Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [39]
The bridge metaphor also works in China, according to Ji Shaobin, professor at Wenzhou College of Profession and Technology. “English,” he says, “is not [only] the language for us to speak with Americans, the British or any other native speakers. Rather, it is the common language for us to communicate with Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Singaporans and other Asians and people from developing countries.”19
In India, the bridge syndrome is more domestic in nature. English serves as a sort of lingua franca among Indians who speak different languages.
Informal English also serves as a middle ground on international athletic fields. In 2006, World Cup Soccer required all of its referees to have a working knowledge of English because it was the language known best by players and coaches. Four years later, the refs were required to add a knowledge of obscenities in English in order for them to know when and whether to penalize a certain player. Or was it so some refs could add a little verbal abuse of their own?
English can also be a middle ground within mixed population groups, such as fellow employees in a business firm. David Rohde, a former writer for the Christian Science Monitor, described one such group in an Australian factory. It included Cambodian, Samoan, Maltese, Greek, and Latvian workers all complaining about their boss in the lingo they each knew to some extent. Rohde added that in Thailand, Russians, Pakistanis, Japanese, and Germans make phone calls to each other by shouting out numbers in English or “something like it.”20
EUROPE’S SECOND LANGUAGE
But the European Union doesn’t want to buy a language bridge. Its policy has been to encourage many tongues over any one. It says every member nation should teach at least two languages in school, though it doesn’t say which languages they should be.
Despite the EU’s stand, private efforts have been made to devise a Europeanized Standard English in order to provide a common lingo that is easy to learn, uniform for diplomatic and trading purposes, and able to save substantially on translation costs. One of the areas of possible improvement cited is the fifteen different English spellings of the sh sound, namely the words: shoe, sugar, issue, mansion, mission, nation, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia, pshaw, fashion, and crucifixion.
A EURO FIX FOR ENGLISH?
An anonymous online jokester says English could be improved enough to become the official second language of Europe with a five-year plan. In the first year, he would have “the letter s replace the soft c. Sertainly, this will make sivil servants jump with joy. The hard c will be dropped in favor of the k. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter.
“In the second year, the troublesome ph will be replaced with f to make words like fotograf 20 percent shorter. In the third year, public akseptanse of the new spelling kan be ekspekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent e is disgraceful and should go away.
“By the fourth year, people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing th with z and w with v. During ze fifz year, ze unesesary o kan be dropd from vords containing ou and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
“Forget the fifz year; it looks as if someone has spiked ze alfabet sup.”
According to Juliane House of London’s Guardian Weekly, the main reason the EU has not made English the official second language is that “the French with their traditionally superior position in Europe cannot accept the decline of their own linguistic power.”21 By 2001, 47 percent