Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

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

> 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.
As John has already pointed out, this standard can only be
meaningfully used within Europe, but comparisons with non-
European countries is precisely the issue at hand.  But even
if we did use it, your claim would be false.  According to the
most recent French census I could find, the population of Bordeaux
and Nice were 216,105 and 336,261 respectively out of a total
French population of 59,225,683.   Those cities therefore constitute
.36488% and .56776% respectively.  The most recent US census (from
which I drew the figures for Chicago and St. Louis) gave the total
US population as 281,421,906 (although according to one of their
recent estimates, the population is now probably something closer
to 288 million).   Of that number, Chicago and St. Louis constitute
3.25402% and .92516% respectively.  This means that they are in
fact larger than the French cities we mentioned as a proportion
of the total national population, and so have a larger influence
on the US and therefore world economy and are therefore more
practically important to know about (whatever nonpractical importance
the French cities may have).

> > 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).
In fact, neither of these cities is a state capital.  As John and
I have already pointed out, only a few of the state capitals are the
largest cities in their respective states (e.g. Boston, Atlanta,
and Phoenix).

> Do the Americans learn the Länder capitals of
> Germany? I doubt so. Yet, they are state capitals.
In German class we certainly did. In other classes, we also had
to learn a number of those which were large cities, like Munich
and Hamburg, but never systematically as German Länder 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.
Also true.

> > 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.
We had to learn those cities usually in a historical context.
Venice was very important when learning about the crusades
(e.g. the sack of Constantinople in 1204), so we learned that
there; we learned about Munich when learning about Hitler's
rise to power, and we learned about Barcelona when learning
about the Spanish Civil War.

> > I'd think those'd be important to learn for any European.
>
> Maybe, but not in geography classes.
Which is IMHO odd. :)

[...]

> > 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.
Right. I, too, was talking about Europeans who had completed
secondary education.  But it's not a matter of what you *should*
know, but what in fact educated people *do* know that was under
debate.

> > 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).
So, have you spent much time in Eastern Europe? From what I've
read, the educational system of many Eastern European countries
is currently in a state of near-collapse due to lack of funding.
The people you've met, I presume, were reared under the old
Communist regimes which made education (rightly) a priority.

> > 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
Right, same here generally. And I would say it is relatively more important
for any "educated" person anywhere in the world to be able to locate
a city like Chicago than it is to locate a city like Bordeaux.  Its
size and the accomplishments of its people merit a need to know it
that is not necessary for Bordeaux for basic world knowledge. (So
what if Ausonius lived in ancient Burdigala? His poetry is usually
considered bad anyways.)

My point about distance was not that there is an absolute measure
to knowledge of geography, but that absolute distance is *one*
criterion (among others) for whether a city's location is important
to know.  It is well-known that newspapers from the Western US pay
far more attention to affairs in East Asia and Latin America than
those on the East Coast do, for whom Europe is still a much more
obvious interest.  That kind of thinking affects educational systems
as well.

> (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).
Wait: needing to know all the capitals of all nations irrespective
of size does not sound like making relative judgements about the
need to know a city.  It sounds like it makes Rangoon every bit as
important as Paris or London.

 =========================================================================
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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