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 ...
I disagree. I'm a native English speaker who lives in a Polish speaking country and works with Poles and Italians and has clients from France and Germany as well as the US and Canada and India.
My French and Italian are good, but my German is slipping badly (I guess I also don't like the language so that could be a psychological factor)
in a multi-lingual world it is very much worth the time.
I fully agree.
The nuances and shades that exist in one language don't exist in others. For instance in French there are multiple ways to describe how you do things that puts english in shade, in Polish the language is highly precise, but english is the best in precision business and technical terminology -- goals/objects/targets can mean the same word in Polish for instance.
Also, different languages require you to think differently, use different parts of the brain.
Those are seriously important languages in the modern world and everyone of them is more widely used than French.
Speaking of French, do you read well in documents written in Gallo? There used to be a number of spoken versions of Gallo and all the kings of England spoke it ~
As I said most people learn one language well ~ but there are a large number who can learn to read just about any written language in relatively short order. With today's computer assistance my own reach has extended out to many dozens of languages ~ but that doesn't make me fluent in them.
BTW, fluency is usually determined by a TEST with STANDARDS OF PERFORMANCE ~ but being able to order a beer or declaim for hours in a second language regarding a technical field does not equate to fluency.
I am sure his education helped.
The big deal there, according to one analyst, is that there's a broad shift from the dialects in the West to the East, with each adjoining language unit being inteligible to the next, but not to the degree that all still extant 10 dialects are mutually intelligible.
The Sa'ami language spoken in the Carpathians disappeared a couple of centuries ago when they were driven out by the Czar's CarpathoRhaetian Cossacks. That'd been brought to the region by Swedish Empire hard rock miners!
A system like that can exist with a relatively stable vocabulary in a mix of people migrating regularly from location to location and back again.
Those were all agglutinative languages ~ similar to Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian ~ but with several features demonstrating them to be MUCH MORE CLOSELY related to the language base found in Eastern Europe BEFORE the creation of the Indo-European or Finno-Ugaritic languages.
All the Sa'ami languages have a tough road to hoe up against something like English with more than a million words in the vocabulary.
Now, abut learning French (the written language), Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Romansch, Latin, Portuguese ~ you really only need to learn Spanish because that's going to open up the world of train schedules, street signs, and local maps to you. You can pick up what you need to get along in public places when you get there. Used to be degrees in 'Romantic Languages' and you'd focus on one of the group while actually using materials written in the others.
The condition is ‘specialist’ and there you are ~ in an environment where that has value. For most folks there is no value in knowing more than one language well. They do not live in a multilingual environment,. In 100 years all Europeans will live in an English language environment. Then only specialists will learn more than one language well.
English is a lot more easier to learn than you think. All it takes is, practice, practice, practice.
Plus English is now for the 21st century, as French was in the 18th century, the language of business.
My late father, who was in counter intelligence in that war - and spoke several languages - loathed and despised Eisenhower as a fool.
And I do too, though for a different reason - it was because Eisenhower refused to listen to credible reports about Castro being a red that we’ve had a psychotic tyranny as our neighbor for half a century.
I know you’re not going to want to believe it, but it’s true - I know every detail of this part of history.
I wasn’t thinking about ordering beer - anyone can do that in any language in one minute - and I don’t work in a technical field, so your point is irrelevant. You are making the typical American mistake of confusing quantity with quality and treating language as some sort of training manual or implement.
Language is about being able to speak, communicate and express yourself to another, and being able to understand them. Fluency is when you can speak spontaneously and as you are speaking, forget what language you are using.
Thank you. Well said.
Well, practice is necessary for learning any language.
What I’ve been told by those for whom English is a second language is that English is difficult because there are so many exceptions to the rules. You know, “i” before “e” except after “c” and so on. Apparently, there are few if any exceptions to language rules in other languages. I learned French in high school and later Italian, so I know that’s true in both languages.
When it comes to written language, Latin, Gallo, Breton, and Gothic are far more important to me than somebody babbling in French with a regional accent.
The East Asians have the biggest problem with the sounds which is why it is important to expose your children to sounds of foreign languages at a young age. That's where we learn them. By the time you are a teenager you don't even hear the spoken sounds you've never heard.
Simple is the right word; your response is so quaint - it’s a throwback to the bumpkin from a Sinclair Lewis novel from the 1920s - except you should have said ”anyone important enough for me to want to talk to would speak American.”
You’re not from around here are you.
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