Re: Let's talk about langages (Advice/Help)

From: Olivers (olive_at_LOSETHIScalpha.com)
Date: 08/19/04 

Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 09:46:07 -0500

Icono Clast extrapolated from data available...

> LEE Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
>> I don't think it makes any sense to watch a Hollywood
>> film in a dubbed language which I'm less familiar with than English.
>> (I'm more familiar with British English than American, though.) I
>> have to catch the occasional time slots where the local German cinemas
>> would show an "o.V." (original version).
>
> In Germany, I met a young man (well, my age at the time) who spoke
> excellent English with good grammar, excellent pronunciation and
> accent, and an enormous vocabulary. He claimed he "learned from the
> movies". He was also a voracious reader. During the month or so we
> lived in the same dormitory, only once did he ask me to define a word.
> I could not. He was reading science fiction; the word had been created
> by the author.
 
During one of my college years, I lived next door to a women, just into her
post grad studies, who had learned "good" French from years of attending
the then common "French w/English subtitles" flicks at the local "art
house". She hada little accent problem, presumably due to the film
distributors' (or maybe the French producers") 1950s/early 60s predilection
for noir-ish tales involving "lower class" French life, orphans,
prostitutes, gangsters, never an aristo among them.

My exposure to foreign languages was not very effectivee...bad (obsolete
words and verb forms) TexMex Spanish as a child/teenager, four years of
Latin in high school, a year of French, one of Spanish and one of Italian
in college (and little gained from any one of the three except some basic
grammar), but then a couple of tours with the US 6th Fleet after which my
Italian and French, still circumscribed in scope, had become workably
effective in the rough end of the marketplace or tourism, while the Spanish
had remained confused and old fashioned. I had the mischance to pickup a
little Vietnamese (which amazingly gets used some here, in restaurants,
small businesses, and Gulf seafood markets/shrimpers, although second
generation Vietnamese in the US seem to use it less even among others of
the same age).

I suspect that mxsmanic's world is seen through Francocentric spectacles,
just as mine is viewed through Hispanicized lens. These days, the Mexican
Border creeps North every year, and aside from Brazil, everybody to the
South lives, works and eats in Spanish. Part of the confusion for
USAians...South and Central American have never been
tourism/business/military sevice venues to the extent as have been Europe
and parts of Asia, but for a child in the US not to learn Spanish these
days is probably a lost opportunity (especially when it comes to future
employment or potential "flexibility" in locations for work and play).
While public school teaching and administration are not highly compensated,
they represent regular work and permanent employment opportunity, and these
days, the key words in a vast number of ads for teachers are "bilingual"
(and they don't mean French).

As for the idea that all those new USAians of Mexican heritage will be
speaking English soon, that's a vain hope which overlooks the principal
"recharge zone" for monolingual Spanish speakers in the US, a Border which
is highly porous and likely to remain so because of the demands for workers
in all sorts of "niches" in the US labor force, from chicken plucking to
concrete finishing and in between. Toyota's new truck plant near San
Antonio will have a 95%+ Hispanic workforce, every one on paper legal, but
dozens of suppliers and contractors building and supplying the plant and
its workers will be staffed in part by the "illegals" available for those
less than glamorous/highly compensated jobs.

One can't be but a little cynical about the "public advocates" who besiege
Washington, DC, complaining about the concept or fate of illegals, all the
while staying at hotels where the entire housekeeping and banquet staff
speak Central American Spanish and have arrived in quaint fashion (and many
reside "legally" on political refugee status from insurgencies long over -
although admittedly "going home" for some might still be dangerous given
the cultural custom which allows revenge to be dish enjoyable even when
old and cold).

Were one planning ahead, learning Chinese might not be a bad thing to
suggest to small children these days. One can't help but expect that the
day will come when the economic and cultural sway (or dark cloud) of the
PRC may become a bit larger and more noticeable than that of France. Even
the use of the French language as an official, commercial or cultural
medium in many former french colonies has dropped in recent decades (and
will continue to do so in places wher Arabic or local dialects are
"encouraged"). The day when French was the "civilized" world's second
language has passed.

TMO

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