Hello Dave,
You post is VERY long indeed. I will try to have a
short post, and perhaps later if there are more
comments from others.
Perhaps you might want to think why you have English
as your first langauge now, and so am I. We both grew
up in countries that once belong to the British
Empire. In a way, if I am correct so is Cananda,
Australia, NZ and many countries in the African
continent etc. etc. etc. (as I am not too sure about
the US, so I will let someone tell me ...I know for
sure historically, you escape having to learn Dutch as
first language!! So what if you speak English, come to
Holland and I will assure you you can surve quite well
with English, but you would be quite lost and many
other things. Like me).
So, what shall we do with people that was once the
colonies of Spaiin, Portugal, France, Belgium, the
Netheralnds to name a few? OR those that were too
uninteresting to be a colony for any one of the OLD
countries? According to your theory, does that mean
ALMOST all of South American should drop their own
langauge and learn English instead? Or the Chinese
with 1.6 billiongs citizen should ignore their own
language? What about Indonesia combined with Malaysia?
or the German which has more millions of inhabitans
than NL (only 16 millions therefore anyone can bully
them into dropping their own langauge and stick to
English). How about the French? They too have many
former colonies in the African continent, Vietnam,
Haiti, even a tiny portion of Cananda??? I don't think
the French or the German are going to agree with you.
German is spoken in more than just Germany. Now I just
remember, Italy is another big country! And Portugal
would join hand with Brazil, and Macao (tiny but ..)
India is a unique case, perhaps, because Indians NEVER
agreed to have one of their own language to represent
thier country, instead they are using English as their
official languae. You cannot say that about China.
China has united their language to Mandarin since, I
don't know, many centuries ago. Therefore, is it right
to ask them to drop their own official/native
language?
Take the case of Indonesia, the country has a very
lopsided rich vs. poor. Therefore the rich would not
have problem with using English as defacto IT language
since most of them would have had the chance of
studying in the US, Australia, Canada etc. They have
money. AND if they cannot speak the langauge, they can
always hire someone to translate for them. I don't
really know the percentage of rich vs. poor in that
country. But I am quite sure it is something around
the region of 10% vs 90% poor. So, what are we going
to do with the poor? Ask all of them to learn another
language? Forget about if it technically doable, is it
ethically correct? After all we are talking about
solving digital divide to leap-frog the poor. Why then
the burden should be on the poor?
OK. I am going to stop here. I will see if anyone
would send in their arguement about the economic side
etc. etc.
Do not forget as well, Indonesia is one of the
countries that are going to order 100 millions of the
100$ lap-top.
Cindy
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