Further evidence of the demise of English as a world language

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jul 30 20:29:16 UTC 2010


Posted by a woman from Valencia, a Catalan-speaking - or should that
be "Catalonian-speaking"? - sub-country of Spain. (Interestingly,
Spain recently refused to allow Catalonia the same sub-country [my own
nonce-formation; hopefully, its meaning is sufficiently clear] status
and Catalonia remains merely a region of Spain speaking a non-standard
variety of Castilian. Makes good political sense: Divide et impera.
Avoids any future same-language = same-(sub-)country hassles. Besides,
Catalonia is far larger than Valencia, hence capable of a greater
degree of agitation for integration with Valencia plus U.S.-style
"Commonwealth-of-Puerto-Rico" status.

"When I lived in Tokyo, I [came to] understand that, _if you want [to]
live in [a] foreign country, you have to speak English_."

Note also that this woman is capable of speaking, reading, and
writing, IMO, anyway, Japanese at the BA level. Hence, it wasn't the
case that she was in Japan trying to get by with using Catalan and
Spanish. Indeed, except for the sentence quoted, the rest of the post
was in Japanese far beyond my two-quarters-at-UCLA-in-1967 ability to
comprehend.

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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