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Wouldn't Spanish be a BETTER choice?
Sw yank, I know that the tribes of the Southwest were migratory and thus were not "established". I was pointing out that English supplanted many native languages throughout history, so you shouldn't get all bent out of shape if, in turn, English gets supplanted where you live.
<<Like I said, don't even talk about situations you don't know.>>
What exactly don't I know? Is there some big secret that is known in the Southwest and nowhere else?
Similarly, let me respond to Cro-Magnon:
<<This is an English speaking country NOW. What it was 300 years ago isn't relevant. The Spanish people haven't conquered us yet, though sometimes that seems to be their intent.>>
You aren't getting my point. What the US was 300 years ago IS relevant in a discussion of "linguistic conquest". You are complaining about how English is being "conquered" by Spanish, yet English itself is only spoken here because it "conquered" other languages!
<<The Hispanics are even ruder when they come here without speaking English, since they're coming here to live, not just to visit.>>
The Europeans were extremely rude when they came to the US and refused to learn the native languages - indeed, they killed most of the inhabitants. What the Hispanics are doing is far less rude than that.
In other words, you have no right to bemoan the conquest of English.
I myself though just strongly doubt the likelihood that English will be "conquered", one way or another, by Spanish, in the US, one way or another; I doubt that it will last any more than a few generations /at most/ here in the US, and expect that the rate of assimilation, language-wise, of descendants of Spanish-speaking immigrants who are born here in the US, with the preexisting English-speaking populace, will be very high as a whole. I see no reason why it will be an exception, compared to previous immigration of non-English-speaking groups to the US.
Personally, I agree with Travis here.
In my view, if English today is kind of what Latin was 2,000 years ago while French and Spanish together are what Greek was 2,000+ years ago then English or some variation of English will prevail in the United States.
Italy, especially southern Italy, once had a large Greek speaking population reinforced by the numerous Greek slaves the Romans imported into the country. Yet, most of their descendents eventualy went over to Latin. Just one tiny dialect of Greek (Griko-Salentino) is all that remains of the language in Italy today. The same scenario will probably be the future of Spanish in the United States.
Don't assume from my posts that I think English will be conquered by Spanish. I was telling sw yank and Cro Magnon that they shouldn't complain IF English were conquered by Spanish.
Whether you deliberately chose *specifically* Latin for comparison with English, or whether it was chosen just because this case involving Latin and Greek parallels what will likely happen with English and Spanish, respectively, I still find the comparison of Latin with English interesting, as it seems, at least to me, that English will quite likely develop in an overall directly parallel to how Classical-period Latin ended up developing into the Romance languages and Medieval Latin. That is, it is likely that the informal spoken language will develop separately from the formal literary language, and will fragment, while the formal literary language will most likely not only stay as one, but also remain in use as such long after English as it is known today is no longer spoken by anyone as a native language.
The reason for believing that is simply that the spoken language has in general, at least in the case of North American English, changed far more, and varies from place to place far more, than the formal written language, which varies quite little from place to place within natively English, and is far more conservative than the spoken language as a whole. There seems to be little indication that the gap between the two, and the differences between individual dialects, will not continue to widen as time continues, while there seems little reason to believe that the formal literary language will *not* stay as one, or will change in any significant fashion in the at all near future. Hence, it is likely that people will be still writing in a form of English relatively close to that which we are writing in right now, similar to the use of Latin during the Middle Ages, long after most no longer speak dialects, descended from the English of today, which are crossintelligable with the various dialects of English today as a whole.
Sorry if this is somewhat off-topic for this thread, but I'm just too interested in this particular topic to pass by the association with English as Latin, even if the association wasn't pointed in the direction which I have taken it in this post.
Lazar:
Spanish and English are both European colonial languages in the Western Hemisphere. However, the Spanish did have more of a tendency to go native and intermarry with Indian populations than the British did. This partly why I think the Spanish are not seen as "bad guys" by most modern historians to the extent that the English are. Yet, there was considerable brutality towards Indians by both Spanish colonials and Anglo-Americans it just took different forms. For example, thousands of Indians were killed in Mexico and the Andes mining silver for the Spanish. The English and Anglo-Americans didn't use Indians as laborers so poor Whites were the victims of mining accidents in the U.S. instead. On the other hand, the Americans did relocate entire Indian tribes in the eastern United States to states further west like Kansas and Oklahoma on forced marches which killed a lot of their people.
Travis:
A lot of posts seem to be getting off-topic but, nevertheless, I agree with your previous post. I am a great believer that history repeats itself and that the British and Americans are the modern Romans and that English is the modern Latin.
A major difference between Anglo-American colonization of North America, and Spanish colonialism in the Americas, is that in what is now English-speaking North America, for the most part, the native population was basically /replaced/ (read: genocide and mass displacement) with a European population, along with slaves from Africa and their subsequent descendents, whereas such never happened in most of what is now Latin America, where much of the population, except in some heavily Europeanized areas like Argentina, and in areas like Brazil where most of the population is descended primarily from African slaves, is of native descent to some extent or another. While the Spanish were brutal all right to the native population in many cases, the native populations weren't simply destroyed directly, disease aside, by them, for the most part. Rather, the native population was generally /absorbed/ slowly over time into a primarily mestizo population, which is totally opposed to the pattern which happened in much of what is now English-speaking North America.
Travis:
I agree. The Native American population remained strongest in the urbanized parts of the Americas: the Mexican and Andean highlands. It was the areas of low population density - Argentina, Brazil, the US - where the natives were displaced.
I agree with Lazar's posts, including the first one reminding everybody that Southwestern USA was Mexican. Some Mexicans may resent the annexation of their homeland and somehow view it as potentially void.
If Hispanophone immigration - illegal but legitimate - continues to expand at the current pace, the outlook for English could be gloomy in what used to be Northern Mexico.
And the debate about undocumented immigrants may also apply to undocumented US soldiers occupying Iraq.
Sorry Mjd : I broke a golden rule to highlight Anglocentrism.
Native Americans weren't "displaced" from Brazil, Argentina etc.. DNA studies have showned that a significant portion of the population in these Latin American countries still carry some Native American ancestry,however minute. What happened was that the "mestizo"/Native American population in these places was heavily outnumbered and inevitably absorbed by the hordes of European refugees that later arrived, thereby diluting Native American blood.
In nations such as Mexico (where there's a large segment of the population with predominant Native American ancestry, almost pure in some cases) some Aztecs weren't captured they managed to escape and were not assimilated into the current latinized Mexican culture. But they remain on the fringe of society and as it is in most parts of the worlds, the poor usually reproduce the most and hence why there are so many of them today.
>>- It's easier to pronounce
For those whose native language it is, no doubt, but it is the pronunciation which I found by far the most difficult aspect of Spanish. As a native English speaker (not from the US, where perhaps one may expect more general exposure to spoken Spanish), I had no great difficulty in relating written French to its spoken form (or Classical Latin, for that matter, although pronunciation of it is a guess at best), so next tried to learn Spanish. The written version was indeed logical enough, but I was utterly defeated by the attempt to speak or understand its spoken form.
German wasn't too bad: it looks guttural, and sounds that way, but the letters used in it pronounce much the sounds you'd expect from them.
If Spanish were the euphonic, sweet, flowing language it appears in print, fair enough, but it makes you cough so much it can't be good for the throat.
>>If Spanish were the euphonic, sweet, flowing language it appears in print, fair enough, but it makes you cough so much it can't be good for the throat.<<
Mmmm...I think you're mistaken the accent of a particular variety (Peninsular perhaps? peninsular spanish is know for having all those traits you've mentioned) and thinking it represents the whole spectrum of accents found in that language. Try Chilean, Argentine, or Mexican instead and notice that there's world of difference between them. They're softer, sweeter and more musical than their Eurpean counterparts (Yes would you believe there is more than one variety of Spanish spoken in Spain, it is not homogeneous).
>>For those whose native language it is, no doubt, but it is the pronunciation which I found by far the most difficult aspect of Spanish. As a native English speaker <<
This is hard to believe. There are 5 simple unambiguious vowelsto learn with a hadful of dipthong that shouldn't be hard to master. How difficult could that be? Me thinks you're just prejudiced towards the language and don't care for it too much. Which is fine, eveyone is entitle to their opinion and tastes.
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