The Engimatic Mermaid has posted an entry about how the government of Brazil is trying to legislate its citizens' language. The problem with language is that everybody speaks one (at least), and we all have opinions on ours. What's right? What's wrong? How the plebes are slaughtering our noble tongue. This relieves most people of their reason and allows them to discourse on matters better left undiscussed. This linguistic sickness is the goad that urges otherwise sane people to lobby for English First or English as the Official Language of the USA. I thought all those huddled masses yearning to be free of their ancestral languages and strange ways need only to be shown the blinding, political power of American English for them to come to their senses and assimilate. Why can't these pesky foreigners learn English like the rest of the world?
Posted by jim at June 9, 2003 08:38 AMThat's true, one of our representatives has already had his project for the legislation of foreign terms approved in the first round of discussion ; next, it must go to the Senate and then to the Congress.
Well, it happens that the main source of those terms to Brazilian Portuguese is American English ; however, people always forget that cultures are rarely isolated, and that what makes a big part of a language's identity is not the imported lexikon ( which is seen as a bunch of roots that become part of the language life game ), but its grammatical instruments - inflections, conjunctions etc. So, the point is that BrazPortuguese is just being enriched by the imported terms, but will unlikely lose its character *by external influence*(1).
By the way, the fear of assimilation is the core of that deputy's project, who doesn't see that, although many people in Brazil *do* speak some English as L2 ( what would, indeed, indicate that substantial sociolinguistic differences are rising, especially in the lexikon ), BP will never be assimilated ( more likely would mix with Spanish, a Romance and neighbor lgg, than with English ) ; and, considering the absolutely remote possibility that it could happen, after three or four generations, wouldn't it be a different system, once again, considering all the external factors involved ( substrata, time etc ) ?
(1) However, there are many studies proving that, through metaplasms, BP's noun and verbal inflections are being lost, what must create a series of arrangements to accomodate the new face of that language.