Good move to make English accessible to all classes
It was heartening to read that the Minister of Education has decided to give English a big push in Sri Lanka schools.
The history of English in Lanka, that it came through being colonised had social relevance at that time, but today has lost that association because it has become a world language.
English originating from Germanic tribes, influenced by Latin and Greek and European languages through the Norman invasion of 1066 was like all languages progressively invented. Through the historical fact of the British founding of the United States of America, the world impact spread the language both for physical sciences and social sciences as well as world trade and political communication between nation states.
English has acquired some similarity to maths in its universality and its independence from cultures as Indian English today demonstrates.
To be a little desultory, unlike a language Mathematics, did not originate in any culture but was in nature before human existence. Humans discovered its existence.
Einstein’s E = mc2 is the world’s most famous equation, Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. On the most basic level, the equation says that energy and mass (matter) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing. This physical relationship existed in nature before Einstein, before any human. What Einstein did was to discover what existed in nature and give it a formal equation. The spiral arrangements of leaves on a stem, and the number of petals, and spirals in flower heads during the development of most plants, represent successive numbers in the famous series discovered in the thirteenth century by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, in which each number is the sum of the previous.
English cannot aspire to this universality, independence from cultures, because it is man-made, not discovered in nature. So, it, unlike maths, will show cultural variation. However, this will not be significant enough to become separate languages in different cultures.
To conclude, the Sinhala Only Act was in 1956, the same year as Ediriwira Sarachchandra’s Maname which was entirely in Sinhala without being Sinhala only. This world class classic was infused with Greek, Japanese and other traditions because its creator accessed these with knowledge of the English language.
And Sarachchandra is not the only one. The Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors and Malays, not to mention the transitory Burghers, like Ludowyk, Keuneman and others who did so in science, the arts and social development, using English, are too numerous to mention. However, all of them came from the privileged middle classes.
May Minister Premajayantha’s mission make it accessible to all classes.
‘Here was a man with no guile in him.’
The demise of my first cousin Brian Forbes on October 17, removes the eldest of our family in Sri Lanka, from our midst.
Brian’s father Clifford and my father, Victor were step-brothers. Brian with Lorraine and Hamish were the children of Clifford and Muriel Milhuisen, a widower when she married Clifford. I was the youngest in a family of six, and Brian was an elder brother to me in reality.
Always accessible, I used to visit him in Dehiwela also hometown to me, to borrow books from his personal library for tutorial writing in History at University Entrance level.
After graduation from the University of Ceylon, Brian joined the Bank of Ceylon, serving at its headquarters in Fort. He married Joan Pereira, who became a foremost florist, much sought after. The couple first resided at Bogala Flats, Colombo 5, and later moved to Kalyani Road, Colombo 6.
Many of Brian’s family had migrated to Australia since the ‘fifties. After the passing,