Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:
>
> >
> > Exactly why should someone be expected to know the values
> > of foreign words when they haven't been trained in it?
>
> Because they are supposed to have a [+foreign] attribute. If you say they
> don't have it, then the discussion is quit different.
Having a [+foreign] submodule for your particular dialect's
phonology does not imply that you have any understanding
whatsoever of the phonology on which that [+foreign] submodule
is based, nor on the orthography of said language.  The grammar
is, in other words, separate from the content of speech.

> > > Anyway, most Americans wouldn't be able to correctly situate Paris
> > > and Prague...
> >
> > That's true.  And most Europeans would probably have difficulty
> > situating St. Louis and Chicago.  (I remember an anecdote on
> > sci.lang several years ago to that effect.)
>
> Well, most Americans wouldn't either to my knowledge, while
> most Europeans can situate Paris and Prague.
About as many as Americans that could locate New York City
and Philadelphia.  (Paris in all truth can't be used as an
example for anything, since, like New York City, it is one
of the world's truly great cities and so stands out in a
way that other European cities -- Cologne, or Valencia, for
example -- do not.)

> Also, Paris and
> Prague are country capitals, not St. Louis nor Chicago, so
> you cannot compare (indeed, asking a French person to
> situate those towns would be like asking an American to situate
> Bordaux or Nice).
But Bordeaux and Nice have but a fraction of the (metropolitan)
population of these cities -- 9,157,540 and 2,603,607 respectively.
Chicago has about as many people as Paris, and St. Louis about
as many as Rome.  For Americans, their size alone merits knowing
about them.  And if being a capital is so important, wouldn't that
imply that Europeans should be able to identify Albany (NY) and
Columbus (OH)?  (American state capitals are almost always noted
on maps that I've seen made in Europe, so it's not as if Europeans
don't have a chance to learn them.)

> We in Europe learn to situate capitals, nothing else (it's difficult
> enough already). If we had to learn to situate all important towns, it
> would multiply the number of towns to learn by 5.
Somehow I find that claim unlikely. You mean you don't have to
learn to locate Venice and Munich and Barcelona? I'd think those'd
be important to learn for any European.  More likely IMHO is that
the set of major cities and the set of national capitals overlaps
to a far greater extent in Europe than in America.  The 50 state
capitals are very often not the largest city in the state -- only
a handful, like Boston and Phoenix, are in both categories.

> To give a better example, how many Americans are able to correctly situate
> Washington, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Beijing? Those are towns an educated
> European is supposed to be able to situate (although I admit many won't :((
And those are also towns that every American is supposed to
know, and most *educated* Americans *can* locate them. But
we haven't been discussing merely the educated part of the
population, but rather the whole.

> It's not anything against Americans, it's just to give a good
> reference point. Nobody will deny that world geography is better
> taught in Europe than in America :))) .
Seriously, though, it depends on what you mean by "world", and what
you mean by "Europe".  I'd say that if you count Eastern Europeans,
that'd be hard to maintain. Also, Europeans live in a physically
smaller space, and like everyone else on the planet are more likely
to know about the geography of smaller spaces.  But the citizens of
Los Angeles live 2790 miles from those in New York City, so their
worldview is more or less of necessity different from those distant
people who happen to live under the same government.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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