CLICKED ON PHONICS Sometimes I wonder. I wonder what South Africa would be like for us if only Afrikaans and Xhosa were spoken. No accented English. Just the throat clearing guttural sounds of the old Dutch, and the clicking, wood on wood sounds of this local African language. If English were not universally spoken here we would no doubt resort to a little phrase book and muddle our way through. We have done so in countries that did not colonize this place, say France or Spain. This, of course, assumes that we could perform the comedy of reading the phonetic sentences in the first place and then, squirming, ask, “Where’s the loo?” Of course, the next logical linguistic progression would be the ability to pronounce the raw language itself, without the phonetic crutch. Here in South
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