Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language
Where to buy Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language books online?
- ISBN13: 9780393062557
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Product Description
How English conquered the world: a Guns, Germs, and Steel argument based on the power of the word. It seems impossible: a tiny island in the North Atlantic, colonized by Rome, then pillaged for hundreds of years by marauding neighbors, becomes the dominant world power in the nineteenth century. Equally unlikely, a colony of that island nation, across the Atlantic, grows into the military and cultural colossus of the twentieth century. How? By the sword, of course; by trade and manufacturing ingenuity; but principally, and most surprisingly, by the power of their common language.
In this provocative and compelling new look at the course of empire, Robert McCrum, coauthor of the best-selling book and television series The Tale of English, shows how the language of the Anglo-American imperium has become the world’s lingua franca. In fascinating detail he describes the ever-accelerating changes wrought on the language by the far-flung cultures claiming citizenship in the new hegemony. In the twenty-first century, writes the leader, English + Microsoft = Globish.
Buy Cheap Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language Online
Related posts:
- Barron’s AP English Language and Composition
- Cracking the AP English Language & Composition Exam, 2010 Edition
- La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language
- Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
- Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, Third Edition
Terrible book, I can’t judge I plowed all the way through it. It perpetrates a fraud on the reader, claiming to have something to do with the spread of English as an international language, while it’s really a rambling, disjointed, incoherent muddle of passages loosely related to the development and spread of Anglo-American culture. It reads like a first draft, or perhaps a mind dump to which some editor added a title as a replacement for of forcing the leader to rewrite the text around some kind of unifying theme.
If you’re really interested in the tale of English, I heartily recommend the aptly titled “The Tale of English” — which, oddly enough, is partly written by the same leader.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Non-fiction can be entertaining as well as informative. McCrum has proven this in Globish. Illustrating how English wears the uniforms of many cultures and peoples, McCrum gives the reader plain examples of the fruitfulness of this global language. From the image of a committee writing the King James Version of the Bible to the Globish phenomenon of a ‘Free Culture Movement’ with roots of a belief system in the rights of the public domain, this volume is a not-to-be-missed journey through the ages of the development of all things English and, thus, Globish.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Globish is about the English language,its history and its quick spread throughout the world.The first 200 pages of this appealing and fascinating book are devoted to the history of English.A tiny island in the North Atlantic which was colonized by Rome,pillaged by additional neighbours,becomes finally a huge empire with its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,bringing along a fantastic gift to humanity- that of the English language.Then another empire across the Atlantic,the United States,nonstop this mission especially after WW2 and the world has been revolutionized by
English.This language has at this point become the lingua franca of our planet.As the leader puts it, “English is like a virus that has spread round the world,carrying with it a way of looking at,and expressing,new experiences”.Some 80 per cent of today’s Internet pages(circa 40 billion pages)are written in English,and the dictionaries of English become obsolete immediately after being published because it is nearly impossible to update them.Nearly each transaction is affected by English everywhere and even the Moon had the honour of having English as the first language spoken on it.With the aid of the PC and the Internet, we are witnessing daily a cultural phenomenon where English is everywhere:in politics, sports, the manufacturing world,the movies and the computer games-all being helped by the multi-rapid technological innovations and advances.
Among persons reliable for the evolution of the language was William Caxton,described as “an engaging hustler”.He became the first editor-publisher and printed the works of Chaucer and Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’.This happened in the late fifteenth century.English was the language of the settlers who came to America.Thomas Paine was one of the “founding fathers of of the world’s English”,while Mark Twain spoke and wrote in a language that was distinctly American.
The turning point and the beginning of the global culture was in 1989 and the fall of the Berlian Wall,after which emerged “the worldwide cultural revolution that would become Globish”.
More than 350 million Chinese are learning the language today,and the same goes for India and additional parts of the world.English has become a global means of communication that is irrepressively contagious,adaptable,populist and subversive.What will the future of English be like? No one really knows,but one thing is certaing: this book is here to stay with us for a very long time,because it is simple,yet intriguing and intelligent,with a lot of information and original insights.Add the fact that is is also highly entertaining!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
There is nothing particularly incorrect with Robert McCrum’s new book, “Globish”. In fact there are many excellent points he makes about the spread of English around the globe over the centuries. But I came away from the end wondering about what this book was proposed to be. It certainly wasn’t about the English language, as a language.
Anglophilia is huge for McCrum (don’t even bother to read “Globish” if you’re French…you might want to start another revolution) but if this book is supposed to be one concerning English, the relations are rarely made. “Globish” is more about the socio-economic developments within the increasing English-language world and the narrative leaves you scratching your head. Why aren’t there more examples of the English language? “Globish” gets off to a painfully slow start and never reasonably recovers. If you’re not English, the long, drawn out early history of Britain is excruciating. I would have expected many more examples of the language itself, but history trumps words here and it’s not very rewarding.
McCrum does occasionally have flashes of brilliance….his last pages are the best…contemporary usage of English in different countries…but by this time, one is glad simply to get to the end. For an historian, as McCrum is, I marvel where his proofreaders are….he gets the years of the battle of Gettysburg and FDR’s swearing in incorrect. As a name who collaborated on the terrific series, “The Tale of English”, I can’t imagine that this book has as much disconnect as it does with the language, itself.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Historically, in 1600 A.D., at the time of the founding of the East India Company, in London, languages of the Indo-European family tree were already native to most of the lands extending from Ireland to the border of Burma six thousand miles east, and had been so for thousands of years. At present, the Indo-European language family tree has more than twice the number of native speakers (46 percent) than the next largest family tree, the Sino-Tibetan (21 percent), which has permanently been confined to East Asia. These numbers suggest that one of the Indo-European languages was likely to become the common language of the globe. English won. (Past ifs: Spanish, if Philip’s Armada had succeeded; French, if Napolean; German, if Hitler; Russian, if Stalin.)
So, what is this “Globish”? The term was initially coined by Madhukar Gogate, an Indian linguist, to clarify an artificial dialect he made and open to the Simplified Spelling Society of U.K. in 1998. (Example: “She is fine” in “Globish” becomes “She iz faain.”) Like many earlier spelling-reform attempts, his ” Globish” didn’t take root. In 2004, Jean-Paul Nerriere, a retired French marketer, trademarked the term “Globish” and later published a book, “Parlez Globish.” Nerriere’s “Globish” is a subset of 1500 words and limited syntactical patterns derived from Standard English. “Globish” has precedents in “Basic English,” a subset of 850 words proposed by linguist and philosopher Charles Ogden in his book, “Basic English: A All-purpose Introduction with Rules and Grammar” published in 1930. And, since 1959, “Special English,” a subset of about 1500 words and simplified grammar, has been used in broadcasting “Voice of America” news to lands where English is a second language.
The projected marketing of Nerriere’s “Globish” textbooks, which if adopted by instructors of English, will dumb down the teaching of English globally. Building on the initialism ESL for English as a Second Language, I propose the acronyms BESL for “Beginners’ English as a Second Language” and SESL for “Standard English as a Second Language” as a replacement for of “Globish.” The current Beginners’ ESL books (levels one, two,…) get the learner ongoing and present an incentive to upgrade from the beginners’ levels to the Standard ESL books. Effective ESL books need to be point to the learner ’s first language as customary by practiced ESL scholars in books like Learner English: A Teacher’s Guide to Interference and additional Problems , edited by Michael Swan & Bernard Smith, and published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. This guide, a favorite of many ESL instructors, succinctly documents the interference patterns point to twenty languages, ranging from Japanese to Spanish. (I routinely recommend the significant chapter of this book to ESL authors for self-editing before I accept their manuscripts for editing.) Another brilliant resource for ESL teachers is Understanding ESL Writers: A Guide for Teachers by Ilona Leki. When SESL writers start outnumbering native English writers, they will contribute more to the ever-evolving “Standard” English, building it the truly global language. No doubt, entrenched Anglophobes will resist the acronyms BESL and SESL because both include E for English. Quel dommage! Let them pretend that they have silenced the odious E simply by proclaiming the term “Globish.”
In the prologue to his book, aptly subtitled “How the English Language Became the World’s Language,” Robert McCrum states his thesis: “Anglo-American culture and its language have become as much a part of global consciousness as MS-DOS or the combustion engine” (page 14).
“In 2006-7, about 80 percent of the world’s home pages on World Wide Web were in some kind of English compared with German (4.5 percent) and Japanese (3.1 percent), while Microsoft publishes no fewer than eighteen versions of its `English language’ spellcheckers…. A film such as Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is predictable of the world’s new English culture. The Indian bridegroom has a job in Houston. The wedding guests jet in from Melbourne and Dubai and speak in a mishmash of English and Hindi…. Take for instance, the 2006 Man Booker Prize. The winner was The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, an Indian-born writer. …The British critic John Sutherland was stirred to clarify Desai’s work as `a globalized novel for a globalized world’” (pp 9-10).
McCrum’s “Chapters 1 through 12, a biography of the English language, will sound very familiar to readers who’ve watched the well loved documentary series on PBS, based on the book The Tale of English , coauthored by McCrum. (Since its inception in 1986, the documentary has been shown several times on the San Francisco affiliate of PBS and many additional affiliates.) “Globish” can be read as if were the fourth edition of “The Tale of English, third revised edition,” published in 2002.
The twelve chapters are grouped under four parts: Founders; Pioneers; Populisers; and Modernisers. McCrum’s retelling of the biography of English is engrossing. A few of his examples follow.
On Shakespeare: “Recent erudition has shown that Shakespeare was really an inveterate reviser,” discrediting the assertion of the two actors who published the First Folio, “His mind and hand went together . . .Wee have scarse received from him a blot in his paper” (page 84). Shakespeare “to his bitterly envious contemporary Robert Greene, on his deathbed, was an `upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers . . . in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country’” (page 85). “It’s nice to note that the motto of Shakespeare’s theatre, the Globe, was `Totus mundus agit histrionem,’ the whole world is a playhouse” (p 87).
On American-English: “From as early as 1735 there had been attacks on the `barbarous English’ of the colonists and jokes about `Americanisms’ such as alienate, belittle, and placate. Dr Johnson had written trenchantly about `the American dialect, a tract of corruption to which every language, widely diffused, must permanently be exposed’” (p 112).
On American literature: “Hemingway place it succinctly. `All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called `Huckleberry Finn.’It’s the best book we’ve had. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as excellent since’” (p 124). Excellent choice of quote; no English person could have written “Huckleberry Finn.”
McCrum cites Oscar Wilde’s comment on American English : “The Irishman drank the silver miners of Leadville under the table before formulating a Wildean paradox: `We really have everything in common with America nowadays,’ he confirmed, `except, of course language’ ” (p 110).
[Yeah, right. Here's my fictive dialogue between two cousins, Stanford Singh visiting Oxford Singh:
Stanford Singh: Merriam-Webster says...
Oxford Singh: Nonsense. There's just one glossary of the English language: `The Oxford English Glossary.' Forget Mary-Ann Webster -- the American woman you keep quoting. Get over your infatuation with her!
Stanford Singh: Come on, Merriam-Webster Glossary is used by many more people globally.
Oxford Singh: Don't reflect, we haven't noticed you Americans pinched our language. You owe us back royalties -- trillions and trillions of dollars!
Stanford Singh: The last British-English speaker on the planet will be an Oxford graduate from India.]
On World English: “How can one be original in a foreign tongue? As V.S. Naipaul puts it in his essay `Reading and Writing,’ `I had begun to place together an English literary anthology of my own. . . . I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish had come the knowledge that the literature that had agreed me the wish came from another world, far away from our own.’ Out of this dividing line, the world’s English starts to emerge” (p 209). Chapters 13 through 15 resume McCrum’s argument stated in the prologue.
“In the twenty-first century the fusion of the English and the Hindi traditions…is making a society uniquely equipped to contribute to, and benefit from, the development of English” (p 265). “The Times of India” has been certified as the world’s largest selling English-language daily, and, according to ComScore, TOI online is the world’s most visited newspaper website, yet to be of “The New York Times,” “The Sun,” and “USA Today.” Three of the examples McCrum cites are as follows.
A publishing firm in India, Pre-Media Global, founded by the brother-and-sister team of Kapil Viswanathan and Kami Narayan, both Indian graduates of the Harvard MBA program, offers outsource services for editing, crafty, and producing for clients such as Wiley, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, and McGraw-Hill. Second, the 2008 Man-Booker Prize was awarded in London’s Guildhall to Aravind Adiga, for his novel The White Tiger , the fourth Indian novel to win. And third, the film Slumdog Millionaire , which won eight Oscars and four Golden Globes. Based on a debut novel, “Q & A,” by an Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup, its screenplay was successfully adapted by Simon Beaufoy, who simplified the dialogues, while maintaining the storyline.
I highly recommend McCrum’s new book written for the all-purpose reader in brilliant Standard English, not “Globish,” despite his acquiescence — temporary, I hope — for the latter term.
— C.J. Singh
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5