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Learning The Lingo: Good Moaning !

The document discusses the author's experience with language learning and foreign languages. It discusses how the author's wife has started taking Spanish classes, and reflects on learning French in school which provided limited practical help. The document also discusses Esperanto, an constructed international auxiliary language, and how it failed to gain widespread adoption. It further discusses attitudes towards foreign accents and dialects in the UK.

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Al-Amirah Zainab
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39 views1 page

Learning The Lingo: Good Moaning !

The document discusses the author's experience with language learning and foreign languages. It discusses how the author's wife has started taking Spanish classes, and reflects on learning French in school which provided limited practical help. The document also discusses Esperanto, an constructed international auxiliary language, and how it failed to gain widespread adoption. It further discusses attitudes towards foreign accents and dialects in the UK.

Uploaded by

Al-Amirah Zainab
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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DOI: 10.1111/tog.

12178

And nally. . .

2015;17:144

The Obstetrician & Gynaecologist


http://onlinetog.org

Learning the lingo


James Drife

MD FRCOG FRCPEd FRCSEd FCOGSA FFSRH

Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Leeds, UK

My wife has just started Spanish classes. Its years since we


visited Iberia or South America but she enjoys learning
languages, and the Instituto Cervantes makes part-time
learners feel welcome. The Institute, run by the Spanish
government and with branches in over 20 countries, is named
after Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish surgeons son who
wrote the first modern European novel. Volume 2 of Don
Quixote appeared in 1615. Now, four centuries later, there are
said to be about 100 000 new novels published each year in
English alone. Crikey. Miguel has a lot of answer for.
The Spanish word for language is lengua. The French is
langue, the Italian lingua and the Romanian limba all
derived, of course, from the Latin word for tongue. With
their shared Roman roots, southern European languages
seem deceptively simple to us Brits. The slang word lingo in
my title sums up our lack of respect for them, and indeed our
laziness about learning any foreign language. Why bother, we
say, when cities all over the world, including Oxford and
Cambridge, are full of English language schools catering for
eager students.

Doktoro Esperanto
Back in the 1960s at Edinburgh Medical School there was an
attempt to promote an alternative to English as the universal
language. The graffiti in one of the toilets included a small
poster saying, Lerni la lingvon Esperanto. A wit had written
underneath, Gette stuffato, and that seemed to be the end of
that intellectual debate. Pity. Ive always felt that a neutral
lingua franca is a great idea. I even bought Teach Yourself
Esperanto but sadly never got round to reading it.
I now know that Doktoro Esperanto was the pen-name of
Dr Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist who wanted to ease
tensions among the Poles, Russians, Germans, Jews and
others in his native city of Bialystock. Part of the problem was
that each community had its own language, and in 1887 he
published a completely new one. Esperanto means hoping
(oh dear, another Latin-based vocabulary) but as it turned
out, hope was short-lived. In the 1930s various nationalists
denounced the language and both Hitler and Stalin executed
its users. Then as now, winning hearts and minds to
internationalism was an uphill struggle.

144

Good moaning!
At school I learned French, like everyone who wanted to enter
university, but really it has been of limited help to me. I soon found,
faced with a French visitor in the outpatient clinic, that I was illprepared to take a gynaecological history. (The word for period, I
discovered, is regle: why hadnt I been told?) Today schoolboy
French is no longer universal in 2011 only 40% of pupils in
England took a GCSE in any foreign language. Realising this, Ive
had to mothball one of my comedy standbys a joke in Franglais
that once had them rolling in the aisles. I wouldnt dare use it in an
after-dinner speech now, except for an audience of senior citizens.
But even for my generation a schoolboy standard was all we
wanted to achieve. We knew that if you speak with a heavy
foreign accent people will smile at your mistakes and wont take
offence. The same principle applies when foreigners speak our
language. Visiting France recently, my wife and I found that
one of the staff in a local tourist office spoke as if she had come
straight from Buckingham Palace. One slip would have been a
disaster but fortunately her English was perfect. She must have
wondered, though, why we exited backwards, bowing.
Accents send messages of which the speaker may not be aware.
The English now being taught around the globe tends to have an
American inflection. Here in Britain immigration has broadened
the range of accents while some impenetrable rural dialects have
disappeared. In the past ambitious people (with exceptions, like
Alan Bennett) worked hard to lose their regional accents but I dont
hear much about elocution teachers these days. And we Scots are
lucky because our brogue is widely perceived as reassuring for a
doctor, or indeed any professional. Perhaps those language
academies should move from Oxford and Cambridge to Inverness.

An ongoing stakeholder?
Im tempted to join my wife at her classes. Why dont I, then? To be
honest, Im still trying to master English. During my 40 years in
academic medicine Ive had to get to grips with bureaucratic jargon,
political doublespeak, sociological mumbo-jumbo, a mindnumbing succession of acronyms and the ebb and flow of
politically correct terminology. After all that, Spanish should be
easy, but I need a break.

2015 Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists

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