[PRCo] Re: PRCo] Re: Europa (Foreign Languages)

[Richard Allman]

the political scientists will tell you that language differences are the 
most irreconcillable-maybe even more than religion. think about it-if you 
can't talk to your neighbor, building community becomes a challenge and 
suspicion of "otherness" rises to the top of the pond. Just look @ 
Belgium-threatened w/ break-up despite relative prosperity, the always- 
strong separatist movement in Quebec, w/ some thoroughly vile demagoguery, 
what happened in old USSR, the Balkans, Kuridsh regions of Iran, Iraq, 
Turkey-some religious and ehtnic baggage for sure, but where dialogue is 
impossible, all else breaks down.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 6:28 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: PRCo] Re: Europa (Foreign Languages)


> Sorry about that.   I was quoting a rather upset member of the
> Canadian diplomatic service who I met at the Baltimore Streetcar
> Museum.   When I asked him about politics, we went ballistic.
>
> But within your commentary I feel a certain dissatisfaction too.
> Sad isn't it that politicians in any country feel that they can only
> get support from their constituents if they are running someone else
> down.   Sort of like the newspapers which can only make money if they
> print bad news.   And the churches who are always right ... my church
> that is, your church is always wrong, or so it seems.   <BG>
>
>
> On Nov 9, 2007, at 6:12 PM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:
>
>>
>> Fred Schneider wrote:
>>> And then we have 12 million people in Quebec and some others in New
>>> Brunswick and Nova Scotia who would like to break away from Canada.
>>> And if they do, then there is another group of Canadians in the
>>> prairie provinces who think more like the USA to the south.   Crazy,
>>> isn't it.
>>
>> Quebec doesn't have 12 million people, much less 12 million
>> separatists; they got two chances to pass a referendum and
>> failed both times.
>>
>> Language is certainly a political issue here (I moved to Montreal
>> a few weeks ago).  One of the former Parti Quebecois governments
>> even banned commercial signs in English.  Eventually it was struck
>> down by the courts, but they allowed a "reasonable compromise":
>> now French just has to be at least twice as big on signs.  And despite
>> having caused an exodus of English Canadians from Montreal in the
>> '80s,
>> so that English is now definitely a minority language in the city,
>> the separatist politicians still rant and rave about how if they don't
>> do this, that and the other to support French (which really means
>> suppressing English), French will vanish instantly.  The latest threat
>> that will magically destroy French in Quebec is immigrants, who are
>> supposedly all learning English and not French.  There's no data
>> to back this up, but who needs facts?
>>
>> -j.
>>
>
>
>