I have spent my time in China, and there are plenty of people who cannot or
do not want to speak Mandarin. Even though it is constantly pushed by the
educational system and the media as "putong hua" ("common language").
On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 8:35 AM adriano paolo shaul gershom palma <
palmaadriano@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It is not, given the educational system
Quatsch wird gelöscht, ohne gelesen zu werden
Kerem jojjenek maskor es kulonosen masho
הִשְׁתַּדֵּל הִזְדַּקֵּן
palma, a paolo shaul םֹשׁ ְרֵגּ
On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 4:42 AM Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Why not to Cantonese or Sichuanese ? The domination of Mandarin in China
is rather artificial.
On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 3:15 AM John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Isn’t this relighting an old battle? The future most likely belongs to
Mandarin.
John
Sent from my iPad
On Apr 17, 2020, at 0:46, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
From a review by R. W. Johnson of *Power and Glory: France’s Secret
Wars with Britain and America, 1945-2016 *by R. T. Howard:
Johnson writes, “In De Gaulle’s view of history – a European history –
England and France had struggled for supremacy for the best part of a
thousand years. For most of that time France had been the dominant power,
but now its great empire wasn’t just overshadowed but outmatched by the
even greater British Empire. For De Gaulle France was not itself if it was
not the leading power in Europe. By 1941, however, the opponent was no
longer Britain” it was ‘les Anglo-Saxons’. Asked what was the most
important international development of recent times, De Gaulle replied:
‘The fact that the Americans speak English.’”
We did have one French fellow in Lit Ideas a long time ago. He owned a
books store, can’t remember where, and can’t remember his name, but we used
to argue about the relative merits of France and the U.S. He knew English
and was on Lit Ideas, but he despised the U.S. and perhaps England as well,
I don’t recall. I had read an interesting article in Foreign Affairs and
recommended it to him, implying that it would provide a more accurate view
of the U.S. than he seemed to have. He rejected the idea. He had no wish
to understand the U.S. more than he did. He didn’t quite challenge me to
learn more about France because I was reading quite a lot at the time, but
at some point he became disgusted with Lit-Ideas and perhaps especially me
and disappeared.
The referenced review appears in the March 16, 2017 issue of the *London
Review of Books. *Johnson entitles his review, “Danger: English
Lessons” and draws attention to De Gaulle’s and other’s interest in
advancing French over English in the modern world. “Howard quotes Gerard
Prunier, an adviser to the French Government, who claimed that ‘the
Anglo-Saxons want our death – that is, our cultural death. They threaten
our language and our way of life, and they plan our ultimate
Anglo-Saxonisation.”
“When De Gaulle ordered US bases out of France, Lyndon Johnson angrily
demanded to know if that meant digging up the graves of American soldiers
who had died in the liberation.” My impression is that many of the French
at the time wouldn’t mind digging up the graves and sending the bones back
to us. Many French saw the second front that Stalin had been pleading for,
Operation Overlord, as merely the occupation of France by a new set of
oppressors.
In reading of these events, we perhaps don’t want to spend much time
dwelling upon Churchill’s sadness over the loss of the British Empire, but
De Gaulle was even more committed to reacquiring the French Empire. I read
histories of France’s pitiful efforts at Dien Bien Phu and in Algeria.
Many Americans, probably, would lose all sympathy for the French upon
learning that Algeria after WWII would have been delighted to be considered
part of France as equal citizens, but the Colons would not hear of it and
so there was a war. The Colons were driven out and Algeria eventually
became independent.
Perhaps here the French book seller would take offense at Americans who
blithely assumed that democracy and equality ought to prevail throughout
the world and that Britain and France ought to willingly give up their
former colonies. What right did the U.S. have to insist upon such a thing,
especially when Eisenhower took up in Indo-China where the French left off
not to preserve it as a colony, but to “prevent its becoming a Communist
puppet.” “As if,” the French scoffed and saw only hypocrisy.
There is plenty of room to build a variety of arguments to support a
variety of opinions. After reading the above article in the LRB, I checked
back through the recent editions of *Foreign Affairs* to see if there
were any recent Gaullist-type efforts to advance French supremacy in
Europe, but couldn’t find any. And yet, I suspect, many of the French,
even today are hostile toward Britain and the U.S. for reasons much like De
Gaulle’s. They don’t see the Vichy period in the same way we do. De
Gaulle, who spent the bulk of the War in Britain wanted to get past the
Vichy period as quickly as possible. Most Frenchmen, it seemed to be
implied, were really in the resistance. . . but not so much anymore,
becoming with Germany the “big two” in the EU – the EU whose capital is in
French-speaking Belgium.
Lawrence
