Transcript Unit 5

Unit 5
Activity 1
markets, trade and language
Identifying the essentials of trade
 Analyzing the components of a trade deal
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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.
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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.
 Trading is a fundamental human activity, necessary
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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 without
it altogether.
English is currently the most commonly used
language of international deals between Asian and
other countries. This situation may change in the
future.
Activity 2
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Place trade survival depends on language
body language or natural language
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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.
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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.
a pidgin
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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 fumbling
attempts 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.
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.
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.
 Chuck raises a question at the end of the dialogue and he doesn't know
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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.
 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.
 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.
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.
 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.
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
One example
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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.
Summarizing the Differences among Varieties,
Pidgins, and Creoles
 1. Differences between a pidgin and a Creole. A pidgin, but not a
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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.
Activity 4
 Examining stable and changed aspects of trade practice
There are several things that have not 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
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.
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
Activity 5
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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.
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.