember someone writing about how important the subtle use of the subjunctive was for the language of Günter Grass, which I at least wouldn’t call archaic. If you read 19th century German texts, you’ll find a much more extended use of the subjunctive which in part at least seems to be an imitation of Latin usage.
Yes, yes, but that’s writing, not speaking; I use it in halfway formal writing myself, but I really have a hard time imagining anyone speaking like that, except of course for speaking in the written register (speeches, reading aloud…).
(Konjunktiv II, on the other hand, is actually more common in dialects that have mostly or entirely lost the passé simple than in the standard – there’s nothing left to confuse it with even in regular verbs.)
@ulr If you read 19th century German texts, you’ll find a much more extended use of the subjunctive which in part at least seems to be an imitation of Latin usage.
Does that mean the German subjunctive was invented out of thin air at some point? Or that someone took a set of forms that had fallen out of use, and repurposed them as subjunctive?
I feel compelled to mention that Kusaal makes all the tense and aspect distinctions that English does*, but in a significantly more transparent and regular way.
I have a feeling in my bones we’re about to find out about the Kusaal subjunctive, and its influence on ASE.
(I remember struggling through the subjunctive in Latin Grammar at school, with no real understanding what it was all about. Would that it were as transparent and regular as Kusaal.)
No, it means that the range of uses of the “present” subjunctive, Konjunktiv I, may have been modified (most likely extended) in some registers of written German based on the Latin example.
Well, it’s not lost entirely; the “present” subjunctive is marked by absence of 3sg -s, in particular be as in if there be. The “past” subjunctive has merged in form with the actual-past indicative except for the last remnants of if I were, but its usage doesn’t seem to have contracted at all.
No, not at all. Just that I found in reading 19th century non-literary prose I sometimes found usages of the subjunctive that seemed somehow unnatural but apparently followed the rules for using the subjunctive in Latin. Let us not forget that this was a time when Abiturienten were expected to write an essay in quasi-Ciceronian Latin.
(Abitur = the exam at the end of Gymnasium that gives you the right to study at a university. Comparable to A-levels in the UK and the bac(calauréat) in France. Called Matura in Austria through Poland.)
I have a feeling in my bones we’re about to find out about the Kusaal subjunctive, and its influence on ASE
Breathe again! There isn’t one. (Only a non-main-clause imperative, formally identical with the indicative.)
The English subjunctive is alive and well in Early Modern English. You can find it all over the place in the KJV.
Literary Welsh has a subjunctive, at least in principle, but it disappeared in spoken Welsh at much the same rate as in English, and similarly survives nowadays only in set expressions.
Modern Welsh speakers have no real feel for it. Ifor Williams had to explain (to readers of modern Literary Welsh) in his notes to Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi that the proverbial a fo ben bid bont actually means (or at least, originally meant, in Middle Welsh) “let him who is a chief be a bridge”, and not “let him who would be a chief be a bridge.”* Bo/fo is only subjunctive because it’s in a subordinate clause.
* Bendigeidfran is a chief when he says this. Also a giant, which is handy if you’re planning to be a bridge. You’re kinda half way there already.
The English subjunctive is alive and well in Early Modern English. You can find it all over the place in the KJV.
Thanks, but I’m not convinced the second sentence supports the first. Didn’t the KJV use deliberately archaic [**] English? In the way Shakespeare didn’t.
[**] That is, verily archaic relative to 1611. It may come to pass Thy Mileage Might Differ.
Would that it were as transparent and regular as Kusaal
Western Oti-Volta in general has a delightfully simple verb conjugation system, unlike most of Oti-Volta, where your best bet with verb aspect is just to memorise all the aspect forms individually for each verb that you learn. Bad as Russian …
And Kusaal noun plurals are just as easy as in Welsh! Easier than Arabic, even!
(Sadly, Kusaal external sandhi makes Sanskrit sandhi look straightforward. But you can’t have everything.)
Didn’t the KJV use deliberately archaic English?
Yes it did. But
(a) that’s still Early Modern English*
(b) you can, in fact, find subjunctives everywhere in Shakespeare, too. WP is just wrong.
* Early Modern Welsh traditionally starts with Dafydd ap Gwilym, who was about a generation older than Chaucer. The English are so addicted to the latest linguistic novelties … I blame texting.
By morphic resonance, I’ve just been revising my views on the historical origin of the word-level tone allocation rules in Western Oti-Volta, having seen a plausible way to answer what I previously thought were insuperable objections to the views of George Akanlig-Pare and Michael Kenstowicz (which are generally taken as valid by the five other people in the world who have ever thought about this question at all.).
This makes me very happy, but also seems to refute my beautiful theory about how Western Oti-Volta ended up with such a simple conjugation system (which proposed replacement of the old nasty irregular imperfective formation with a nice simple system based on using deverbal adjectives predicatively as finite verbs. Unfortunately my fix for A-P & K seems to imply that the verb forms can’t be derived from the adjectives after all …)
Bummer.
Exactly! Your sympathy is much appreciated.
The whole question of conjugation in proto-Oti-Volta is highly problematic. Manessy, the Moses of Gur historical comparative studies, basically gave it up as a bad job. Possibly every generation must learn the lesson anew …
[Actually, I think he gave up much too easily. Excelsior!]
Ah, that’s Latin/Romance-level subjunctive. I don’t know if German ever did this. Wer ein Häuptling sei, sei eine Brücke is – it took me a while – grammatical in a properly archaic register, but would have to mean “whosoever might be a chief should be a bridge” and could hardly refer to the concrete situation. (The second sei, with its straightforwardly optative function, is merely literary as opposed to properly archaic.)