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Olympics According to Languages | ||
Tags: Olympic Games | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 41 of 45 08 March 2010 at 2:00am | IP Logged | ||
You aren't forced to speak French, no more than Québécois are forced to speak English. No one is forced to speak both official languages. In fact, only a minority of Canadians are bilingual. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5495 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 42 of 45 08 March 2010 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good point Arekkusu. That's one of the great things about Canada. We're allowed to speak
any language freely whenever we want. I do believe that in the past during war time, one was not allowed to speak "enemy languages" (German, Italian, Japanese), but other than this instance, we have always been free to communicate in any tongue. This can be compared to Franco era Spain, when only Castilian could be used and not the regional languages and dialects. Forcing the Catalans to use Spanish must have been comparable to forcing English only in Quebec. It just wouldn't work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 43 of 45 02 May 2010 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Olympia spricht deutsch
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 44 of 45 03 May 2010 at 12:06am | IP Logged | ||
I see that the sentiments are running high here, so to add a touch of national chauvinism I suggest you take the number of people speaking these languages, and do the math on which language has most gold medals per capita. (Which of course would prove beyond a reasonable doubt the olympic superiority of that particular language) :-) I'll help by telling you that there are 4.5 million Norwegians. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mafouz Diglot Groupie Spain Joined 5325 days ago 56 posts - 64 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: German, Japanese, French | Message 45 of 45 03 May 2010 at 11:32am | IP Logged | ||
I am totally with you, and I am not under any circumstance a Franco's linguistic policies (applied basically with guns) supporter. But I would like to point two things just for sake of not promoting another Spanish black legend: 1. Linguistic prohibition is complicated, because the people speaks, after all, his language. In the Spanish case it was applied to public use of the language, not to private use (with caveats). You can speak whatever you speak in your home, and sell your tomatoes in the market shouting in your language. But you can not be represented politically, relate to public administration, receive education or judicial services in your mother tongue, which is serious enough. Compulsory military service was used to supress violently any caprice of monoglotism, at least in male population. Not to speak to public press. As far as I know, these rules were being applied long before the Franco era, with the exception maybe of the vernacular press, and only supressed in the years of the II republic (1931-1936). I am not sure what happened during franco years with some forms of traditional judiciary, like the "tribunal de las aguas" en Valencia (for judging irrigation lawsuits), done in the vernacular language since the middle ages. As far as I know they were left untouched. Publication of books in Catalan or basque was never forbidden, although the forties were really a bad time for this business, as you can imagine. Selection was made on a book by book basis, wich again is serious and violent enoguh. 2. This was not an invention of the Spanish fascism. The idea was imported from practices of widespread use in Europe, and specially (but not only) in France. The difference is that in france it began with the revolution of 1789, and in Spain it began a hundred years later. The result in France was uniformity and really little political defense of other languages but french, the result in Spain was useless suffering and nationalism, that never existed before the final years of the XIX century (despite Patrick O'Brian's novels). Remember that the cultured world in written basque was north of the frontier, well in the XVIII century. But the idea of not allowing to send a telegram in basque (as was the rule) was not local. I also have the impression that it was less systematic in Spain in the sense that depended more on the particular civil servant attending the service, and not on written rules (but I do not have documentation to defend this). Sure some of the catalan speakers in the forum can polish the details. Those years were terrible in general, not only for the linguistic policy. I think the European experience with language supression should serve as reference for avoiding this kind of nightmare and political puzzles. Excuse me the irruption! By the way, I strongly support the recalculation of the list, weighting by population (and climate?) proposed by Solfrid!! Edited for orthography Edited by Mafouz on 03 May 2010 at 11:41am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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