Some man in the Daily Telegraph was going on about English not being only for the English. Dr Mario Saraceni, the man in question, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, goes further. He says: ‘It’s important the psychological umbilical cord linking English to its arbitrary centre in England is cut.’ But why should it be?
The next thing he says sounds truly deranged: ‘The origins of English are not to be found in the idea of it spreading from the centre to the periphery, but in multiple, simultaneous origins.’ Does he believe that in the fifth century some Jutes set sail from Schleswig-Holstein in clinker-built boats for Malaysia and started a little language community there?
Dr Saraceni (whose name, the OED warns us, probably does not come from the Arabic sharq, ‘sunrise’) has form.
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