While the Director is showing the students around Hatchery and Conditioning Center they come across a topic that interested me: French and German are referred to as "dead languages." French and German have, for centuries, been the Lingua Franca of Diplomacy and Commerce. French was especially used by the educated to communicate with one another up until the early Twentieth Century. Fluent German was actually required in order to be a scientist back in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and is still favored by Scientists nowadays. Indeed, both languages played major roles.
However, nowadays, English has replaced them both as the language of business and commerce. In Europe and Japan, an English class is mandatory in secondary schools. I am wondering, was Huxley predicting the demise of these languages, and their replacement by English?
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I don't think Huxley predicted the "demise" of the French and German language. I understand what you are thinking and where your thoughts are headed but English is one of the most common learned languages of the country, of other countries or you could pretty much say; the universe. Of course the language to know for business (successful business anyway) wouldn't be English but it would have to be Chinese. But to us Americans it would be, like you seem to put it, English, Chinese, Spanish. In that order. So to conclude my opinion to your blog post Raul G., No, I do not think Huxley predicted the banishment of those two languages at all.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Huxley predicted the demise of German and French specifically, like Breahna said, but I do believe he predicted English would take over. Somehow, huxley knew way more than should be possible back when he wrote the book, so it wouldn't be surprising if he knew a thing or two on how language is going to change throughout the years. English is slowly taking over language as a whole; the majority of content on television and the internet is shown/heard in English. I could just have a biased opinion since, obviously, I'm in the US; but English still seems to be spreading all over, in my opinion. So, to your question, I think he only had a hunch on the demise of languages, and used French and German as examples.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Lenora and Breahna on how Huxley didn't predict that languages like German and French to be gone. I believe that Huxley thought that English would the dominant language. English over the years have cause some languages to be extinct and that today it is the one of the most widely used languages. For Raul's question, I believe that Huxley saw that the English language to be more dominant of the other languages and guess that the other languages would be become extinct
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