> Three cheers for Alex!
>
> I have always felt that any soi-disant "educated" American
> who does not have a functional, speaking knowledge of at
> least one foreign language is a provincial, a country bumpkin--and
> in the international sphere, think of how much and often
> this country has been mis-served by political-appointee
> ambassadors who don't have a clue of what's going on
> around them! ... I am especially disappointed to see, over
> the past so-many years, how our grad students in literature,
> as a population, have grown monolingual--and that's been
> to the detriment of their native English as well.
>
> ==Dan Pearlman
 
I did a little work in programming office systems for
computers. The idea was to enable multi-lingual usage.
 
The standing joke of our European counterparts was:
  If you speak three languages, you are tri-lingual.
  If you speak two languages, you are bi-lingual.
  If you speak one language, you are American.