Posting about not posting....
Apr. 18th, 2008 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishMy professor for "Aspects of Tibetan Religious History" is a tiny white-bearded Hungarian man who frequently uses English words when he cannot remember the German ones. He is uniformly charming, with a slight tendency to ramble on.
Oddly enough, it appears that if you are going to study Tibetan religious history at a German-speaking university, you are going to have to speak very good English. There are just not that many books written on the subject in German, and even the ones written by non-native English-speakers are often written first and only in English, because that way one can be sure that they will get outside the author's own country.
I have mixed feeling about the use of English as a lingua franca for Europe. On the one hand, it gives me a marked advantage: my ability to speak my native language gives me a boost when in situations where English becomes the default language. But I'm not sure how I feel about how English *became* that language. I tend to mentally link it with American imperialism, though perhaps British imperialism is a better place to lay the blame. I've noticed that a lot of native-English speakers feel a little embarrassed at using English in foreign countries, presumably for the same reasons as me.
But when someone approaches a German-speaker in a language that the German-speaker does not understand, the German-speaker most often defaults into English, simply because it's more likely for that person to speak it than German. So, while *I* feel bad for defaulting back into English sometimes, it's the most adaptive behavior for functioning in the current multi-lingual environment. I just don't speak Hungarian or any of the (somewhat) mutually intelligible West Slavic languages; while the older generations of those countries did learn German very a very young age, it's now more common for them to learn English.
In other news, my f-key seems to be sticking, so if you see an 'off' you suspect there should be an 'of', that's why.
Oddly enough, it appears that if you are going to study Tibetan religious history at a German-speaking university, you are going to have to speak very good English. There are just not that many books written on the subject in German, and even the ones written by non-native English-speakers are often written first and only in English, because that way one can be sure that they will get outside the author's own country.
I have mixed feeling about the use of English as a lingua franca for Europe. On the one hand, it gives me a marked advantage: my ability to speak my native language gives me a boost when in situations where English becomes the default language. But I'm not sure how I feel about how English *became* that language. I tend to mentally link it with American imperialism, though perhaps British imperialism is a better place to lay the blame. I've noticed that a lot of native-English speakers feel a little embarrassed at using English in foreign countries, presumably for the same reasons as me.
But when someone approaches a German-speaker in a language that the German-speaker does not understand, the German-speaker most often defaults into English, simply because it's more likely for that person to speak it than German. So, while *I* feel bad for defaulting back into English sometimes, it's the most adaptive behavior for functioning in the current multi-lingual environment. I just don't speak Hungarian or any of the (somewhat) mutually intelligible West Slavic languages; while the older generations of those countries did learn German very a very young age, it's now more common for them to learn English.
In other news, my f-key seems to be sticking, so if you see an 'off' you suspect there should be an 'of', that's why.
