Languages (was Re: [Sca-cooks] globetrotting)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Randy Goldberg MD:
>As far as Americans not learning languages... I think it's another aspect of
>the "ugly American" syndrome. We're so self-absorbed and self-important that
>our educational system doesn't recognize the benefit in learning other
>languages.

Another aspect is the fact that we are still a pretty _big_ country,
population-wise, and the kind of survival travel that a lot of the
rest of the world has had to deal with, and which Americans deal
with, too, does not involve, for them, learning a new language. Yes,
as Avraham implies, we haven't been forced to learn a lot of this
stuff. I don't know how much of it is self-absorbtion, and how much
reflects on simple reality. We probably don't place enough emphasis
on learning other languages for the sheer beauty of them, but frankly
I don't think too many other cultures are learning English so they
can read P.G. Wodehouse in the original English. They're learning it
so they can deal effectively with a significant chunk of the world's
population, instead of learning the seventeen (I'm making this number
up but I doubt it's far off) other languages those same people also
understand and speak.

I really don't feel that Americans are the only, or by any means, the
worst, of the cultures that expect others to adapt to their habits
instead of the other way around. And unlike them, I think for the
most part, Americans have stopped going around saying, "you should do
it our way because we're better than you." We just have a bigger
guilt complex. And not _really_ justifiably so.

I think practicality is at least as big a factor as arrogance.

>The fact that less than 25% of our border is shared with a
>country that speaks another language doesn't help, either. (Yeah, I know
>about Quebec - they don't count, the official government language of the
>nation is still English). Of course, I'm hardly one to comment, since the
>only two languages I've studied in any depth are both dead (Latin and
>Yiddish).

I don't know Yiddish is dead. Most large cities around the world have
a Yiddish-speaking population, and there are still Yiddish cinema,
theatre, and publications. There are possibly more people in the
world that speak Yiddish than, say, Basquaise...

Adamantius (English, German, Cantonese, and, once upon a time, Esperanto)