Learning The Lingo: Good Moaning !
Learning The Lingo: Good Moaning !
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And nally. . .
2015;17:144
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.