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Remodeling The Tower Of Babel For The 21st CenturyPublished on 06 December 2011 Comments (Be the first)by Susan Easton(OfficialWire)SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA (USA)OfficialWire News Bureau Susan Easton"I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” debuted in a worldwide 1971 television commercial for Coca-Cola. Also known as “the Hilltop Song,” the commercial featured an assembly of multicultural teenagers walking up to the crest at the top of a hill, earnestly raising their voices to say how they would also like to buy the world a Coke. The jingle was so successful that the lyrics to the song were rewritten (minus the Coke ad). The ”de-commercialized” version of I’d Like to Teach the World was then recorded by The New Seekers, a very upbeat, American evangelical sort of group, and the song instantly became a number one hit.Teaching the world to sing let alone work together in harmony is a persistent utopian vision which has met, especially in the past few centuries, with marginal success. Utopian communities – many based on religious principles of one sort or another - have been so numerous that they rate their own lengthy Wikipedia entry. Then there are the obvious experiments like theUnited Nations which, like its predecessor the League of Nations, was designed to prevent future wars, and the European Union which is being reinvented (again) this very week. Apart from religious or cultural practices, there has been until recently only one utopian ideal which involved building a universal language. That was Esperanto, a “nation-free” tongue created in 1877 by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. Zamenhof was born in Bialystok, once part of the Russian Empire, now a part of modern Poland. His Father spoke Russian, as did his Mother. She also spoke Yiddish. Yiddish derives from a blend of High German dialects, Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and a smattering of other romance languages. The creation of Yiddish is credited to the Ashkenazi Jews. Written Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet. Zamenhof’s Father taught German. The family learned and spoke Polish. Zamenhof also acquired fluencies in French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and English. He dabbled in Italian, Lithuanian andSpanish. He was a self contained embodiment of the Tower of Babel.Zamenhof chose the name Esperanto for his new language: it translates as “one who hopes.” His goal was simple and yet incredibly complex. He wanted to teach the world to speak in a politically neutral language not tied to any nation. His utopian dream was that Esperanto would bring peace and international understanding as soon as enough people learned how to speak it well enough to sit down and broker the end to wars. Esperanto was not meant to function, therefore, as a means of conducting commercial enterprises. It was meant to promote peace on earth.What Zamenhof could not have seen coming is the 21st century’s state of globalization around the world, fueled by international trade, jet transportation, the internet and its quirky features known as emailing and texting.Nor could the founder of Esperanto - which still has devoted followers here and there - foresee that the economic powerhouse the United States has become, would eventually abandon teaching its children at least one living foreign language, much less an invented one. In his own experience, the borders of countries frequently moved and languages changed along with them. Learning to speak many languages was required. An estimated 6,700 recognized languages are spoken around the world today, although many are used by fewer than a thousand people. Currently over 45 countries recognize English as an official language, if not their native tongue. One out of five people can speak English, although fluency varies a great deal. But in this globalized world, despite the perceived dominance of English as the lingua franca, it is estimated that less than 10 percent of face-to-face or telecoms-based business transactions are conducted between participants who both use English as their principal language.The statistics on emailing and messaging are even more fascinating barometers of the way business is conducted in the 21st century. A recent global communications technology study reports that North Americans and Europeans are much more likely to use email as their primary form of communication. In the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, instant messaging is more popular. Cell phone texting and Twitter are limited to 160 characters per message. As a result a shorthand language of emoticons has sprung up. Epsilon’s Global Consumer Email Study found that respondents in 13 key countries use various communication tools based on their country of origin. What the world needed was a new utopian language designed to facilitate and encourage successful business transactions using a short universally understood vocabulary: Enter GLOBISH.Created in 2004, ago by Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerrière, Globish uses a subset of Standard English grammar, and a list of 1500 English words using a subset of established rules. It is the opposite of Babel. The goal of Globish is to create a new linguistic foundation for getting the job done in international business. Its unique advantage, unlike Esperanto, is that it is not an invented vocabulary. The underlying principle was to create a level playing field for non-primary English speakers to facilitate communicating with primary English speakers. It’s like playing soccer with people from other countries where you might not speak the language fluently, but you all know the same basic words and the rules of the game.To make Globish a reality Nerrière faced a significant challenge. For a start, there are over 260,000 words in the English language. Nerrière had to whittle these down to just 1500. (Note: ‘whittle’ is not one of them). For more information, take a look at the free introduction to Globish, hosted on the net by Jean-Paul Nerrière himself. The complete list of the 1500 word Globish lexicon and information on courses and conference is available at www.globish.com. Or for a more scholarly venture into the world of “speaking in tongues,” purchase a copy of Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language.The book’s author, Robert McCrum, is an Associate Editor of The (UK) Observer and collaborated with Robert MacNeil, retired co-founder and host of the MacNeil Lehrer Report (PBS), on the televised version of MacNeil’s book, “The Story of English.” Teaching the world to speak in any kind of harmony would strike a thinking person as a capital idea, especially in the global village which we all now inhabit. Globish was not invented to make native English speakers feel superior to others, but to communicate with others more graciously and efficiently.It’s close to Christmas, the time when we are supposed to encourage Peace on Earth to men (and women) of good will. Communicating with others in the spirit of harmony – and getting the job done - might be something brilliant enough to set atop the tree as opposed to under it in a box.Think Globish. ContactOfficialWireSusan EastonTel: +1 6235517365 MEDIA CONTACT