Re: [wolfrunners] Languages & SF/F (fwd)

On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > >> I think I have a pretty good background in languages myself (two years each
> > >> Latin, Spanish, and French). However, Americans on the whole are generally
> > >> ignorant/intolerant of other languages.
>
> Ignorant, yes.  Intolerant?  I'm not so sure about that.  I would say it
> is easier to claim that Americans are not driven by economic factors to
> learn other languages to the same extent that speakers in virtually any
> other part of the world are.  In America and Canada, one can travel
Perhaps "intolerant" is a bit too strong, but I've occasionally
encountered attitudes in that direction.  Probably the most extreme case
I heard of was a bicultural man who married a monocultural American wife,
took her to Rome for their honeymoon, and couldn't understand why she
seemed increasingly unhappy.  Finally she burst out, "I don't understand
why all these foreigners won't speak English."  Needless to say, that
marriage didn't last long.

I went to an international school in South Korea and knew teachers who'd
been there for 20 years, yet couldn't speak more than one or two
phrases and were unwilling to learn.  It's an attitude I've always found
puzzling; if I were dumped into another culture, heck *yeah* I'd take the
opportunity to learn to say things.  But I guess not everyone feels that way.

> exaggerated.  People, at root, learn languages not because they like to,
> much as we on Conlang might think otherwise, but because they are
> driven to do so because they need the other languages to survive, in a
> very real sense.
Pity.  :-)

Which is why students in Korea are started off with English in grade
school...elsewhere too, I'm sure!

> > The person didn't seem to have bothered to think about any other possible
> > roots of the words (what is it with this obsession with symbolism?). It
> > wasn't that difficult to make the connection. I had had only one class of
> > Russian at this time and it jumped off the page at me.
>
> I'm not sure that this strengthens the case that people are intolerant of
> other languages. Ignorant, yes, but not intolerant.
I haven't actually read _A Clockwork Orange_, so I can't comment on
whoever-it-was' example.

> > My Russian teacher really tried to impress on us that you can't always
> > directly translate words. For an example, she would write Russian words
> > up on the board and give the English "equivalent". *Then* she would tell
> > us what the word *really* means--all the connotations and nuances that
> > come from being a Russian. Direct translations are nearly impossible.
>
> Well, "usually" only in proportion to the abstraction that the word is being
> used as a label for.  There is, on the contrary, usually no problem in
> translating words like "mother", "sun", "grass", etc., since most language
> groups have similar notions about what those entail.
<nod>

YHL