Unit 5

1. Unit 5

2. Activity 1 markets, trade and language • Identifying the essentials of trade • Analyzing the components of a trade deal some things we can not produce, we should buy from others, or change ours with that of others. for trade, first there is the of some people don’t have. There also should be the things you want somewhere. components of a trade: commodity, a currency, buyer, seller, market, a means of communication buyers and sellers and commodities may vary from time to time, place to place. • Understand negotiation or bargaining and language use in a deal, or bargaining there is a certain context. Some people can understand each other with minimal language. it seems that there is not language use in supermarket shopping. You can see the price and take what you need, and pay for it at the check-out. But the price for the goods is also a means of communication because we use language in understanding the price.

3. Trading is a fundamental human activity, necessary to all except the most undeveloped societies. • Trade deals, large or small, have similar components. • Communication is essential to all trade deals. The most satisfactory means of communication is a • language equally well known to the buyer and the seller. • It is possible to arrange to do some deals with minimal language, but hardly possible to do withoutit altogether. • English is currently the most commonly used language of international deals between Asian and other countries. This situation may change in the future.

4. Activity 2 • Place trade survival depends on language body language or natural language • A need for lingua franca if a trade is carried between two people who do not share the same language, they should use a language to bridge their meanings so they can do the deal. The language is called lingua franca. • Finding out what is meant by a pidgin read the dialogue: Summarize the main points of the Dialogue. Li Yan learns a number of things that you need to know too! She finds out that English speakers, including highly educated speakers, sometimes use specialist words in a non-specialist, non­technical way. That is what Mrs. Barrow did. She said that Li Yan's faulty composition was little better than a pidginl She meant simply that it was full of grammatical mistakes and that the vocabulary was narrow. It is not uncommon to find the word pidgin applied to English that is just ungrammatical. It would be more exact to use the word deviant or to say it deviates from the standard. A pidgin does deviate from the Standard, but it does so in a rather special way. Make a summary of how it differs by copying into your Notebook and completing the following statements. You can use several words to fill each space.

5. a pidgin • 1. Pidgins are languages for a very narrow range of purposes - those that have to do with coastal trade. . • 2. Pidgins develop wherever traders want to do business (a) with people with whom they do not share a common language and (b) where there is no lingua franca \w them to use. • 3. Most pidgins are mixtures of Asian or African languages and those of major European trading nations – Spain and Portugal, Holland, France and Germany, and Britain. • 4. In general the sound and grammatical systems of a pidgin are those of the language used locally: The vocabulary is supplied by the voyagers. • 5. Pidgins were not as a rule written down; they changed rapidly, they were quickly learned by those who needed them, and when trading stopped they were discarded and soon forgotten. There must have been many pidgins of which we have no record. • 6. They are makeshift languages, and evidence of human inventiveness. • 7. They have very low prestige. Users of the language that provides the vocabulary hear them as fumblingattempts to speak as they do! People of every race tend to think of foreigners as childish, and the use of pidgins tends to strengthen or reinforce, that idea.

6. Activity 3 new languages • Creoles and creolization What happens to pidgins? You know already that they change very rapidly and often they are short-lived. They could be described as unstable. Most of them serve the purposes of buyers and sellers reasonably well, until trade ceases along that part of a coast. The pidgin that made communication possible becomes a distant memory, and then is forgotten. There may or may not be some written record of its use. If there is, then that pidgin may be a subject of specialist study. Pidgins are temporary solutions to communication problems. Not always though! In some rather special circumstances a pidgin is adopted by a group of speakers engaged in all sorts of human activities, not just in trade. As they make use of it they extend the number of functions it can have. That means more vocabulary. It also means extending the grammar and inventing or, more often, adapting a writing system that will make another set of functions possible. The pidgin rapidly becomes a language — useful for that group of users in all the ways that language is useful. In this way contact between different languages produces another language, related to both, and different from either. This can happen to a French or a Portuguese or English or any other pidgin. The resulting language is called a creole. The process is called creolization.

7. Examining an English based Creole ---- black English • We are going now to look at an English-based Creole. It is an unusual and important one. It developed in North America and in the islands of the Caribbean,' where French-based Creoles are used too. The languages in contact were max African languages and English — a mix of languages having very different sound and grammatical systems. The circumstances were very unusual and they are very fully recorded. They are a part of European and of American history. Both Tim and Chuck have learned about them at school.

8. Chuck raises a question at the end of the dialogue and he doesn't know answers. His question is part of a larger one. What happened to the various languages that the African slaves had learned as their mother tongues? How is i! that their descendants — Black Americans and Jamaicans — are not speaking those languages? • 0 Along that part of the African coast many languages are spoken. It is common now and it must have been common then, for adult Africans to several of them fluently. • 0 Most of the slaves captured and able to survive the journey were young adults. • 0 Slave owners separated people who had a language in common. Owners feared that slaves might join together against them and that is harder to do if they can't speak the same language. • 0 Owners expected slaves to pick up some English — enough to understand orders and give messages and look after children. This was especially important for women working as house servants. • 0 Women raised their own children to use the English they had learned rather than the languages of an Africa they would never see again.

9. The young black women Tim and Chuck talked about learned something very like a pidgin, but they taught their babies a Creole. What they taught was not of course the English their owners used. There were features of their language which owed something to the African languages these mothers hardly remembered. These were features of sound, and grammatical features too. We may see what those black women did as inventive, creative, and historically important. Owners saw it quite differently. They saw it as an unsuccessful attempt at the Standard English to which their own speech approximated, a bad, incorrect, careless English.

10. The differences from Standard English persist in the speech of black Americans now. Educated Black Americans may be bi-dialectal using Black English where they think it is suitable, and Standard English, with an Educated American Pronunciation in other circumstances. There are a number of names for Black English. Black English Vernacular (BEV for short) is sometimes used. Some people prefer to call it Ebonic — Ebony is the name of a hard black wood. Nearly two centuries after slavery ceased as a regular trade, Black English is no longer a creole. It is a variety of English with some creolised features. It has low prestige. It is not a variety that is taught, and black children experience some difficulties in both British and American schools which many people believe are the result of differences between the mother tongue they learned and use at home and the Standard English they learn to read and write.

11. Find out how an English Creole differs from standard English • Creoles use a writing system, so it is not very difficult to look at some Creole sentences. • Examples: he lazy, a’s why he no like play. more better, I bin go Honolulu to buy them. she no can go. She no more money.

12. This is enough to show you two things though. First, most of what is said in the Creole can be understood fairly well by speakers of Standard English. It is not a foreign language! It has rules but they are not exactly the same as the rules of Standard English. And I think you can see why most users of Standard English might think that this was nothing but a failed attempt at it! (They would be wrong though). • Second, you can see why children, writing something like a Creole in school where Standard English is expected, would find their work full of corrections and given a low grade and might be very puzzled and disappointed.

13. Could a pidgin or a Creole ever be used as a national language? • The answer is no to a pidgin — yes to a Creole. A pidgin has no more than a restricted range of functions — restricted to buying and selling or to the giving and taking of orders. Creolization happens when it is taught and learned as a mother tongue, and then it has the range of language functions that a speech community, however small, must have. A Creole is a language. It can serve as a national language

14. One example • there is one outstanding example in Asia of such a Creole. Papua New Guinea has a Creole with vocabulary derived from both English and German as the national, official language. It was in use before independence. As you know newly independent governments are usually anxious to have everything that traditionally goes with their new standing flag, national anthem, and most important, national language. Papua New Guinea adopted Tok Pisin as its national language. There were practical reasons, as well as reasons of national pride, for the decision. Papua New Guinea is a country having many languages, some of them in use by only very small speech communities. In these circumstances there is an obvious need for a language that can be taught in schools, and used for government administrative purposes. Tok Pisin (which is a Creole though its name indicates its origin pidgin talk) was the obvious choice. It is not possible to understand it by having a good knowledge of English, though such a knowledge will allow you to guess at some words. Those who already know English are said to need about three months of study to get a working knowledge of Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin is used everywhere in Papua New Guinea, but nowhere else. Students who have been educated in it are not always happy about that. For most of them Tok Pisin is an additional language, not a mother tongue. They believe that with only a little more effort, they could have studied and learned Standard English and have been by the time they reached the University stage of their education, fluent in an international language rather than just a national one.

15. Summarizing the Differences among Varieties, Pidgins, and Creoles • 1. Differences between a pidgin and a Creole. A pidgin, but not a Creole, has only some of the functions of language. • 2. Ways in which pidgins and Creoles are similar. • Pidgins and Creoles are both mixed languages - usually mixtures of languages belonging to different families. • 3. What is meant by saying that English has some creolised features? Some varieties of English include some, but not all the features of a Creole. • 4. Why do speakers of varieties of English that have creolised features sometimes have difficulties in an English-using educational system? • Their difficulties arise from the differences between their mother tongue and the Standard English used in schools (You could add that some teachers see the creolised features as simply careless mistakes.) • 5. Give an example of a Creole currently used as a national language. Tok Pisin is a Creole, with English and German vocabulary, currently in use as a national language.

16. Activity 4 • Examining stable and changed aspects of trade practice There are several things that havenot changed. There are still buyers and sellers There are still commodities. There has still to be some sort of currency exchange There has to be some means of transferring ownership from one to another. All these things are on a much larger scale than before, but they are still recognizable. There has still to be communication between buyer and seller, and that means a need for a language that can be used by both, through their representatives. It may not be English. All international languages are extensive! used in international trade — German, Spanish, Dutch, but English is the one most widely used

17. Things new in trade • There are two new factors. Both are the effect of this increase in the scale and the scope of international trade. First of course, the costs involved are very much larger, so large in fact that almost no trading company has the resources to make straightforward purchases of the sort we are all used to from our experience of shopping. Present day trade has to have the services of international banking These days, the question for a company is not "How big are our reserves?" but! "How good is our credit?" What sort of sums will banks lend us, believing that we can make repayments with interest when these fall due? • The other new factor is that present day trade is regulated by national and international law. That means officials, records, and the completion of documents. In international trade at the present day language is used not only to negotiate deals, and track their progress to completion, but also to finance them and regulate them. Language and especially written language, allows permanent\ records to be kept, and is as important as beforehand important in a greater I variety of ways.

18. Finding out how English is used in some areas of international trade components of a trade: commodity, a currency, buyer, seller, market, a means of communication. There are others: international banking, national and international regulation, bilingual merchandisers with access to fax machines (new technology) Considering some differences between the practice and the teaching of business English read the dialogue by yourself

19. Activity 5 • Fax meets international needs The most obvious advantage of faxed messages is their speed. That was the selling point when fax machines were new to everyone! Users soon found faxes have other advantages besides speed. They can be sent at any time. It is enough if someone checks every morning the faxes that have come in during the night. There is a written record, with the time and date of arrival, which can be filed once it has been answered. Copies can be made and dispatched to other desks or to other destinations. They are easy to write and easy to read. They are not, as a rule, formal. There are no conventions to be mastered, as there were in the old style of traditional formal, business letter-writing. There is no trouble in sending illustrations. Drawings and diagrams can be faxed. It is possible to photocopy fabric so as to show details of texture, finish, stitches, and trimmings and send that. do exercises according to the dialogue. • Faxed English is faxed English a pidgin? no. Faxed business English this sort of English depends on much shared knowledge between the sender and receiver of the message. It can be shorter than the same meanings in standard English. It makes much use of abbreviations. Headings signal changes of topic. Not a word is wasted. Nobody thinks this shortness and directions is rude or abrupt. Errors which a teacher would correct are just ignored.

20. Faxed English as a distinct variety • Faxed English is a major means of communication in international business. At present it is learned on the job, rather than deliberately taught. It works well for several reasons: 1) Users are highly motivated to make it work. Their livelihoods depend on it. 2) Users have what is needed - detailed knowledge of the context, which increases as they gain experience. 3) Users for whom English is an additional language find it easy to use because mistakes are expected and ignored, not criticized. It is informal. Nobody expects or wants polite indirectness! Headings show changes of subject, and abbreviations make it brief.