 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
There is a campaign now in England for the reform of the English language. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the campaign aims at stemming the deterioration of the language. The government, represented by both the British Council and the Ministry of Culture, is trying to safeguard the mother tongue. It is joined in this quest by other organisations and even newspapers.
In a scathing conclusion the Daily Telegraph published an article entitled "At the end of the day, English is in a sorry state". The article starts by tabulating the grievous mistakes which have been committed -- misplaced apostrophes, split infinitives, Americanisms, then it goes on to mention more than a hundred figures who have been asked to mention which grammatical mistakes annoyed them most.
The chief offender, according to the article was the incorrect use of the apostrophe with examples of the confusion between its and it's and whose and who's. Second was split infinitives, then the use of clichés, the most hated of which were "at the end of the day," "At this point of time", "We must tighten our belts", "Know what I mean" and "Basically".
Then followed the lack of clarity, of which the politicians were found guilty, and lastly the invasion of Americanism. Examples of this invasion was the use of adjectives not adverbs to modify verbs -- such as "he swam good."
104 people were given spelling tests, and only four passed with full marks. The average score was five out of ten. One of the successful candidates was Miss Widdisombe who had been a government minister. She had this to say "I used to offer my civil servants incentives not to mix singular and plural as in "a pensioner collects their benefit."
This information came as a result of a survey carried out by the publishers Collins to coincide with the latest edition of its concise dictionary. The survey also showed a number of politicians including ministers and even Mr. Blair who committed grammatical mistakes. More than 70 per cent of the people polled recommended that grammar should be included in school syllabi.
Some, however, expressed opposition to the survey. John Snow, Channel 4 newscaster, had this to say "I think English is a constantly evolving language and I particularly appreciate the development of new adjectives."
The new Collins dictionary is publishing words that had not been previously published, such as Viagra, Disneyfication, road pricing and hedge fund.
Some newspapers are also taking part in this new campaign to save the English language. The Sunday Times. for instance, publishes a series of pamphlets with the title Wordpower. In its introduction to the series, the paper writes: "Today's pace of life allows us little time to learn how to master our own language effectively. But now, in just one hour, the Wordpower Series can help you enrich your own powers of communication in writing and speech," The pamphlets, and there are eight of them, are sold at the cheap price of L2.99 each.
I am all for this new campaign, since there is no doubt that English needs to be saved. I, like my generation, were brought up on Nesfield Grammar which helped to lay deep the foundation of the language.
