Faux Pas

“An example of the kind of embarrassing gaffe that the study of French seems powerless to prevent”

How about the assumption that speaking Spanish is useful only for dealing with day laborers or cleaning women (as opposed to communicating with the majority of the population of the hemisphere)

I thnk rea has one. I’ll add farting, for which mastery of French is no prophylactic.

When I read Cathy Seipp’s comment I thought to myself that either she leads a very sheltered life, or she wrote it to bait some politically correct person, or she might be a snob/racist – someone who knows her better could discern the truth of the matter.

To address the issues in point-LATIN would probably be a better focus for “a deeper understanding”, FRENCH probably is best for the “embarrassing gaffes” as the pronunciation is _interesting_. Learning Italian would prevent people saying Tagliatelle incorrectly (silent G) and other popular foods.

Dsquared is right. After 12 years of French, I can’t help using French pronunciations for Latin, Spanish, you name it.

Ironically, given Seipp’s apparent view of Spanish speakers as unskilled laborers, my experience is that Spanish is extremely useful for plain old-fashioned capitalism. There is an awful lot of business and concentrated wealth in Latin America, and a lot of need for American businesses and services.

Back before I moved to the Silicon Valley, I was discussing Sun Microsystems with a friend who was in fact from California. Now, a lot of Sun’s operations were in Milpitas, which, former French student that I am, I pronounced as I imagined it must be “Mil-peet-ahs” (long ahs). My friend almost died laughing.

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who found her comments at best silly and at worst downright offensive. The first two hits on ‘worldwide spanish speakers’ and ‘worldwide french speakers’ indicate ~330M and ~110M speakers worldwide, respectively, and Latin America’s GDP is as big as France’s and is growing faster. And as far as culture… you have to go back to 1985 to find a Nobel lit winner in French, during which time there have been three winners from Spain and her colonies (before that, 1964, and four more spanish speakers.) Anyway… before I google for more stats, and get more pissed… there it is :)

Leaving aside the silly snobbishness of the original quote :-) …

I suppose for us Brits, French is still pretty useful as the language of our nearest neighbours. Why Americans would want to devote a lot of time to it though, I have no idea.

As Luis’ figures imply – English and Spanish are pretty much the only European languages spoken widely throughout the world and Spanish is spoken throughout the rest of the continent on which the USA is located.

French in parts of Africa doesn’t make up the numbers enough to justify picking it over Spanish unless you have a really good reason to be spending a lot of time in France or Francophone Africa.

[Anyway, French, Spanish and German are easy… trying learning Czech for a headache :( ]

Spanish is much more important than French, especially in America. No question about it. French might be fun to learn, but the Hispanic population is booming and immigration will (hopefully) be on the rise.

The future of America is ‘Latinization’

“if I were a contractor rounding up day laborers every morning ….I do speak enough Spanish to communicate with the cleaning lady”

Wow.
I’m speechless. It was a joke, right? She’s taking the piss of that kind of character she is impersonating. It must be. No?

Oh well, I suppose it’s a good thing she didn’t think of other even more classy examples of the usefulness of Spanish…

“I suppose, if I were to have a cocaine habit like that trophy wife I met at this dinner party the other night, I might find it essential to learn Spanish to communicate with the Dominican pusher. However unrefined and non-anglo and un-French these Spanish members of the underclass are, they do provide, so I’m told, such invaluable services for us YSL-wearing ladies. But I still need to learn French to bask in the knowledge that that bitch who thinks she’s got it better than me has pronounced ‘Yves’ wrong.”

I’m not saying that Latin America’s GDP is particularly ‘impressive’; I’m just pointing out that if you want to learn a language for economic reasons (i.e., access to a large and/or growing market) then Spanish is eminently more reasonable than French. Really, I’m saying that for all reasons I can think of except couture (economics, literature, music, food, tourism, etc., etc.), Spanish is a better language to learn than French. I’d maybe give the ‘French leads to better English’ argument, except as others have pointed out Latin is ahead of either French or Spanish in that regards.

As a graduate student, I wore a Hermes tie to a formal event. A fellow student commented on it (it had some of the tell-tale brand indications) and I answered that it was a gift, made by some company called Hermes (in my best drawl). She immediately corrected me (“it’s said AIR-may!”), and then proceeded to tell anyone in the department who would listen that I was clearly without a proper upbringing. I found it (wait for it) a bit galling.

In the US, you just don’t joke about such things.

Same department failed to hire a candidate because he chewed with his mouth open. Well, OK, I guess I kind of backed that decision…

Adam, but why would GDP figures be relevant to what language you want to learn? :-)

If your mother tongue is English, and you don’t need to study a particular language because you want to move to that country for isntance, then you have even more freedom to choose. (I’m speaking as a non-anglo who learnt English out of both interest and necessity*). So it should be even more about what culture and nation you’re more attracted to. That’s the nice thing about learning languages. Being motiviated by the interest in everything a language is about. Not utilitarian calculations you won’t even need anyway if you’re born speaking THE language of the Empire. ;-)

[* of course I learnt English just so I could feel all superior cos my pronounciation of (imitation) “Levi’s” and “Nike” was cooler than my mates. Lay-vees and Nee-kay. What troglodytes…]

Matt-

This may sound strange, but I really didn’t learn the formal rules of English grammar very well until after having studied Arabic (talk about a difficult language to learn) for some years and mastering its grammar in its own terminology and analysis. I guess I was too bored to pay much attention in Middle School to pay it much attention when it was taught. Or probably just too stoned. I found that in the process of learning another language really well and deeply, that it prompted me to reflect on my native tongue and its inner workings.

Matt-

This may sound strange, but I really didn’t learn the formal rules of English grammar very well until after having studied Arabic (talk about a difficult language to learn) for some years and mastering its grammar in its own terminology and analysis. I guess I was too bored to pay much attention in Middle School to pay it much attention when it was taught. Or probably just too stoned. I found that in the process of learning another language really well and deeply, that it prompted me to reflect on my native tongue and its inner workings.

Matt-

This may sound strange, but I really didn’t learn the formal rules of English grammar very well until after having studied Arabic (talk about a difficult language to learn) for some years and mastering its grammar in its own terminology and analysis. I guess I was too bored to pay much attention in Middle School to pay it much attention when it was taught. Or probably just too stoned. I found that in the process of learning another language really well and deeply, that it prompted me to reflect on my native tongue and its inner workings.

Matt-

This may sound strange, but I really didn’t learn the formal rules of English grammar very well until after having studied Arabic (talk about a difficult language to learn) for some years and mastering its grammar in its own terminology and analysis. I guess I was too bored to pay much attention in Middle School to pay it much attention when it was taught. Or probably just too stoned. I found that in the process of learning another language really well and deeply, that it prompted me to reflect on my native tongue and its inner workings.

.q,
I believe the current Administration subscribes to that point of view.

he immediately corrected me (“it’s said AIR-may!”)

O_°

Weird. I always heard it like the god in french : hermess, more or less.

Alex Havalais, take consolation in the fact that your fellow student was wrong: “Hermes” (there should be a grave accent over the second “e”) is pronounced “er-MEZ”, not “er-MAY”.

One reason for leaning French is that the French are obnoxious about their language. In most countries your’re likely to visit the locals know a little English, are keen to practice and treat English speakers politely. French speaking people despise English and Anglophones and will not speak English to you even if you desperately need directions to the rest room. So if there’s even a chance that you will visit a French speaking country or have any business to do with Francophones, you’d better learn French.

the French are obnoxious about their language. In most countries your’re likely to visit the locals know a little English,

… All the thrills of the wildest exoticism, one channel away. All these french, obnoxiously ignorant of the english language, what an adventure for the holidays!

“It doesn’t matter so much of your vocabulary is poor as long as your pronounce the words you do know correctly.”

Come on, Brits do that all the time to foreigners who mispronounce words or retain a strong accent even after living in the country for years. They will make ruthless fun of you for not losing your native accent. It tends to happen anywhere, and it tends to be more about teasing you than insulting you, but the Brits can be particularly cruel about it. Americans on the other hand tend to be a lot more relaxed about it. Perhaps because the Brits also make ruthless fun of _their_ pronounciation ;)

Matt: [I suspect it’s probably true in the opposite direction for people attempting but failing to speak English when here in the UK.]

yep, you anticipated my point exactly. :)

Imagine if French was the dominating language instead of English. Imagine some French tourist travelling across the Scottish highlands and just _expecting_ people in the tiniest village to speak French and wondering what’s wrong if they don’t, why are they being so _rude_. That’d be fun!

But I suppose it’s natural if you’re born speaking English, you don’t even realise what that does to your expectations and views of the world.

Daniel — your comment seems a little bizarre to me. Spanish is the language of a quite huge body of modern literature which includes some of the most vital authors of the last century (Garcia Marquez and Borges to name just two) and I reckon of the coming century as well.

It has just struck me that a corollorary of my theory is that we should invade other countries and demand by force of arms that they produce any significant works of literature they are planning in the English language. Before you dismiss this, I would point out that it worked a treat in Ireland, whose guttural Celtic language would otherwise have been quite a bore to learn.

It’s extraordinary that for a Germanic language English is such a Romance language.

It’s both, really. English is a mishmash of Norman (Romance) and Saxon (Germanic).

My goodness, where do I start? “French leads to a deeper understanding of English” – not any more than Spanish will, but ironically it can improve your spelling in English a great deal. Go figure. But to translate Ms Seipp’s remarks into the common tongue, I don’t need to speak the language of the peasants, the peasants need to learn my language. How very… conservative.

Now on to the comments:

Eks has noted, Beavis and Butthead style, that the dismal beigist suburb between Fremont and San Jose (that’s San Ho-Zay, for all y’all) ends in “as”. Alas, the local pronunciation does not rhyme with “ass” it rhymes with “penis”, as every student at “Mill-penis” High knows.

There indeed is an example of a faux pas that a slightly broader knowledge of the romance languages might prevent: there is little that demonstrates your lack of left coastal sophistication than to think that “Ell Co-Joan” is a suburb of San Diego or that Intel’s offices are in “San Josie”. (Or to ask your dealer for a dime bag of “mary-jew-wanna”. Spanish really does come in handy.)

As for the status of French with respect to other global languages, alas, we live in a world where money counts, and French speakers tend to have more of it on the average. French is and has been the language of a wide variety of African, Asian and Carribean dictators, from Papa Doc Duvalier to Prince/President/King Sihanouk. That is exactly the kind of thing that makes French so very much more important than the language of campesinos and gauchos.

Luis makes a case for learning Spanish on GDP and GDP growth grounds. Unfortunately, this is not an especially economically efficient way to decide. The language that offers the highest rate of return is quite variable. Japanese and Chinese, for example, offer an enormous earning potential over the long run, far larger than Spanish. Spanish is certainly helpful in the US southern border states, but it is also widely spoken in them. Supply and demand suggests that the best way to capitalise on language learning would be to learn something less common, but where demand exceeds supply more acutely. Arabic is a real moneymaker right now, especially Levantine and Mesapotamian colloquial Arabic rather than the more widely studied modern standard Arabic.

However, the effort spent in learning Spanish in LA is a good deal lower than learning Arabic there. And by effort, I mean money. Spanish is offered on a flexible schedule at a reasonable price by a wide variety of institutions in LA and can be practiced with a large portion of LA’s population, as well as enjoying extensive media support. Arabic, in contrast, will cost you tens of thousands of dollars to learn in a structured, inflexible academic environment in LA, or for somewhat less in an overseas immersion environment. (I’m told the University of the UAE is the place to go these days.)

Can I just say that the “learning language X leads to better English” argument is a dumb one? If you want better English, study English!

Alas, “learning language X leads to better English” is demonstrably true for every language in the world. This is one of the few things studies fairly uniformily show. One of the biggest barriers to teaching solid native language skills is getting students to think of their language as a language. Monolingual people are almost completely unaware of the actual properties of their own language. Anglophones in particular have difficulty distinguishing adjectives from adverbs, but most monolingual people are hard pressed to correctly identify syntactic dependencies and ambiguous structures in their own native languages. A second language is absolutely essential to developing a critical sense of your own language.

H.E. Baber has hit on something that merits some more consideration: That people who can’t speak English often feel very ashamed, as if they were illiterates, while anglophones rarely even notice that they’re monolingual. This can be ever bit as disempowering and destructive as feeling inferior because of your race or gender. I see this in Belgium all the time. Global English is deeply disempowering and at least the French are putting up some resistance. One of the reasons Quebec is so very strict about forbidding English is because they want to guarantee that at least in Quebec no needs to feel inferior just because their English isn’t very good.

I have to add, being from Quebec, with a French mother, but raised anglo, I railed against the racist language policies of the Partie Quebecois in the 70’s and 80’s.

I still think they were (and are) wrong, but I failed to see then what I see now that I have moved to the southwest US.

From 1972-1985 the PQ made French co-equal with English officially, throughout the country, and they made French dominant in Quebec. At the time, French speakers were 20% of the total population, and 60% of the Quebec population.

And, at the start of this period, the French in Quebec were being treated exactly like this bitch is treating the Spanish in Southern Cal, as peasants.

Needless to say, this is not the case anymore.

Currently, Spanish speakers comprise 12% of the total US population, and 40% of the Southwestern States (on average) CA, AZ, NM and TX.

What will the Spanish PQ be called? How quiet will that revolution be?

Luis,

if you think the corpus of Spanish-language literature is more impressive than that of French-language literature, you probably know nothing about anything written before 1985.

Hint: Quite a lot was…

Ianj

Luis – I was making a joke, suggesting that the number of dictators might be a reason for someone of that political disposition to prefer French. French is a language of richer people on the average.

Could Marcos really speak Spanish? He was a US educated Filipeno and he couldn’t even speak Cebuano. As for dictators… well, the francophone ones have less populism and better fashion sense. Too many Latin American dictators have tried to actually improve their countries, however ineptly. But I’m hard pressed to think of a francophone populist dictator except for Houphouët-Boigny and, of course, Napoleon.