Date:
Thu, 10 Dec 1998 19:35:55 -0600
MIME-Version:
1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding:
7bit
Content-Type:
text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
|
> 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.
|
|
|