Minimal English for a Global World: Improved Communication Using Fewer Words

299 Pages·2018·3.137 MB·English

by  Cliff Goddard (eds.)

MINIMAL ENGLISH
FOR A GLOBAL WORLD
IMPROVED COMMUNICATION USING FEWER WORDS
EDITED BY CLIFF GODDARD
Minimal English for a Global World
‘What should be an effective and equitable communication order for our world?
The established pattern of global communication reflects a largely superseded
world of national economies contained within secure territorial boundaries, and
validated by authorised national cultures. These stabilities of territory, economy
and culture may always have been illusory but vast population mobility and
widespread transnational connections today have seriously eroded the inherited
pattern of global affairs.  This important volume proposes a unique addition to
the usual answers to this question: Minimal English, in addition multilingual-
ism and English as a Lingua Franca. This volume is an important instalment in
the conversation we must all have about how we talk to each other in our topsy-
turvy world. It shows the unique contribution that intercultural semantic analy-
sis can offer to discussions about global communication. Combining insights
from diplomacy, law, science and medicine with intercultural and linguistic
analysis reveals new angles and prospects to thinking about the emerging com-
munication system.’
—Joseph Lo Bianco, University of Melbourne, Australia
‘This is a timely, important, and significant contribution to our knowledge of
meaning and language. It is timely because everywhere, we are finding that dif-
ferences of meaning are active even when people use the same scripts of the same
language; it is important because the approach in the book offers clarity for
understanding those differences (as well as the commonalities); it is significant
because the more enhanced understanding we are able to develop in uses of
language and its various meanings, constructive paths to social betterment can
be cleared – not always followed, but cleared if possible. This is a fine book for
linguists, anthropologists, communication scholars, interculturalists, and others
interested in addressing and developing these issues.’
—Donal Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Cliff Goddard
Editor
Minimal English for a
Global World
Improved Communication Using
Fewer Words
Editor
Cliff Goddard
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science
Griffith University
Brisbane, QLD, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-62511-9 ISBN 978-3-319-62512-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952172
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
Cliff Goddard
2 Minimal English and How It Can Add to Global English 5
Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka
3 Minimal English: The Science Behind It 29
Cliff Goddard
4 Minimal English and Diplomacy 71
William Maley
5 I nternationalizing Minimal English: Perils and Parallels 95
Nicholas Farrelly and Michael Wesley
6 C harter of Global Ethic in Minimal English 113
Anna Wierzbicka
v
vi Contents
7 Torture Laid Bare: Global English and Human Rights 143
Annabelle Mooney
8 Talking About the Universe in Minimal English: Teaching
Science Through Words That Children Can Understand 169
Anna Wierzbicka
9 Big History Meets Minimal English 201
David Christian
10 Introducing the Concept of the ‘65 Words’ to the Public
in Finland 225
Ulla Vanhatalo and Juhana Torkki
11 Narrative Medicine Across Languages and Cultures: Using
Minimal English for Increased Comparability of Patients’
Narratives 259
Bert Peeters and Maria Giulia Marini
Index 287
List of Contributors
David Christian (D.Phil. Oxford, 1974) is by training a historian of Russia
and the Soviet Union, but since the 1980s he has become interested in World
History at very large scales, or “Big History”. He taught at Macquarie University
in Sydney from 1975 to 2000 before taking a position at San Diego State
University in 2001. In January 2009 he returned to take up a position at
Macquarie University. He was founding President of the International Big
History Association and is co-founder, with Bill Gates, of the Big History
Project, which has built a free on-line high school syllabus in big history. He is
Director of Macquarie University’s Big History Institute.
Nicholas Farrelly is a Fellow in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at
the Australian National University and Director of the ANU Myanmar Research
Centre. His academic specialty is the interaction of culture, politics, and security
in Southeast Asia. On these topics he wrote masters and doctoral theses at the
University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2006 Nicholas co-
founded New Mandala, which has grown to become a prominent website on
Southeast Asian affairs. He holds an Australian Research Council fellowship for
a study of political culture during Myanmar’s ongoing transformation.
Cliff Goddard is Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University. He is a propo-
nent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to semantics and its sister
theory, the cultural scripts approach to pragmatics. He is also interested in lan-
guage description and linguistic typology. His publications include the edited
volumes Ethnopragmatics (2006, Mouton de Gruyter) and Cross-Linguistic
vii
viii List of Contributors
Semantics (2008, Benjamins), the textbook Semantic Analysis (2nd ed., 2011
OUP), and Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages
and Cultures (co-authored with Anna Wierzbicka; OUP 2014).
William Maley is Professor of Diplomacy, Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy,
the Australian National University, and has been a visiting professor at the
Russian Diplomatic Academy and a visiting research fellow at the Refugee
Studies Program at Oxford University. He is author of Rescuing Afghanistan
(2006) and The Afghanistan Wars (2009), and most recently has co-edited
Reconstructing Afghanistan: Civil-Military Experiences in Comparative Perspective
(2015) and Theorising the Responsibility to Protect (2015).
Maria Giulia Marini is an epidemiologist and counsellor. Her education com-
bined a classic humanistic background with scientific studies in chemistry and
pharmacology. In her early professional life she worked in the private sector, in
medical research and health-care organization, and later, in consultancy and
health education. She is a Professor of Narrative Medicine at Hunimed
(Humanitas University), Milan, Italy, and Director of the Health Care Area at
Fondazione Istud in Milan. Marini is author of Narrative Medicine: Bridging the
Gap between Evidence-Based Care and Medical Humanities (2016 Springer).
Annabelle  Mooney is a Reader in Sociolinguistics at the University of
Roehampton. Her most recent books are Human Rights and the Body: Hidden in
Plain Sight (2014 Ashgate) and Language and Law (2014 Palgrave). Her research
interests also include globalization, media studies, and gender studies. With
Betsy Evans, she is co-author of Language, Society and Power (4th edn, 2015
Routledge). She is researching the language of money.
Bert Peeters is an honorary associate professor at the Australian National
University, Canberra, and an adjunct associate professor at Griffith University,
Brisbane. He previously held appointments at the University of Tasmania and
Macquarie University. His main research interests are in the areas of French
linguistics, intercultural communication, and language and cultural values.
Publications include The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface (ed., 2000); Semantic
Primes and Universal Grammar (ed., 2006); Tu ou vous: l’embarras du choix (ed.
with N.Ramière, 2009); Cross-culturally Speaking, Speaking Cross-culturally (ed.
with K.Mullan and C.Béal, 2013); and Language and Cultural Values: Adventures
in Applied Ethnolinguistics (ed., 2015).
List of Contributo rs ix
Juhana Torkki holds a PhD in theology. He is a well-known author of popular
books in Finnish on rhetoric and communication. His work consists of solving
people’s everyday problems in communication. He gives personal training in
public speaking, as well as coaching organizations in clearer communication.
Ulla  Vanhatalo is a visiting lecturer at the University of Helsinki, the
Department of Modern Languages. She is interested in the methodology of lexi-
cal semantics, especially questionnaire-based studies (PhD at University of
Helsinki, Finland) and Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Besides academic
research, she has applied methods of semantic analysis to everyday situations.
Michael Wesley is Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Coral
Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. His
career has spanned academia (previous appointments at UNSW, Griffith
University, University of Hong Kong, Sun Yat-sen University, and University of
Sydney), government (as Assistant Director General for Transnational Issues at
the Office of National Assessments), and think tanks (as Executive Director of
the Lowy Institute for International Policy and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at
the Brookings Institution). His most recent book, There Goes the Neighbourhood:
Australia and the Rise of Asia, won the 2011 John Button Prize for the best writ-
ing on Australian public policy.
Anna Wierzbicka born and educated in Poland, is Professor of Linguistics at
the Australian National University. Together with Cliff Goddard, Wierzbicka
created the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage”, based on empirical cross-
linguistic investigations, which can serve as a basis for comparing meanings
across languages and cultures. Her latest books are Imprisoned in English: The
Hazards of English as a Default Language (2014 OUP) and (with Cliff Goddard)
Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures
(2014 OUP).
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Diagrams illustrating how complex concepts are successively
built up from simpler ones, in three domains 52
Fig. 10.1 A printable starter kit available at the webpage
www.65sanaa.fi (September 2016), with the primes grouped
so as to be easy for a Finnish-speaking nonlinguist (general
instructions for using the primes are given at the top right of
the figure (for the English translation, see Sect. 2.3)) 235
Fig. 10.2 A second version of the starter kit by designer Timo Sorri,
from the Finnish company Havain Oy. Colors and visual
symbols help users to understand the picture. Used with
permission 236
xi