"maxo"
gmail.com> wrote in message>> We could learn a little from that attitude, regardless of whether the guy
>> next to you is speaking English, Spanish, Greek or Swahili.
>
> Hell yeah. Good post, Olin!
>
Thank you. It's merely an opinion, with little to no regard whether the
speaker is legal or not.
Just a tiny bone thrown...
> As a child immigrant, I find the American distaste for even attempting
> to speak a foreign tongue just appalling. Spanish should be required
> in the schools from the third grade--not to surrender to some straw
> man horde--but because knowing more than one language truly widens
> your perspective. It divorces you from the constraint of one set of
> words or grammatical structure or even curse words. Shoot, even being
> open to dialect opens the mind.
>
Absolutely. I love to throw an occasional Spanish word or phrase into a
song, even though I'm told that is now the kiss of death here in Nashburg.
I took German in college, though being from Texas, even the part of Texas
that consisted largely of descendants of German immigrants (my
ex-mother-in-law was the first-born here of her family), Spanish would have
been a LOT better language to take and one that would not likely have wound
up as lost as was my German.
> It was funny this spring when I got to host my cousins, who are young
> enough to be my kids, and spent time in Atlanta and Memphis. They only
> know me via my Germanic language usually--but in English I'm formally
> a midwestern and with a bit of southern and jive thrown in during
> casual times due to my upbringing. They just flipped when we ate at a
> meatn3 in Memphis, and switched into deep south mode with the
> proprietor like one is want to do around collards--they just didn't
> expect that sort of dialectical variety in the US.
>
> Point is that language is flavor. More languages, more flavor as far
> as I'm concerned. Dialects, Spanish, whatever, bring it on!
>
> Language is just so magical. I can imitate at least four dialects of
> Swedish as well as speak damn good restaurant Spanish. :-P
Oh I got a ton of Mexican waiters, even here, who are delighted to teach me
new phrases. My thing, as a radio announcer, was correct pronounciations of
foreign words. In San Antonio, Mexican-Americans who met me and had heard me
on the radio would often start speaking to me in Spanish, because they
thought I spoke the language well since I had no difficulty with Spanish
names.
I didn't, and I don't. Just a few words and phrases here and there... enough
to get in trouble. ;^)
