Re: "Usefull languages"

Danny Wier wrote:
From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
>>>
| I read everything that comes at sight :)) . Don't leave a box of anything
| edible near me, because I'm gonna read the ingredient lists in all
| languages [...]
It's boring here in America. Most products are English-only. An increasing
number also have Spanish. On other occasions, you find French, if the
product is also sold in Canada. And then there are the occasional import
items with German or Thai or Chinese or Finnish or whatever.
<<<

Really?  In the UK there are *lots* of things with a huge range of languages
on them ... a thirty-second search of my flat yields the following:

hairdryer case:
English, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish
Pringles (potato snack thing, in case there is a culture left pringleless):
English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Finnish, Greek (modern only :) ),
Italian, Danish (or is it Norwegian??), Portuguese, Swedish
shower gel:
English, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Slovak, Latvian, and a
single phrase in Arabic script (?language)

I presume this has to do with the international marketing of these products,
as few of these languages would be useful to UK residents, compared with say
Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu, Serbo-Croat, Polish, etc.  I strongly suspect (as I
said in a previous post) that the constant low-level linguistic stimulation
I experienced each morning in the shower during my formative years played a
significant part in keeping my interest in languages fired up.

Jonathan.
'O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages...'
W. H. Auden, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'

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