General Discussion

...hello. She lived in an Italian enclave in Brooklyn.

My son, to whom we gave my wife's beautiful Italian surname, won a scientific award and was invited by the Italian government to tour Italian industrial plants. He got by OK, he picks up languages fairly quickly, and has fluent French, passable Spanish, reading and speaking Chinese, some Japanese, some Russian. Because of his name, everybody assumed, in Italy,, that he was Italian. The Italian professors and graduate students where he is working on his Ph.D. love to say his full name whenever they address him, and I believe he's learning Italian from them.

Until recently Italy was a "no nukes" country and so Italian nuclear engineers all left the country for the United States, then a civilized country, and many were educated here. It's a shame, since Italy's greatest scientist of the 20th century, Enrico Fermi, built the very first nuclear reactor, albeit in the United States, since he was forced to leave Italy for having a Jewish wife. The Italian nuclear moratorium has just been reversed, since they recognize how the absence of nuclear infrastructure is destroying the atmosphere, and my son, who is seriously thinking of emigrating to Europe after graduation, might consider ramping up his Italian. (Unfortunately my father-in-law never taught his daughters Italian.) Right now France is mostly on his radar. He may end up marrying his girlfriend, also a nuclear engineer, and she, like many Americans is more or less monolingual, so he's teaching her French. It wouldn't be a bad idea to exercise his Chinese, I think. China is the world's leading country now in nuclear engineering; they have the power to save the world.

When my son was sent to France after his freshman undergraduate year on an NSF grant, I told them to not allow them to speak English to him, so that he could practice regular conversation, which as a marginal French speaker myself, I often find difficult, hearing French. It turned out that most of the grad students and post-docs in the lab in which he worked were from Brazil, and everyone spoke English as a common language to communicate with the French. Thus he could only speak French outside the lab. (The lab was in Limoges, a ceramic science center, apparently.) He did pick up some Portuguese in the lab and during social events outside with is colleagues, based on the similarity to Spanish. His Spanish, of course, helped with Italian.

He went to Montreal recently with some friends, and he acted as translator; he had few problems.

I think it's terrible that most Americans only speak one language. It is a huge disadvantage in business negotiations. The problem is that English is spoken throughout the world, and has become a de facto Esperanto. I don't know how many times in France, when I'd start to struggle, particularly when tired or jet lagged, for my limitations, they'd say, "It's OK, you can speak English."

I'm trying to restart working on my French, in case my son goes there to live. I've been trying to put in some time translating Camus' La Peste, and as I do so, I recognize how awful the English translation I have actually is. My son, picked up in Montreal, Orwell's prescient 1984 translated into French. I thought it would be fun to translate the French translation back into English, like the child's game "Telephone." Neither of us will have the time. I, of course, am running out of time on the planet. There are so many things I want to learn before I go, and I have to prioritize. I want to die feeling that I've stuffed my brain fully, expiation for my wasted, sybaritic, youth.

My son doesn't speak German, and my German is atrocious, although I can get by reading it, particularly scientific German. In the old days, when I was young, it was a requirement for chemists to speak or at least read German. That is no longer true. I've done a little work in the past working with translating Hesse's beautiful Demian, but I set it aside years ago. I do take my deepest personal peace, my sense of why it is wonderful to be alive at all, from a passage in the prologue.

English is pretty much the world standard language in science. Whether that remains true after the collapse of the United States that is now underway, remains to be seen. Latin lasted as Lingua Franca long after Rome fell; this may not prove true for English. German didn't last long as the scientific Lingua Franca after Hitler dismantled most science, with most scientific refugees coming to the United States, hence the rise of English. There are some famous European scientists buried here in Princeton.

I won't live long enough to find out how long English remains Lingua Franca, which in some sense is a relief, since seeing the collapse of the United States via the work of mindless morons led by an ignorant orange pedophile, would cause me and is causing me great emotional suffering.