From Chomsky:
"...English and Japanese, those languages, or collections of languages, happen to be unusual in that they're rather isolated. They both emerged from island societies for one thing, so people tend to learn a narrow range of dialects and not to be acquainted with broadly different ones. If you go to, say, continental Europe the situation is radically different and individuals are commonly in contact with widely different languages, even language types. And it's not unusual for a child in Europe, or even more so in countries like, say, Africa where there's a wide diversity of languages within a small region, it's not uncommon for a child to grow up speaking a number of languages with complete comprehension and competence. "My closest colleague, for example, in the office next to me at MIT, is a man who grew up in Eastern Europe in Latvia, and he spoke five languages natively by the time he was five years old. And we don't know what the limits are. I mean, in so-called primitive societies - meaning low level of technology but high level often of other kinds of cultural wealth - in such so-called primitive societies it's very commom for a child to grow up in a quite complex linguistic environment with the mother speaking one language and the father speaking another language and the uncle speaking another language and some teenage ritual introducing a third...still another language and so on and so forth. And this is entirely within the range of normal human competence. Our own - both in the United States and Japan - we have a rather misleading sense of this because of the relative isolation of our linguistic communities..."
http://www.nancho.net/advisors/chomsky.html
On Feb 23, 2012, at 8:52 AM, // ravi wrote:
> On Feb 23, 2012, at 9:33 AM, Angelus Novus wrote:
>> Wojtek wrote:
>>
>>> Pervasive foreign language illiteracy is a uniquely US phenomenon.
>>
>>
>> I'm not surprised that you hold this view, but you're wrong.
>> […]
>>
>> Don't get me wrong, I think if the US was not an arrogant
>> superpower, it would have the decency to instruct its school
>> students in Spanish from an early age. But this is hardly a unique
>> US phenomenon.
>
>
> Sample of one [billion] inclines me to agree. In India many, perhaps
> most people know two or more languages. But they tend to be internal
> (including English) languages, not foreign.
>
> —ravi
>
>
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