If only my language were more like a flash-animated website, full of colourful, fast-moving, plain imagery, weird sounds, three-letter words and four-word sentences. A sort of comic strip with speech-balloons for those who have chosen to prolong their childhood indefinitely. Even Stone-Age men found delight in colourful pictures adorning their cave walls, though, of course, those were not animated. Yet, colourful and moving objects along with annoying sounds would not at all be alien to me. On the contrary, they would remind me of my baby chain rattle suspended across my pram with dancing bears and snakes and tiny ducks I used to enjoy so much when I was about 6 months old.
In this day and age, the pace of living is fast and so are changes in almost all aspects of life. Written language is being partially or wholly replaced by fragmented chunks, animated websites, video clips, SMS snippets, freakish sounds, and more often than not inane cartoons. Spoken language is often reduced to the bare minimum, making it ambiguous in every other sentence or, rather fragment. Descriptive and precise language is rendered superfluous and only quaint crumblies like myself use this sort of language.
In his book „La terza fase“, the Italian linguist Raffaele Simone even speaks of „a retrograde evolutionary step,“ claiming that our century will be „dominated by a culture of audiovisual input“ and that „This new manner of creating communication or information has lost all long-established characteristic features of being analytical and well structured, contextual and referential and has transformed itself into an indifferent mass in which everything is contained in anything and analysis and experience are valued only little.“
Likewise, the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater „warned of the progressive simplification of the language used by young people, saying that these days, young people do not read because they understand only very easy texts.“
With regard to Globbish, there is some hope that this issue may be solved. The linguist Dr. Joachim Grzega, a German crusader with a noble cause, has come up with a method of his own invention, which he calls BGE or Basic Global English. For that purpose, he has reduced and changed English grammar to what he deems to be the bare necessities and selected a 1000-word vocabulary as a means to „communicate effectively“.
What a relief to be unburdened of the need to use the tried and tested code of communication which Standard English used to be. Just fancy being able to say just anything which comes to your head. Up to now, this was privilege of those residing in „secluded“ areas. There is no need to bother at all, whether you have expressed yourself clearly.
Allow me to slip in a piece of advice if you are thinking of taking part in the state of the art cultural linguistic activities of modern life and uncertain about your intelligibility when experimenting with the new way of speaking, try out your Basic Global English on some 10-year old kids. If they understand you, anybody might.
