Babylon Becomes Babble-on

Babylon Becomes Babble-on
Genesis 11: 8- 30

In England I had an Egyptian colleague whose first language was Arabic. When we were going to Morocco for a holiday, I asked him to teach me a few phrases of Arabic so I could at least say, “Good morning” and “Thank you” to people, but he laughingly told me this would not be a good idea. He could teach me only Egyptian Arabic, and in Morocco they would smile at that. There is one written Arabic language, but each country has its own spoken Arabic. Only when I came to live in the United States did I realize the extent to which the same is true of English. I thought people in Britain and the United States spoke roughly the same language. How wrong I was. As is the case with Arabic, there is one form of written English, more or less, though it is pretty important to realize that in Britain the pavement is where the cars are not supposed to go whereas in the United States the pavement is what British people call the road. And every page or two in this book I ask myself, “Will that communicate both sides of the Atlantic, not to say in other parts of the English-speaking world?” But these differences are small compared with those in the spoken language. A decade later, I am still asking students in a lecture whether they recognize an expression I just used, and while they may respond, “Oh yes,” they may also reply, “No, but we can guess what it means,” or “We have no idea what you are talking about.” We are two countries divided by a common language (the saying is most often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but no one really knows where it comes from). So communication with people for whom English is their first language is much more complicated than I dreamed it would be. But it is a much bigger issue with people for whom even American English is their second or third language. As I look back to my first year of teaching in California, I shudder to think how unintelligible I was...