Re: surzhikal removal of troublemakers

On Aug 30, 12:37 pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Aug 29, 1:53 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In Tel Aviv in 1999, I found out that one year of Modern Hebrew thirty
years ago was not much help -- but everyone speaks English.

In Antwerp in 2004, neither French nor German would have been
appropriate, so I was not unhappy that everyone (even the bus driver)
spoke English. (But I did buy books in Dutch -- er, Flemish -- at the
Plantin-Moretus Museum.)
· law of least effort [if the interlocutor suspects that he speaks
English better than you speak X ...]

Probably the last factor is the most important for most people.
Plus they may be accustomed to tourists who are unaware that any
language exists but their own (and I don't mean only American
tourists).

In Mexico I speak Spanish. Rather well, but not anything like a native
speaker (my main problem is that I am most familiar with sixteenth
century Spanish). The
people I meet almost invariably try their English on me. They aren't
being polite or any of those other reasons - they want to practice
their English.

So we have great fun perfecting each other's languages and being very
careful not to laugh at the mistakes.

There was a nice piece on NPR this morning about Spanish TV in the US
paying attention (finally) to, not only the varieties of American
Spanish, but especially to the different accents of Spanish-speakers
in English. Jimmy Smits (Puerto Rican) took coaching to be able to
play a Cuban-American realistically, for instance. A linguist and a
dialect coach described differences among those, Mexican, Argentine,
etc., and noted that Colombian is considered the "best" American
Spanish. (And Antonio Banderas gets very bad marks -- as Zorro, he
sounded like a Spaniard who has some vague idea that American Spanish
is somehow different, but he had no idea how to talk Mexican.)

.

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