Post by earl on Jan 28, 2008 17:59:53 GMT
Since we've had one or two articles on here about the Irish language on this island, I thought it fair to balance them with an article, told by an outsider, about the advantages and cultural heritage of English on this island:
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Our columnist presents a modest proposal to allow us to rule the world.
THERE’S an island with just under six million inhabitants that’s had a pretty difficult history.
At one time wholly a colony of England, ruled with an iron fist and thoroughly exploited, it has seen hunger, poverty, civil war, and dreadful communal violence. Untold millions of its people have fled.
For much of the last 800 years, as far as I can tell, it has been a miserable bloody place.
Yet it has also produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a musical group that has sold 170 million albums worldwide.
The group is U2, and the Nobel Laureates are George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney; the island is Ireland, of course.
Its problems have always been immense: when Oliver Cromwell led the English conquest of Ireland in the 17th century, more than 600,000 inhabitants died in 12 years of war. During the Great Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, in which disastrous food shortages caused by diseased crops were compounded by the inefficiency and callousness of the colonial government, one million people starved to death in a five year period, and another two million were forced to migrate to America.
Don’t go complaining to an Irishman about Malaysia’s religious and ethnic tensions. He’ll tell you all about Northern Ireland’s history of communal violence and terrorism, about the struggles between Nationalists and Loyalists, Catholics and Protestants.
Many people from the Republic of Ireland, in the south, will tell you about the bad old days before their economy took off in the 1990s. It’s now one of the richest places in the world in terms of per capita income, but it used to be the sort of desperately poor country that you left as soon as you were old enough to crawl on board a boat or plane.
And yet this awful area produced one of English literature’s greatest satirists, Jonathan Swift; its wittiest playwright, Oscar Wilde; and the most critically acclaimed writer of the 20th century, James Joyce.
In popular culture, its achievements have been similarly disproportionate. Last year, the combined wealth of its top six entertainers (U2, Michael Flatley, Enya, Van Morrison, Bob Geldof, and Chris de Burgh) was estimated at RM6.8bil.
How is it that this benighted land has managed to spawn so many cultural titans? And with four times the people and one-tenth the problems, why can’t Malaysia do the same?
It’s not as though the Irish government or populace have been particularly supportive of the arts, historically speaking. Most of the people I’ve mentioned had to go abroad to achieve their success, to bigger markets or more cosmopolitan environments.
But what equipped these particular citizens of the Third World for success in the First, was, I would argue, their proficiency in the English language.
When Independence was won and the Irish Free State created in 1922, Irish was restored as an official language, satisfying nationalist sentiments, but crucially, English wasn’t dropped the way it was in our country. Irish is a compulsory subject for schoolchildren, and some 40% of the population today say they can speak it, but English is still predominant. This has allowed post-independence Ireland to retain and develop their mastery of the language of their former colonial overlords, to claim English for themselves as a complex, musical and very creative expression of their national character.
In fact, one could argue that the best literature in English in the second half of the 20th century came from the pens of the Irish and the Indians.
(In its Official Languages Act of 1963, India also opted to retain English as an additional official administrative language, ensuring that its educated elite – who come from very diverse communities, and who might resent having to speak Hindi – would be equipped to deal with each other and with the West.)
English is a Malaysian language, and always has been. If you are reading this newspaper, you are living proof of that. But I would go further and say that English is the most useful Malaysian language, for several reasons.
Symbolically, it’s apolitical: it isn’t the mother tongue of any particular ethnic group. It may have been necessary at the time of Independence to call for unity under the umbrella of an indigenous language, to reject the visible (or rather, audible) signs of colonialism. But now that we aren’t quite so angry with the British any more, after 50 years of freedom, there’s much less emotional baggage attached to speaking English.
It’s a more inclusive language in that respect. It gets us away from the disturbing dictates of the 1971 National Cultural Policy, which defines Malaysian culture as Malay culture plus those elements of other cultures which are suitable – whatever that means. It allows us to use a neutral linguistic platform to slowly come to terms with what really constitutes our gloriously pluralistic national identity.
And from a pragmatic standpoint, if we make sure everybody learns English, if we truly embrace it and make it our own, we have a shot at “doing an Ireland” – at making a sizeable cultural contribution to the world, and deriving in return economic benefits and prestige.
This is not a value judgement; I don’t believe that English is in any way “better” than Malay. It merely reaches a wider global audience, and allows all Malaysians to feel a sense of ownership.
We are an innately creative nation, and we should be exporting our cultural products. Tash Aw has made an excellent start, but it shouldn’t stop there.
We can’t be sure that we’ll be able to create geniuses, or pop stars – who knows, perhaps the Irish get it from their Guinness and boiled cabbage. But we should at least try to give the youth of Malaysia the tools to access the global marketplace.
Make English an official language of Malaysia, and world domination will be just two decades away.
# Huzir Sulaiman writes for theatre, film, television, and newspapers.
thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/1/27/lifefocus/20131814&sec=lifefocus
____________________________________________________________
Our columnist presents a modest proposal to allow us to rule the world.
THERE’S an island with just under six million inhabitants that’s had a pretty difficult history.
At one time wholly a colony of England, ruled with an iron fist and thoroughly exploited, it has seen hunger, poverty, civil war, and dreadful communal violence. Untold millions of its people have fled.
For much of the last 800 years, as far as I can tell, it has been a miserable bloody place.
Yet it has also produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a musical group that has sold 170 million albums worldwide.
The group is U2, and the Nobel Laureates are George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney; the island is Ireland, of course.
Its problems have always been immense: when Oliver Cromwell led the English conquest of Ireland in the 17th century, more than 600,000 inhabitants died in 12 years of war. During the Great Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, in which disastrous food shortages caused by diseased crops were compounded by the inefficiency and callousness of the colonial government, one million people starved to death in a five year period, and another two million were forced to migrate to America.
Don’t go complaining to an Irishman about Malaysia’s religious and ethnic tensions. He’ll tell you all about Northern Ireland’s history of communal violence and terrorism, about the struggles between Nationalists and Loyalists, Catholics and Protestants.
Many people from the Republic of Ireland, in the south, will tell you about the bad old days before their economy took off in the 1990s. It’s now one of the richest places in the world in terms of per capita income, but it used to be the sort of desperately poor country that you left as soon as you were old enough to crawl on board a boat or plane.
And yet this awful area produced one of English literature’s greatest satirists, Jonathan Swift; its wittiest playwright, Oscar Wilde; and the most critically acclaimed writer of the 20th century, James Joyce.
In popular culture, its achievements have been similarly disproportionate. Last year, the combined wealth of its top six entertainers (U2, Michael Flatley, Enya, Van Morrison, Bob Geldof, and Chris de Burgh) was estimated at RM6.8bil.
How is it that this benighted land has managed to spawn so many cultural titans? And with four times the people and one-tenth the problems, why can’t Malaysia do the same?
It’s not as though the Irish government or populace have been particularly supportive of the arts, historically speaking. Most of the people I’ve mentioned had to go abroad to achieve their success, to bigger markets or more cosmopolitan environments.
But what equipped these particular citizens of the Third World for success in the First, was, I would argue, their proficiency in the English language.
When Independence was won and the Irish Free State created in 1922, Irish was restored as an official language, satisfying nationalist sentiments, but crucially, English wasn’t dropped the way it was in our country. Irish is a compulsory subject for schoolchildren, and some 40% of the population today say they can speak it, but English is still predominant. This has allowed post-independence Ireland to retain and develop their mastery of the language of their former colonial overlords, to claim English for themselves as a complex, musical and very creative expression of their national character.
In fact, one could argue that the best literature in English in the second half of the 20th century came from the pens of the Irish and the Indians.
(In its Official Languages Act of 1963, India also opted to retain English as an additional official administrative language, ensuring that its educated elite – who come from very diverse communities, and who might resent having to speak Hindi – would be equipped to deal with each other and with the West.)
English is a Malaysian language, and always has been. If you are reading this newspaper, you are living proof of that. But I would go further and say that English is the most useful Malaysian language, for several reasons.
Symbolically, it’s apolitical: it isn’t the mother tongue of any particular ethnic group. It may have been necessary at the time of Independence to call for unity under the umbrella of an indigenous language, to reject the visible (or rather, audible) signs of colonialism. But now that we aren’t quite so angry with the British any more, after 50 years of freedom, there’s much less emotional baggage attached to speaking English.
It’s a more inclusive language in that respect. It gets us away from the disturbing dictates of the 1971 National Cultural Policy, which defines Malaysian culture as Malay culture plus those elements of other cultures which are suitable – whatever that means. It allows us to use a neutral linguistic platform to slowly come to terms with what really constitutes our gloriously pluralistic national identity.
And from a pragmatic standpoint, if we make sure everybody learns English, if we truly embrace it and make it our own, we have a shot at “doing an Ireland” – at making a sizeable cultural contribution to the world, and deriving in return economic benefits and prestige.
This is not a value judgement; I don’t believe that English is in any way “better” than Malay. It merely reaches a wider global audience, and allows all Malaysians to feel a sense of ownership.
We are an innately creative nation, and we should be exporting our cultural products. Tash Aw has made an excellent start, but it shouldn’t stop there.
We can’t be sure that we’ll be able to create geniuses, or pop stars – who knows, perhaps the Irish get it from their Guinness and boiled cabbage. But we should at least try to give the youth of Malaysia the tools to access the global marketplace.
Make English an official language of Malaysia, and world domination will be just two decades away.
# Huzir Sulaiman writes for theatre, film, television, and newspapers.
thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/1/27/lifefocus/20131814&sec=lifefocus