Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

En réponse à "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

>
> > 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.
But are proportionally equivalent compared to the whole population of France.
The importance of a town is relative to the size of the country it's in, not
absolute in terms of number of inhabitants.

> 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)?
Because they are state capitals, but not country capitals (I had already made
the distinction before). Do the Americans learn the Länder capitals of Germany?
I doubt so. Yet, they are state capitals.

  (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.)
>
Not all American state capitals are noted, and having them on the map doesn't
mean you have to learn them.

>
> Somehow I find that claim unlikely. You mean you don't have to
> learn to locate Venice and Munich and Barcelona?
Indeed. The only towns we have to learn are the capitals. Maybe for Americans
capitals are not that important, but in Europe they are, more than other big
towns. At least in Geography classes we may talk about other towns than the
capitals, but the only one we need to learn by heart is the capital. Indeed, I
didn't learn where Venice, Munich and Barcelona were in geography classes. I
learned to situate Barcelona, but that was in Spanish classes. As for Venice,
its position is the kind of knowledge that is considered basic for an educated
person, but not learned at school. Rather, when you begin school you're nearly
supposed to know already where it is.

 I'd think those'd
> be important to learn for any European.
Maybe, but not in geography classes.

  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.
That's very true.

>
> And those are also towns that every American is supposed to
> know, and most *educated* Americans *can* locate them.
When do you consider someone *educated*? When I said it, I was referring to
someone who had finished successfully secondary school, but not mandatorily
begun tertiary education yet.

>
> 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.
Not sure of that. The Eastern European countries have good geography classes (I
know that from a few Eastern European people I know).

 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.
Rather, we think more in terms of *relative* importance than absolute
importance (it's changing, due to the influence of the American worldview, but
I know my parents had to learn the capitals of all countries of the world by
heart, including small principalties).

  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.
>
Yes, as I said, they think more in absolute terms of size, rather than relative
terms. I won't blame them for it, but I won't say that I agree with such a
worldview.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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