Re: Talking of old jokes


Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
In article <1151253439.078505.162420@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<Nocturne_CVS@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
(For those of you whose knowledge of foreign languages is worse than mine, Einbahnstrasse means "one-way street".)

Oh, I'm willing to believe it. Although the oldest language joke of all
might be: what do you call someone who speaks three languages?

Well, consider that the continental US is roughly the same size
as Europe. You can go everywhere in the US and never find a
place where no one speaks English, though you'll find places
where some people don't. If Napoleon had succeeded in conquering
all of Europe, maybe you'd now have a similarly-large region
where practically everybody spoke French from Ireland to the Aral
Sea, except for some Arabic-speaking immigrants in southern Spain,
and Franco-European citizens would have the same joke told about them,
and upon coming to the Americas would be astonished to discover that
Spanish, English, Nahuatl, Algonkin, and Apache, but not French,
were spoken over large areas (except for Quebec), and that they
themselves were ridiculed for knowing no language but French.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx


While I certainly see the folly of thinking that the US is "just one
single country"
in exactly the same way Denmark or Slovenia are, I am sometimes
surprised
if some Amercian people seem to think that monolingualism is a virtue
and/or
source of national strength and pride.

Recently I read a discussion item where a poster calmly tried to
explain that in US history,
all past immigrant groups had been assimilated into anglophone
mainstream culture
and that there was no reason to fear otherwise concerning the recent
immigration from
Latin America.

So far, so good, but then he really surprised me by cheerfully
concluding that at least the next
generation will have become so thoroughly americanised that they will
be probably unable
to speak more than a few sentences of bad Spanish.

Wow - people thinking that you can recognize a good *national by the
fact that he speaks
no foreign languages seems odd.

Jörg

.

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