The Editor, Sir:

I am against the teaching of English as a foreign language in Jamaica. I envision certain problems in the years to come. We import many items into our country for our usage. The Bureau of Standards Act requires that goods be labelled in English. That act will have to be changed in future to make labelling be in Patois.

I wonder how many manufacturers abroad are now going to spend resources to put Patois labelling on goods? So, we are setting up our population to not know what is the labelling on imported goods.

Impact on publishing

What about textbooks at the tertiary level? Most of the books at tertiary level are written by foreign authors in English. So, if Patois is elevated to a basic teaching status at any level, then we need new textbooks.

I do not think foreign publishers are going to bother with this Jamaican language. Tertiary institutions would opt for the logically easy way out of this problem by teaching in English. This would cause us to be in a worse position than now. .

I guess some will say that it opens the door to Jamaican authors and publishers. However, I think that would fail. I saw when the adoption of Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams (CAPE) was mandated to be taught in public schools. It took, sometimes, up to four years for some textbooks to come on the market that addressed CAPE subjects. Teachers had to use books geared towards the GCE Advanced level syllabus.

Think of tertiary students defending their Patois dissertation to an audience that includes foreigners. I guess we could just leave out foreigners since they will not understand. If the dissertation is in Patois, in which journal are we going to publish the dissertation?

I guess some will say translate it into English and then publish it or we could limit our publications to Jamaican patois journals.

Difficult terms

I can just think of some mathematics terms, which would be difficult and awkward to use. Examples:

'Therefore' may become 'si yah now'.

'Subtract' may become 'tek weh'.

'Infinity' may become 'whole heap'.

'There exist' may become 'Sintin out deh'.

Please do not put our students at any more disadvantage.

I am, etc.,

LLEWELYN JONES

genii90@hotmail.com