Tim James likes English. He likes it so much he doesn’t want to offer drivers license tests in any other languages. He thinks enough people will agree that he’s made a campaign ad based on it:
Yeah, I’m sure it’s the businessman in him. This spoof says what he wants to say better though:
It’s nice to have a badge.
(via)
which one was the parody?
I’m honestly sitting here trying to think of ways this would save money and I’m coming up with complete blanks. All I can think of is that it would cost MORE money because you’d have to spend time and money educating those folks who don’t know how to speak English how to speak English.
Or those people don’t get licensed.. which I think is more where he’s trying to go.
Next thing you know, they’ll all be wearing yellow stars.
Yeah, but then they don’t pay for the tests/registration, which is a net loss.
Or maybe they should foot the bill for their own damn ESL classes….
The obvious saving is that you don’t need to print up the textbooks in 12 languages, but that’s going to be a vanishingly small amount of money, compared to paying unemployment to people who can’t get a job because there’s no public transport, and they can’t get a licence…
Yeah, or hire interpreters to hang around the testing stations. I would hope they’d at least use up all the multi-language materials already printed.
If they don’t speak the language of Jesus, as shown in the King James Bible, then they are not real US Americans.
Oh yeah? oh yeah? You be gone sorry when those muslin non-merkins lable there boms in foreign and are boys cant deef… difunz… turn em off cuz they dont speak muslin.
HaHa! I live in Alabama and I will confess that Tim James is running against Judge Roy Moore of the Ten Commandments fame! Oh, the other Republican possibility (gasp) endorses the teaching of evolution in public schools (Bradley Byrne).You can imagine how popular he is. Yes, it is loads of fun living in the Bible Belt. Is anyone in the market for a 5 bedroom house on a cul d sac? This is my first post on the forum so I want to tell y’all how much I enjoy reading it. We atheists in Alabama need ALOT of encouragement!
No, he doesn’t. That was a vicious slander put about by his political opponents, and he’s been quick to refute the charges.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/05/alabama_suffers_some_more.php
HAHAHA! That spoof was hilarious! I love the ackward transitions.
It would make more sense to give the test in whatever Native American language got wiped out by colonists. Giant toolwad.
“This is Alabama. We speak 12 languages. If you wanna live here, learn one of them”.
A far more accurate statement.
Mathematics is one of dem foreign words ,too Gov. Parody
Algebra is an Arabic word?!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
[/snicker]
I love the way he says ‘learn it’. He’s trying to be polite but failing horribly and is barely holding in the ‘ENGLISH. LEARN IT.’
Who comes up with these ideas? Is Tim James really that moronic or are his advisors just playing a practical joke and he didn’t catch it? Hell.. I should run for Governor. If idiots can do it than anybody can.
Well, I don’t know. I have this CRAZY idea that when you move to a different country, it’s your goddamn JOB to learn the local language. After all, if I were to move to, say, Japan, I’d learn Japanese, instead of demanding that they cater to my white ass and print everything in English.
Is it really so wrong to expect immigrants to learn English?
Most things in Japan are printed in English and I can get forms and the trash rules in English if I so desire. Also in Japan most districts have free or very low cost Japanese classes. Plus the city hall where I live has an immigrant office where those who speak Chinese, Korean, English…etc can go to get information and help. They also give you an emergency card with your info on it in Japanese so if you get hurt or in trouble you can show someone.
Yes it is wrong to demand immigrants to learn English as some are older and some can’t afford the classes. Becoming fluent in English does not happen overnight either. How do you expect them to function as a normal member of society without having access to government help or driving tests?
I don’t get the fear of people speaking other languages in the USA. I can see the logic in Latvia and Estonia where their language (identity) is slowing dying out and they don’t want Russian being the primary language. English is spoken worldwide and in no danger of being extinct.
You haven’t been to southern California lately, have you….
Yea I have actually and have some family there. I did not mind the Spanish speaking areas and I find the ethnic communities in L.A nice (Chinatown, Little Tokyo, …etc).
Some people just can’t stand variety.
Good Idea,
This is Japan, we speak English when we go there, Learn it.
Because people learn english magically. Overnight.
It’s an easy language – but not that easy.
English is one of the hardest languages to learn, and once you are fully grown, learning any language becomes significantly harder. English is a weird mishmash of Romance and Germanic languages with rules that only apply half the time and a plethora of irregular verbs.
Mm, excuse me, but whoever said english is one of the hardest languages to learn?
I mean, OK, it’s complex, but every language is complex. What would be an ‘easy’ language to learn? Portuguese? I’ve yet to see a foreigner speak Portuguese properly, but I know a lot of Brazilians who can speak passable English.
I mean, no, we won’t speak/write it flawlessly, but neither do Americans or Brits or whatever.
I think that the English find Mediterranean and Celtic languages difficult because English has no masculine or feminine tenses and has tenses (such as the future imperfect) which don’t exist in other languages. On the other hand, the Welsh have a language which is grammatically very similar to French and even shares some vocabulary.
English also has a *vast* lexicon, mostly because of its willingness to absorb and mix bits of other languages together – I’m sure I’m not the only person who gets frustrated at the lengths some languages go to to avoid using English words despite those English words not starting out English anyway (Welsh is particularly guilty of this – Siapan = Japan, Folt = Volt, there’s a long and pathetic list).
According to information theory, all languages have equal complexities. The question is which language is your reference point.
If you’re coming from a highly inflected language (like Russian), English is difficult because in Russian, word order means nothing because grammatical meaning of words is entirely determined by morphological endings.
For English speakers, learning other Germanic or Romance languages is easier because they share similar etymological roots and syntax rules.
The point is that no language is inherently more difficult than another. Languages all possess the same complexity because all languages have to express the same things, different languages just choose different methods in which to accomplish those tasks. The question is how much overlap a language you are trying to learn has with your native language — the more overlap, the easier that language is for you to learn.
It is my suspicion that human brains are not perfectly-efficient Turing machines, and so even though all human languages are fully recursive, the differences in morphology are not trivial to the humans that learn and use them; the human brain learns biases towards different syntax encoding/decoding and parsing algorithms depending on the favored algorithms of the native language, and those rule sets are certainly not equal in difficulty.
A language with a larger functional vocabulary would objectively be more difficult than a smaller one, and a language which relies on hypotaxis is more difficult to use properly than one that relies on parataxis, even if *overall* the languages have equal explanatory power and equal information content.
No, information theory doesn’t state that. Though they convey the same information languages may differ in the amount of complexity they employ to do so. If I were to invent a language that is exactly identical to English except it involved three genders rather than one, it’s pretty obvious I’ve made the language more complex without gaining any appreciable benefit.
There’s a reason someone thought up Esperanto.
If one language were inherently more difficult than all the rest, you would expect children of more difficult languages to begin communication on average, at older ages, while children of easier to learn languages would begin to talk when they are much younger. But this is simply not the case. Worldwide, children all start communicating verbally, on average, at the same age, which implies that all languages enjoy the same level of complexity.
When dealing with second language acquisition, I will grant you again that some languages are more difficult to learn than others, but again — it completely depends on which language you speak natively and which language you are trying to learn.
As a native English speaker, Spanish is inherently easier to learn than Russian because the grammar, syntax, semantics, lexicon and even (to some extent) phonetics, overlap much more.
However, for a Russian speaker, it would be inherently easier to learn Bulgarian than English for the same reasons mentioned above.
But this is simply not the case. Worldwide, children all start communicating verbally, on average, at the same age, which implies that all languages enjoy the same level of complexity.
There’s a huge difference between “See Jane run.” and “Four-score and Seven years ago our forefathers…”. The date at which children pick up the rudiments of language would be about the same regardless of the difficulty of the language. The real test would be the average age of the mastery of the language.
How does one define “mastery”? Linguists (to my knowledge, and I’ve taken a fair number of linguistics classes) do not have a fair way of determining mastery. Even so, for most children, they can communicate fully by age 4 or 5. The differences from there are more an issue of education than anything else, and linguists do not judge languages by those standards. Linguistic performance is not an adequate means of judging linguistic competence in any given language.
Moreover your example is more an issue of style than dramatically different semantic grammar. Go and engage in some conversations with children between ages 4-7. They’re actually very adept and right the majority of the time in terms of the grammar that governs their dialect of their language. (Not necessarily the standard dialect, but the dialect they have been raised learning. Linguists also do not place one dialect above another in terms of prestige)
Well, it’s not like children actually follow the rules of the language when they begin to talk.
Anyway, my objection was merely to your reference to information theory. It’s simply not true that all languages have the same level of complexity. It’s a mathematical fact, regardless of how easy or hard they are to learn. Linguists often assume, for practical purposes, that all languages are equally complex, but information theory clearly doesn’t state this.
For a better explanation, see this:
Quantifying and Measuring Morphological Complexity
Mm, excuse me, but whoever said english is one of the hardest languages to learn?
Anybody who’s ever studied its history.
Start with the Germanic Anglo-Saxon root, dump in a large amount of Old Norse vocabulary after the Vikings conquered from the north, add a huge chunk of French from when the Norman’s conquered from the south, then a fair number of Latin-derived “inkhorn” terms.
Discard the tensed vocabulary. Stir it with a Great Vowel Shift, fuddle it by insisting that spelling retain historical characteristics while pronunciation changes (knight, knee, knife), then put it through several incomplete attempts at systematization.
Then make it one of the most widespread languages in existence under the British Empire and allow it to pick up words from across the globe. Serve.
Makes sense, but on a practical level I still think it was a LOT easier to learn than, say, German or Japanese – *especially* because it has no gender inflections and the verbs are frankly easy to handle compared to ours.
Then again, that might just be me. I know my English is far from perfect – but for someone self-taught I hope I do kind of alright.
As a qualified English language teacher, I can attest to the fact that English is not one of the most difficult languages to learn to speak. Its grammar and conjugation is much simpler than that of Latin languages. It lacks cases (like Russian) and tone (like Chinese and Vietnamese) and has far fewer irregular verbs than other languages such as Spanish.
Its main difficulty comes in its pronunciation (the -ough endings being a perfect example), irregular spelling system and extremely large vocabulary with a great many synonyms.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
The first link makes an important point in that the difficult is rated as for an English speaker not a “universal” speaker. Of course that doesn’t mean the English is difficult but learning another language can be made a lot easier if you already know a similar one.
The weirdest question I get asked about English is how to pronounce “the” i.e. when should it be “the” or “thee” – my answer is that in the UK I’ve never been aware of this “rule” but I think it is in the US for consonants vs. nouns, I believe. We have enough stupid rules as it is without adding new ones. I’m also at a disadvantage as I went to school in the 80s when the big idea that teaching children the structure of English was a bad idea as it constrains their creativity. My better half (who isn’t English) often knows more about the technical part of the language than I do so I can thank my trendy teachers for that!