tv [untitled] May 6, 2011 7:30am-8:00am EDT
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store charges free. range month free. three stooges free. and free bloggers plug in videos for your media project a free meal john darche john tom. will. cost the hour here in moscow you are with us to a recap now about some stories and france's military spending on foreign operations has already accounted for the year's entire defense budget the government is accused of turning up a blind eye to people's needs at home by increasing its expensive adventures abroad . while the u.s. operation to kill osama bin laden is widely hailed as a success the methods washington uses in the war on terror are facing criticism
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charges of torture in overseas prisons are feared to be motivating terrorists rather than making the world safe for. a court sentences to be russian and nationalists to life and eighteen years respectively for the murder of a human rights lawyer and a reporter. stanislav markelov and i still see a lot of other gunned down in broad daylight in the center of the capital two years ago. and right up next year an aussie people of el asks is guest whether the current dominance of english threatens other languages and helps to export western values crosstalk is next right here today. we'll. bring you the latest in science and technology from the realm. of the future.
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hello and welcome to cross talk back you're all about the english language continues to flourish does it threaten other languages with one in three people speaking english does this promote western values and with the rise of asia will english maintain its period position in the world. to discuss the language question i'm joined by robert phillips and in copenhagen he's professor emeritus at the copenhagen business school in paris we go to jump on the air he's the author of the book don't speak english parlayed globish and in hong kong we have a big red dog he is a distinguished visiting scholar at city university of hong kong and another member
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of our crosstalk team yell on the hunger all right gentlemen this is cross talk we can jump in anytime you want to jump oh i'd like to go to you you have a new i suppose a language or policy language that you're introducing to the world and it's called global bush and how is it different from english and if you could for partly could you answer in globish morris oh there globish is english even meant to be very couric english but it is what we call english lite it is a simplified form of english with this words you would sink seven fifteen thousand words and you thought he should marry that's way too much so he may do the most efficient it with fifteen hundred words and the children know those words the david use of those words you can express all you need in the world for business purposes are the toys so it is an english light with still a great thing which i will give us an example given his example what it sounds like and what words you like to use go ahead. well. i made one very easy to
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tell you in english this is really being brass indecently to write worse is mostly comprised of me and my siblings you might understand that if you are in is there were a monkey video most people will not understand that so if you want to get the myth of your cause you can say this is our company top management little moment we have mostly me and over two hundred my parents and you get the same message across the world are seem very to be going to my limited release and everybody will understand you better so you heat rate in terms of understanding we tend i was better if you used nice caring or formulation ok robert if i go to you in copenhagen is this just jibberish bad english. i think it's very clear that. when you are in the real world you obviously have to communicate as best you can i am worried by the idea that a simplified form of english like that. isn't it's
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a bit like mcdonald is asian it's a packaged version which apparently will give you the satisfaction that you need whereas in the in the real world. people don't really function like that they negotiate meaning they try to get through and as an educational goal i think they need to be exposed to relinquish as it is used in a whole range of contexts so i'm a bit worried that this is a quick fix in some way whereas learning english you have to be culturally sensitive depending on who you're speaking to which part of the world you are what your goals are it's a much more complex task than what globish claims to be capable of achieving ok david i mean it's a very good point do you know the mcconnell ization of english but that's the trend in the world that everything's getting mcdonogh wise i think john polls point is that you know if you want to be able to communicate and communicate as best you can and i think if i'm i think we make it clear i should make it clear to my audiences
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. this is a this is a kind of kweisi language of non-native speakers speaking to each other like again speaking to japanese japanese speaking to koreans and things like that it's not really actually doesn't have anything to do with needed speakers of english i actually agree partly with both robert then john paul here and i think this is not really so much a question of mcdonald ais ation as the struggle to communicate in the real world by people who don't actually have a lot of english but i think it's quite right john paul is actually on to something here in saying that people need some guidance as to how to best deploy the limited resources of the language they have to communicate clearly and this is actually something which perhaps native speakers need to learn about as well so it's not entirely just a matter for non-native speakers ok i'll jump all in if then why not just learn english i think i'm going on line with robert was saying and if you want to use english want you to speak it properly. well we should make clear that there are additional b.r.d.
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would be two kinds of the only english which gives you access to the culture of the anglo-saxon culture which is enhanced very each outstanding green from shakespeare to luck wayne and if you like bill gates so this is going to if you want to enjoy it if you want to read it we should all use content you need korean english which for a person like me is a life that if you want to cause a deal in must call. to kill or in c. or. to speak later to speak in dallas texas must look at the people who will not understand you and this is my observation when i went to japan in one thousand nine hundred ninety four as business decisions are you observe some americans frontrunning me from a team i was a vice president with a.b.m. usa then and i observe that the job the japanese there and then recovery and soon and the chinese in beijing i talk to the far east where much better ideas with me understood me better understand them better than what i could observe between them
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americans and that's why i said we thought we were speaking english we are not we are speaking a different kind of language they something different so for that is correct i started first concerned business is concerned internationally he's not and had to give in god or the i did to meet right there he talked for the british council which i could extensively in my book and in these people there are many scenes which are worse he got here one of them is that in ninety six percent of the cases in international communication there is at least one no native english speaker who is involved and it's up to you need to adjust to the nigger of this person or not be as good in worshipping as they can eat could be ok example i mean i could agree with you maybe if you're talking about your childhood or buying a ticket at a train station or ordering in a restaurant or something like that. you bring a business i mean most businesses you have contracts and you have very specific
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laws and clauses and things like that this this language can't work for that if i go to robert on that i mean it's for chit chat it's just to get you know get through something is this something you wouldn't sign a contract with using this kind of language it's too imprecise i mean it has nothing to do with english as a school subject where you're trying to equip people to function in a range of ways and i want one of things that worries me about the whole promotion of different types of english worldwide is that the assumption morris is that the only language you need worldwide these days is english you don't get far with english in latin america or even in southern europe or in most of asia so that when for instance danish companies are asked why they have failed to achieve a business deal in japan or in italy they tend to say it was because they don't speak english well enough there whereas what companies ought to be doing in order to trade with japan and italy is to have enough people in their country who can
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actually function will understand the culture as well as the language of japan or korea or or italy so that so far as education is concerned it's a totally different ballgame and i agree really with the mystical bell here that the that the idea that you can do complex negotiations with a simplified greatest is misleading and look a jumble you were shaking your head you disagree go ahead. well i'm sorry and i think. illustration because i'm not a native english speaker as you might have released already and well but i can so wonderful adventure going to spread this around companies. go to me go ahead you know so i could go many people who do that as far as contacts are concerned you have experts that can have the contracts and concentrate them from american into english to begin with from into u.k. english so that you don't have to do when you're negotiating what you have to do is discuss the what he performance of your products or your services understanding
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needs of your customer and you don't need a full english product you did you can do it has a limited english programming you forward to go rules you he formulate you use sentences and you check that you're in front of you are understanding you which most native english speakers don't think they should do and then. in language to do business in d.c. in a foreign land is valid in only one instance if you are living in destroying and so they used to be here you know here for serious talk was all do we have so many so as soon as they are saying frenchman two hundred company and its alliance it was expected to be able to run dutch and speak dutch and for months so you had to take a guy who spoke with a german and english and in four months he was you know to discuss ways card near schools hourly and english not in his announcement in the country they don't so that's true but when you are discussing international gives business you meet people who are understood that the war where language it was going to be some kind
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of english and there will be will step back because. because i have my content in here they can jump here and go to david here why don't we put issue on the other foot i mean should native speakers of english maybe delve into this because it'll it'll make it easier for them to communicate with people and i'm saying just for limited purposes if you want to go travel around the world as we just it was pointed out in some places and in europe in asia and in south america there's very limited english it wouldn't be a bad idea for native speakers say take a real short course in that and you can get by a lot easier. i'm not i'm all in favor of native speakers being talked how to use their language in a more effective ways when talking to non-native speakers i don't think it actually needs to sort of to learn a certain english lighter special kind of english i think it's more about strategies and principles hold for using the language that you already know but i think that we are talking about different things here and i think that in korea tiley with with robert on this that for ordinary service and characters just doing
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business in a low level then find some kind of english like world work but that's not how the global economy works i'm increasingly you have multinational companies for example working in a number of different countries you have research or technicians and so on who have to work as a global team communicator prairie high level their subject within that team across the world and that really does mean that everyone has to share a perry high level of english i am going to jump in right here after a short break we'll continue our discussion on what some people call imperialism stay with her to. take you straight. to the sixty's. a cluster munitions. and inside the container you have
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a small bomb and you can have anywhere from dozens up to hundreds of them there's a huge market right now for battle area clearance because there are a lot of countries in the world that are contaminated by unexploded ordnance. and so you've got these companies and n.g.o.s and it's basically shrunk that have an expertise to get rid of the back of. what they do is they go to these places they will hire local train the locals how to do the clearance they'll let the locals basically take ownership because you know they have a vested interest in clearing their homes and they're putting themselves at risk every single day when they go out there to clear areas of. a. big. man.
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wealthy british style. sometimes that's right. for the. markets why not. why not what's really happening to the global economy in the kinds of reports on r.g.p. . and. still. welcome back to crosstalk i'm peter lobo remind you we're talking about global languages. and. stood. before it let's see what foreign languages are most popular among russians. global language over the years
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has. global status being a language of business culture and diplomacy however english is not the only language used for international relations and communications the united nations for example has six official languages arabic chinese english french russian and spanish the public opinion foundation assessed russians knowledge of foreign languages six to seven percent said they speak english twenty percent german and another five percent can speak french though english today has a dominant position other languages are taking a stand so what language will the world's future and will we all ever speak the same language computer i usually poll if i go back to you first one of the things i think is interesting is that you actually kind of a maybe correct me if i'm wrong kind of
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a linguistic nationalist yourself you you want to preserve good french ok how do you balance it with globish and being someone that really is a a connoisseur of the french language where people in france used to be very proud because it used to be the language of diplomacy can i . think you were going to say which was mostly discourse in english and then from there on. to some pretty and people are very happy about it it was he praised very english for each and every purpose rawness and these there would be no turn back because elysian is now our language and she spoke around the world not very well i was doing very poorly even for researchers and people assume they are highly variable but it isn't a wish we'd use we're going to see the common behavior for international communication and there will be no stared back because for the first time in history. the languages were wide and the communication is instantaneous these never have been in the roman times square like you know geek where we're going to be
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around to get there early on but now this is the case so we need to have gone back and get wind of. the situation they are on french we never get back where did he and as they used to say many years ago in english you're listening we could do about it now you and your actions this is finished and yes we'll be there but if we're going to be the english spoken like maybe even if we're being poor like me it was a people like that and you think it's a very interesting point if i go to robert on this one here i mean if we look at what the impact of the internet on english and you know and you can go to so many websites that purportedly are in english but they're in awful english there is the grammar is awful the spelling is awful the word choice is awful the syntax is awful but what is stopping this the name and really we had agreed with you before before you know why don't you just learn proper english told the world is this way ahead of us here i mean they're going to use english anyway they want so i mean what
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direction we go in or can we just can we control it in any way probably not. the internet when it was launched meant that a lot of people felt that this would mean that english would expand at the expense of other languages in fact there are hundreds of languages used on the internet even very small ones demographically speaking and this means that obviously it makes a lot of sense in the modern world for anyone to want to have a very high level of proficiency in english the interesting thing for me at least when researching language policy is whether english is being added to people's repertoire which is great or else where the english is replacing other languages and this is where you mention the word imperialism obviously under the soviet system the people of the three baltic states knew what linguistic imperialism was because bilingualism then was a dirty word for basically dropping their own language and shifting into russian
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and that's exactly what happened in a lot of the colonial world where there was definitely a major focus on the colonial languages like like french in english and english does open lots of doors world wide but one also needs to look at every particular context and see to what extent it actually closes doors for a large number of people well opening for the few david what do you think about that i mean the big recall the imperialism element that i mentioned at the end of the first part of the program i mean it for all of the learning of languages in english is the predominant one now we'll talk about it later if it's going to stay that way we have to think of the child in chinese but is it is it just is it is a destroyer language is it replacing languages because in talking to some of my you know people who work on cross talk you know even when they speak russian the russian english is invading their language and they're in russia you know in a working with me and it's all a mixture of us making a lot of variety of languages even when two of them are throwing in french at the
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same time i mean is this good or does it or does it matter. well you know i find it very difficult to get sort of terribly worked up about them and i would just look at how the english language came to being of the sort of mongrel language that we have anyway really sort of current preaching purity i think it is true and i absolutely agree with robert that you have to look at particular situations this is a very dangerous area in which to generalize just because there appear to be these big global trends going on but doesn't mean that actually the situation in different countries is not very different particularly in terms of where the languages are actually being injured or perhaps i mean there's an argument to say here in hong kong but the role of english in hong kong is actually helping protect cantonese as a sort of a class to group against encroaching put on by mandarin ok john paul if i can go to you a lot of people in and i want to go into a big discussion here but it is easier is global value free does it have any values
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because we there's a large a great argument in linguistics did you know it will take the english language for example it has a lot of built in values in and what a world view and how to look at values in society it is global. or is it completely devoid of any kind of value in terms of having values. where he'd have. the what i call english you know for in a few leash as devalue of being in f. and with this and i do will say you can say it was easy you want for reasons a to care of president obama's inauguration speech you can see it in my websites and would you say exactly the same thing but if you where her somewhere in educational then down to more people would understand it now to you know gratian species for americans but nonetheless there are people outside who would like to listen to it and it doesn't what he says without any translation which is always distorting the meaning so devalue is that it is if the show and it is not
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a language at all since i'm going to do to communicate and use a tool to make business and in that event it is enough but it doesn't carry the values of the anglo-saxon culture it isn't qaeda values of democracy doesn't go there use this is not the goal is a simple tool that we make it efficient and by the way people who speak good enough english don't have to go to people like peter and amy in the media and indeed very seldom speak with people who don't speak good english because those words who don't they dare not speak the native english speakers when you think about that robert i mean is it isn't as i'm glad. i'm really puzzled by that because i think that immigrants like myself i live in denmark while the english is my mother tongue i mean i use four languages every week all the time and clearly once you have learnt several languages there are vast advantages but to go back to your point about whether globish is intrinsically impregnated with the cultural values which english
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has evolved during its development over fifteen hundred years well i think i would say that very clearly english spread worldwide because of the british empire because of the colonization of america and australia and so on and so this means that the idea that any language can be culturally neutral depends entirely on context any language can serve either good or evil purposes but a lot of the thrust behind global english at the moment is connected with globalisation with americanization and with consumerist values so in that sense very definitely just as john kerry has just said global issues connected with commerce and this congress at the moment is dominated by american interests and other european and japanese and other conglomerates where the chinese of both into the same game and who knows where the chinese are taking us ok well i'm glad that's a good point here hey but what do you think i mean when we're talking about be english language is evolving and you mentioned how it is
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a barrier to or protecting cantonese there i mean one hundred years from now we may be talking having the same program or a different set of characters obviously but how chinese mandarin chinese is invaded the world and how it's either promoted its language or polluted other language we could see people like ourselves you know speaking of a pigeon chinese. well i'm not sure about that and i think there's no doubt that mandarin is increasing in importance in the world and more and more people across the world are getting interested in learning it as a foreign language but it's not going to displace english really i can't see that happening for at least another one hundred years or more and i doubt it is going to happen but i think that the world of languages is being rebalanced at the moment that's for sure and i think bookbinder you see there are more important things actually going on in the world and english is implicated in them and for example in
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china and most primary school children are learning english now from really quite a young age in the big cities it's as soon as they go into primary school now right across the world this is happening this means that we have a younger generation going through schools just reaching second preschools and now in some countries like china who are going to be really fairly good english speakers now this the world has never seen this before these already these children these young adults are able to communicate directly to each other we were talking earlier about amish on the internet they can actually communicate directly to each other in a way that could never have been done before and i think that that is actually for instance contributing to making the world slightly more unstable slightly more dangerous than before so this friend of english is a global language has many many mentions more than just business now the interesting question for me is what if in fifty years time china decides to stop
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teaching english in schools would it have the clout then to start forcing countries around to begin with to learn more mandarin start using more minder and i'm gradually turning ran out of time indeed we should do a program on the cultural and linguistic germany of mandarin chinese thanks mike yesterday in paris copenhagen and in hong kong and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time. remember prost are. just some. serious.
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