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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 527
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WCL 527 August 2006
Can you write 'war criminal' in Hebrew?
Can you write 'war criminal' in Hebrew? Despite having one guilty prime minister in a coma and another who directed their latest outrages, the Israelis probably don't need to, since from America and Britain they import the aircraft and bombs to devastate Lebanon but also the language to keep in touch. But how about 'Beijing' in Chinese? Or 'kamikaze' in Japanese? What about 'Tamil Tigers' and 'caste barriers' in south Asian scripts? Or the big one today: 'terrorist' in Arabic? Do we know anything in another script beyond alpha and omega?
In fact, we are scarcely aware that the Latin alphabet is integral to our way of seeing language. But for non-European or American users of the world-wide web, this is obvious and obtrusive. More, for millions of non-anglophones, this is an obstacle to their handling of the internet which may prevent any use at all, despite the several free programs for translating from and into any widely-used language.
Our keyboards do not give indication of capacity for anything besides our own script and languages. Because the internet, originating in the U.S., is dominated by Americans and supervised, ultimately, by the U.S. government. As a consequence, the domain names such as .edu, .com and the like, are written in Latin letters. To outsiders they are not simply baffling, they are meaningless. Consequently there is now a demand for separation, so that other linguistic groups can have their own little internets. If acceded to, that could lead to the break-up of the global internet and a chaos, with no way of ensuring delivery of emails and the failure of the current mapping that enables users to move from site to site.
Various remedies have been explored and it seems likely that there can be ways of patching up the present snags. But ultimately, it is difficult to see how a global internet can be preserved in its present form. The rulers of the largest countries, China, and its neighbour, India, would probably not be sorry to see that. Their own vast populations are not all going to learn English and that language, together with its Latin alphabet, is integral to the current internet.
One reform that would much simplify, if not cure the problem, is to use an international language with the Latin alphabet, as the basis for general purposes of handling websites. There is such a perfectly adequate language, simple, non-national, impartial, regular and used for over 100 years in all kinds of international meetings and parleys. Esperanto could supply one part of the answer, but there is no way that all the scripts of various languages can be amalgamated or reduced to one staple. We are probably stuck with the Romans for the use of their alphabet.
Nevertheless, this growing rift among users of the internet is a useful reminder that the over-popular phrase amongst anglophones "everybody speaks English" is still not true. Nor ever very likely to be. When it comes to democratic deficit, the inequality of linguistic discrimination will outlast even the subjection of women in many part of the world, because most people in the English--speaking world are oblivious of its very existence. Can you read 'war criminal' in Hebrew?
John Roberts
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