Posted on 04/04/2013 6:25:05 PM PDT by markomalley
Fluency in English and other languages has long been considered a prerequisite for a pope.
Blessed Pope John Paul II arguably set the standard, learning as many as 12 languages and speaking eight of them fluently. Benedict XVI, his successor, was reputed to be fluent in seven and was particularly proficient in French, the first foreign language he learned.
But Pope Francis’ linguistic abilities are, by his own admission, significantly inferior. Apart from Spanish, his mother tongue, he knows German and Italian well, although he admits the former is rusty.
The Holy Father prefers not to publicly speak any languages other than Italian at general audiences, the summaries of which are now read by various officials in the Secretariat of State. This reluctance was also seen on Easter Day, when, after delivering his message urbi et orbi (to the city of Rome and to the world), he refrained from wishing a Happy Easter in 65 of the world’s languages — a custom begun by John Paul II.
(Excerpt) Read more at ncregister.com ...
He’s still a hundred times more a adroit and educated than any American president of the 20th - 21st centuries.
Most all of us are good at grasping ONE language well although we may know quite a bit about several other languages, or even have native talent in tricking out Chinese characters (a fairly widespread ability)
Only a few people have the nack of picking up several languages ~ their purpose, quite obviously, is to serve the others by translating.
So far I haven't seen any reason to question Pope Francis' intelligence ~ but his experiences living in Argentina are FAR different than our own, or those of your typical European pope. We should all expect some surprises
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HABEMUS PAPAM!!! (Live Thread)
If Italian was good enough for St. Peter, it should be good enough for Pope Francis.
that is absolute nonsense. Nonsense. Anyone can learn another language, it simply needs to be taught. Even cab drivers in Holland speak three languages fluently. Most people in Scandinavia speak English or German as a second language. Most of the people in Aruba speak at leaast two, if not three languages. Everyone I grew up was taught a second language from first grade. The Tudor queens, Mary and Elizabeth, were translating prayerbooks written in Latin into English when they were in their early teens. And it is not meaningless as an indication of education and intelligence - it is an indication of dullness and philistinism to grow up in a country with a free education and not learn another language.
St. Peter didn’t speak Italian. There was no such language as Italian at the time of St Peter.
English is a difficult language to learn. Heck, many high school graduates in the US haven’t mastered the language (and more than a few college grads as well). So who cares if the Pope can speak English?
Just another thing for the malcontents to complain about.
My neighborhood has numerous attorneys, physicians, physicists, biological researchers, etc. and doggone it, for speaking they are pretty much one language folks.
The daughter in law lived here a while and she speaks 4 and understands 5 languages completely ~ but that's one out of several hundred.
Those multi-lingual Europeans aren't all that proficient in speaking more than one language. They also depend on listeners who can understand, but that's yet another talent.
I think VR forgot his /s/ and his ;^D
I was inspired by the saying, "If the King James Bible was good enough for St. Paul, it's good enough for me."
Where in the World did you grow up? In 1950s and early '60s America that I grew up in here in the West, no one spoke or learned a second language (pre-illegal alien era). There was no reason to. With that said, my 22 year-old daughter speaks three languages, because she wanted to learn them.
I’ve taught at both the high school and college level (four different languages at the high school level, though I claimed mastery of only two). A great-great-grandfather of mine, living in rural South Carolina, supposedly spoke five languages “fluently” — I don’t believe it for a moment. :-) It’s been my experience that claims of fluency are routinely exaggerated (or mean little more than being able to speak the language fast but badly).
It’s difficult to master another language. It takes an inordinate amount of time, and even if learned, that knowledge is difficult to maintain without continual practice. Except for specialists, few persons should learn many. It’s simply not worth the time.
I grew up in New York City and spent time in Europe. Your assumption of ”there was no need to” is the opposite of the assumption my family had, which was that one wasn’t educated unless one spoke at least one other language. Back then, French was the language of diplomacy, and it was unthinkable to not speak it. The school I went to started French classes in first grade. Our teachers were from France.
The instruction was rigorous. I benfitted from it.
I don’t know what you are talking about re multi-lingual Europeans - I have worked with many, whose English is flawless, they are obviously are fluent in their mother tongue, and I have been at meetings and conferences with them where they have spoken for hours in a third language. None of them depended on listeners who can understand.
No one who speaks only one language can be considered cultured.
Language is something you begin to learn at home - that’s why it’s called ”mother tongue”. If someone American has finished high school and hasn’t mastered English, then they have come from an uneducated family and gone to a very bad school. I diasgree that English is hard to learn - I went to a school with a lot of foreign students, some of whom arrived speaking no English, and they all learned very quickly.
I can’t imagine the world you inhabit. It is a joy to learn another language, to be able to read a poem as it was intended to be read, to understand the lyrics of a song, to have the kind of expanded awareness that comes from the other language as it enhances your native language.
And your statement that people don’t really speak other languages well is just untrue - I’ve traveled, worked - and done simultaneous translation - in multi-national situations, and everyone foreign spoke perfect English.
I have a lot of respect for people who can speak languages from different language families.
Not true.
i've lived in Poland for 2.3 years now and have worked in other parts on the continent before besides living in the uk for years.
The Brits are barely monolingual, but quite a few on the continent are multi-lingual (except most Spaniards and Italians -- mor eon that later)
it's not a big deal to learn another indo-European language, but very few learn Magyar or Estonia or Finnish
For Spaniards and Italians, their languages are from simplified (Vulgar Latin) and have fewer sounds than Germanic or Slavic languages, forget about Finno-Ugaritic, so they find it hard to learn another language
JP II was not a bad a guy, but I'd take RR over any human resource the Church of Rome has coughed up over the centuries.
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