Alain,
My
vote is for Portuguese. Because it was re-latinized it is closer to
the Latin roots that any other Romance language. Thus it makes a great
linga franca. Learning French unfortunately is learning two languages, the
written and the spoken. Not true with Portuguese.
Carl
-----Original Message-----� 15:45 2000-12-20 -0500, John Cowan a �crit:
From: Alain LaBont� [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 2:00 PM
To: Unicode List
Subject: Re: [langue-fr] L'anglais est-il une langue universelle ?
Alain LaBont� scripsit:
> Just as
> an indication, Qu�bec, a 7.5-million-people island of French speakers
> which is surrounded by an ocean of monolithically English-speaking
> community of 300 million users of this language public-wise (I mean
> outside of homes), does not speak English (at least not enough to
> understand a simple question on the phone and answer it) in a proportion
> of approximately two thirds.
[John]
I suggest that there are ideological reasons for this which do
not apply to the rest of the world, which does not feel their
native languages under such a threat as you describe, and feel
freer to learn other languages as a matter of individual
utility.
[Alain] There is absolutely no ideological reason for this, in spite of the well-known clich�. On the contrary, everybody here would like to know English, even those who hate it as not being nice to hear (there are of course exceptions, but they remain exceptions, I must tell you -- the trend among independentists is to say that all Qu�becers should at least learn English and Spanish as a second and third language, and perhaps Portuguese as a fourth one -- Qu�bec independentits being objectively those by which NAFTA passed in Canada; when the issue was discussed the rest of the country was divided on it while in Qu�bec the North-American union was widely supported, regardless of political opinions -- the soverigntists were in power in Qu�bec -- they still are, and currently go beyond this in preaching a single currency throughout the Americas, horrifying a lot of Canadians-outside-Qu�bec).
A former independentist Qu�bec Premier (Jacques Parizeau, not to name him, and he is among the most vocal of "separatists") already said: "if I ever see a guy who does not even try to learn English, I will kick kim in the ass".
That said, the learning of a second language beyond a primitive level is not given to everybody, you must admit it. I would say that it is easier to learn a third language because after the second one you have gained enough confidence.
Now all Western languages are relatively near one to each other (a caricature with a bottom of truth: "English is a dialect of French, which is but bad latin originally spoken by a Germanic tribe and which only got refined"), but this is far to be the case with languages not in the Indo-European group, and in this case, I infinitely doubt that more than a tiny minority of these people will even be able to align two words in a row in English and even understand what they are saying or writing... To me this is the bare reality, and perhaps most Americans, even more than the other peoples on earth, will agree with this. (;
Cases like Michael Everson or Scott Horne are the admirable and noble exception which confirms the rule, as we say in French ("l'exception qui confirme la r�gle").
Alain LaBont�
Qu�bec
