Book Review: Where is English Headed? | 10 Magazine Korea

Globish: How the English Language Became the World?s Language by Robert McCrum (331 pages W32,340) is a surprisingly excellent read, a page turner which breathlessly exploits the drama of the language?s ascendancy. McCrum tells us how, when the language was near extinction under the heel of the Norman invasion, English flourished despite the adversity. He delights in recounting the highpoints of this language?s prose and poetry, making for a vibrant history. As the tongue evolves, he points out how the language is used by the powerful as well as the powerless; as the people triumph, the language triumphs.

For all the power of this narrative, the last 61 pages of Globish quickly evaporate, as Crum waxes too wistfully sanguine about the English language?s forthcoming ubiquity. A better way to ponder the future of English is through the history not merely of English, but of all languages. As daunting as this sounds, it?s exactly what Nicholas Ostler does in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (330 pages, W28,560), which surveys Persian, Aramaic, Babylonian, Sogdian, Greek, Latin, and other meta-languages which have had their place in the sun, but faded. While Ostler?s scholastic prose is more difficult going than Crum?s inspirational canter, his thoughtful, sorrowful conclusion, that English is bound for resignation, is brought into question only by the wild card of information technology. No one knows how machine translation and the internet will shake things out.

If you wanted to guess, however, the history of information would be the place to look. In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (526 pages, W32,490), James Gleick tells us a story every bit as compelling as the rise of the English language. Through the biographies of Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, George Boole, Norbert Wiener and other key players, Gleick takes us to a time before the flood, recounting how things got named, and how they changed society. It?s unbelievable.? While this works exceedingly well, some of the material is less germane, and Gleick fetishizes a tad too many biographical details. The point nevertheless clearly comes through, that the revolution in information technology was made possible by divorcing meaning from the signal. Thus, the answer to the question ?Will English survive as a Lingua Franca?? will only come when we reap the whirlwind of semiotic payback.

A more intimate discussion of these titles can be had at our website. Next month, we will review fiction, and Canadian fiction at that.

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Source: http://www.10mag.com/2011/07/book-review-where-is-english-headed/

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