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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (626)	4/24/2003 5:02:38 PM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

Research on learning and intelligence shows that people who speak more than one language are more intelligent- or at least perform much better on intelligence tests, than people who are monolingual. Well, I certainly know that most of my Dutch friends are extremely literate people. Many of them like to read books published in the languages in which they were written. I always find their knowledge of world literature to be rather astounding. In my own case, several years ago, I set out to learn Spanish so that I could read the poetry of Neruda as it was written. Although Roch Carriere's novels have all been translated into English, I occasionally enjoy reading them in French. In much of my research into Quebec architecture, there are few archival documents written in English, so a good reading knowledge of French is required. Any time that you get into primary source materials on Canadian history (especially pertaining to native peoples and the days of the voyageurs and the fur trade), you definitely want to be able to read French, because so much was recorded mainly by Jesuit priests. In any case, knowledge of extra languages certainly does not hurt us. It always makes me furious when I talk to Native friends who were robbed of their birth languages when they were children because those in power thought that these languages were backwards. How far from the truth. At university, one of my friends could not speak out loud in front of groups of people and it boiled down to having been physically punished every time she spoke an Indian word when she was in a residential school. The record of this kind of treatment in the Indian schools both in the U.S. and Canada is a disgusting black mark on the history of both countries. Well, I suppose I've gone off on a bit of a tangent. The main point I meant to make is that the acquisition of multiple languages is something to be proud of rather than spurned.