Guest-blogging over at Volokh, Cathy Seipp tells us why we should learn French rather than Spanish:
Last year, when she took French at Pasadena Community College, we got the same reaction: “Why French? Why not Spanish? Isn’t that more useful around here?” Well, no. What’s useful in Los Angeles, just like everywhere else in the country, is English. I suppose if I were a contractor rounding up day laborers every morning, and wanted my daughter to learn the family business, Spanish would be invaluable. … I do speak enough Spanish to communicate with the cleaning lady … This is sort of useful, but not vital. Since 1066, educated English speakers have studied French. Even if we don’t speak it … it gives us a deeper understanding of our own language, and prevents embarrassing gaffes like “I just love that Why-vees Saint Laurent!” Which some trophy wife actually said to me at a fashion show once.
An example of the kind of embarrassing gaffe that the study of French seems powerless to prevent is left as an exercise to the reader.
This may be at the root of the otherwise mysterious tendency of educated Americans to chuck French vowels into any vaguely foreign-looking word; vermooth, cafe lattay, etc.
“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)
Hm. I’m guessing the day laborers and cleaning ladies might have some interesting gaffes to relate. Guess it depends on who yer trying to impress. Por me, ca ne fait nada.
I thnk rea has one. I’ll add farting, for which mastery of French is no prophylactic.
French has been my first second language for countless generations, of course, but the last time I visited the Free and Democratic Republic of the United States of America (FDRUSA) I decided I would very much like to know Spanish the next time.
Anglophone American TV is a compelling argument for having access to another kind, and the Hispanophone flavour (“flavor”) does at least show proper foopball.
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.
My Spanish is worse than the English of almost all of the Latinos I meet in New York City. But the fact that I am trying to learn certainly does make people trust my gestures of solidarity more, which has many personal ones as well as the professional rewards for a community organizer. Sometimes my knowledge of Spanish literature helps make a connection too. And if you want to read the daily news with an emphasis on working class quality of life, Hoy is a better paper to read than any of the English ones.
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.
love how outsnobbing trophy wives is “vital”—so much more so than communicating with one’s own compatriots.
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 still recovering from the embarrassment of my father ordering “ARR-roz conn PO-lo” at a Puerto Rican restaurant when I was a teenager.
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. [ignoring for the sake of simplicity French Guyana and Brazil]
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 :( ]
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 :( ]
More people speak Portuguese as a first language than speak French as a first language.
My Portuguese is very good, my Spanish is acceptable, but I would like to improve it. What is interesting is that Portuguese speakers have no problem understanding Spanish (I certainly don’t), but the reverse is not true. Most Spanish speakers without knowledge of Portuguese often have a difficult time understanding it.
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’
I’ve often thought Americans are so stubbornly monolingual because there is no “obvious” second language for most of them to learn. In cerain parts of the country, Spanish is useful. In the Northeast, if you have dealings with Canada, French has its claims. German still has its uses in parts of the midwest. There is the attraction of your ancestral language, which can have its uses (though we Italo-Finnish Americans don’t know which wat to turn).
“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 don’t mean to be a snob or anything, but I don’t think it’s really impressive that a continent and a half (Latin America) has a bigger and faster-growing GDP than that of a large European nation (France), especially since strong economic growth doesn’t seem to be the top priority of European economies.
The route of learning Spanish so as to have some kind of access to labor-oriented news is an interesting point that hadn’t occurred to me before.
In theory, I could try speaking to the staff at the Mexican restaurant down the street in Spanish (I do always pronounce the names of foods correctly — why on earth couldn’t English have developed into such a consistently phonetic language as Spanish?), but in my case, it feels like it would be making more work for them.
But yeah, I wish I had taken French instead of Spanish in high school.
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.
NB: I meant that for Americans; for Canadians or Western Europeans French is probably more reasonable for any number of different reasons.
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…
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!
[pointing out the obvious…]
Even better, study English philology, semantics, grammar, phonology, study Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Old Norse, etc. Read a lot of books in English!
There’s any number of good reasons to learn a foreign language — improving your English isn’t really one of them.
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…]
On the other hand, since you can almost always make yourself understood face-to-face, when learning a second language you should probably think more about the useful works of art, literature and science which it makes available to you. In which case I’d submit that the order goes English, German, Greek, French, Sanskrit, Latin, Russian, with Spanish coming distinctly below Swedish.
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.
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.
If you hear something often enough, it ceases to sound strange …
.q,
I believe the current Administration subscribes to that point of view.
Or else it sounds very strange indeed.
The air-MAY thing reminds me of a story a friend of mine liked to tell. There’s a pizza chain around here called Pagliacci. My friend referred to it only to be interrupted by a person who said with great contempt/superiority/exasperation - “It’s pronounced Pag-lee-och-ee.” My friend had made the mistake of pronouncing it as if it were an Italian name. Being more polite than the person, she refrained from returning the contempt with interest, but we developed a running joke about seraglios, tagliatelle, Camille Paglia, etc. Well it amused us anyway.
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”.
I picked French in high school on the “moving to Canada” theory. Now I live in Los Angeles, and Canadians routinely laugh at me for ever thinking French would be useful in, say, Ontario. So I have some regrets, but I submit that caterwauling along to the tops of the Mexican pops is a more fun, if possibly less effective, way to learn Spanish than any high school course.
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.
It’s not just the French who have this attitude.
My experience of the Czech Republic (my wife is Czech) is that in Prague you can expect young people to be enthusiastic users of English. Outside of the city centre, even in the non-tourist suburbs, and among older people very few will speak English. Rather more will speak some German or Russian.
To make matters worse they will look with scorn upon your pathetic attempts to communicate with them using Czech — at least until you reach the stage where your pronunciation is correct. It doesn’t matter so much of your vocabulary is poor as long as your pronounce the words you do know correctly. Anyone who knows anything about Czech will know that getting the pronunciation correct is non-trivial.
[Any language in which the number four is one of the hardest words in the language to pronounce can make going to the bar a bit difficult…]
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!
Yeah, it’s a bit rude to expect people in a foreign country to speak English.
My point re: the Czech language is that among older people you don’t get much credit for attempting to speak the language. If you speak it really badly and mispronounce words their attitude is pretty disparaging and my own experience is that a fair bit of wilful misunderstanding sometimes takes place.
[I suspect it’s probably true in the opposite direction for people attempting but failing to speak English when here in the UK.]
“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 ;)
I spoke German in a Prague restaurant and was told they were full. They were half-empty. Realizing my mistake (I’m blond), I continued: “Oh! We’re not German, we’re American, I’m just speaking German.” No dice. My dad had something similar with Russian in Warsaw, and Russian isn’t popular in the former Yugoslavia, I found. So my theory is that in Eastern Europe, you open in French or English, and having then established you are not in fact, German or Russian, you switch to a language the other guy speaks. Nothing beats sociolinguistics.
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.
It’s awkward in some places because if you speak English it’s arrogant but if you ask whether they speak English they get a little huffy—of course they speak English: it’s the universal second language of educated people, like Latin used to be. Are you suggesting I’m illiterate?
This was, in any case, the way I felt in Iceland where I was unexpectedly dumped (long story) without any preparation. Icelandic is impossible, even for a native English speaker with a little bit of German. You can’t even make out the signs. It’s extraordinary that for a Germanic language English is such a Romance language.
Even where something SHOULD be intelligible it’s not because as soon as we see a foreign word we read it as French or Latin. At breakfast there were two pitchers full of white liquid labeled “mijlk” (no problem with that) and “surmijlk”—which I immediately inferred was cream, the top of the milk, and poured into my coffee. It didn’t occur to me that it was sour milk until I tasted the results.
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.
Yep, and Swedish is the language of Ibsen.
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.
If Garcia Marquez is one of the most vital authors of the last century, this is a new scary definition of “vital” to me.
Indeed.
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).
Ibsen was from Norway, dude.
I was pretty hardcore in Spanish in high school, and I really tried to convince myself that it was worth it from my perspective as an amateur lit nerd — but having a few good novelists just does not cut it when you look at the vast cultural production available in English, French, or German. If you’re into high culture, it seems dreadfully obvious to choose French over Spanish.
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.
Scott Martens wrote:
“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. “
Yeah, this is a fair point. I studied the English Language at degree level and did 4 years of ‘university level’ English grammar so perhaps I am being a little unfair. For most people their only exposure to the grammar of English will be when learning another languge.
[Indeed, for my own part it was really only when I had to learn Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse that I was able to ‘internalize’ and make sense of a lot of the grammar I’d been taught. On the plus side, I’d have been able to read those Icelandic signs one of the earlier commentators mentioned.]
However, is it really the case that that kind of higher-order knowledge about English affects one’s ability to produce good English?
I’m not sure that the sort of knowledge one picks up from learning another language - the knowledge of the case system, being able to describe verb tenses, etc. - really helps that much in producing, say, good English prose. Although I’m open to persuasion on this - having some knowledge of English grammar has been invaluable to me in explaining, when asked, to non-native speakers where they have made a mistake.
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?
Interesting - so we can correlate Canada’s descent to eunichhood with the increased use of French! WHODA THUNK?
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
ianj: I’m not saying that the corpus is more impressive overall, I’m saying one corpus is dynamic and one corpus has been basically stagnant for my entire lifetime. If I wanted to study a language where nothing interesting is being written, I’d go back to Latin.
scott: Obviously Chinese is the #1 choice based on a purely economic analysis, and by a large margin. (Well, probably behind English.) I’m merely comparing to French. Really, if you want to compare because there are more French-speaking dictators who have concentrated wealth… that’s potentially the silliest argument I’ve ever heard. For every Duvalier I’ll match a Marcos.
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.
“I’m not sure that the sort of knowledge one picks up from learning another language - the knowledge of the case system, being able to describe verb tenses, etc. - really helps that much in producing, say, good English prose.”
why not? in my experience, being more conscious about word choice and grammatical subtleties in a “second language” spills over into greater precision in one’s use of his or her native language.
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