[KS] Re: Mori's cockamie ideas

[Richard C. Miller]

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I believe that Fukuzawa Yukichi (famous modernizing and founder of Keio
University) also advocating jettisoning Japanese in favor of English. I
don't have a copy of his autobiography with me here, but I remember him
discussing the subject in it.

Wholesale language transfer has worked in the past. Spanish and Portuguese
is not indigenous to Latin America, after all, and the native populations
down there were not wiped out as they essentially were in North America.
Moreover, from the perspective of late-19th century Japan, much of their
existing culture was seen as Chinese culture artificially grafted onto
Japanese realities--this was part of the argument against kanji. In many
circles at that time, everything was up for grabs, so why not language?

I also might point out that, at points in US history, similar attention was
paid to a national language, with some people advocating German rather than
English (German-Americans are the largest group even today). It almost came
to pass in my home state (Wisconsin), which was a haven for post-1848 Bund
Socialists, but in the end English was made the official language in the
late 19th century.

East Timor has also just selected Portuguese as the national language, in
spite of the fact that only a small percentage of the elite really speaks
it. Indonesian would have made more sense (everyone knows that language),
but that choice was not politically feasible.

Richard
--Richard C. Miller
--UW School of Music
--Manado, Indonesia
--rcmiller at students.wisc.edu
  http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~rcmiller/