May 14, 2007
Trilingual
In the tradition of Ali G in the land of colorless green ideas -- Sacha Baron Cohen deliberately misinterpreting bilingual as 'bisexual' in an "interview" with Noam Chomsky -- here's the South African comic strip Madame and Eve, going on to trilingual:
... perhaps it's worth mentioning that
Helen Zille's acceptance
speech [as leader of the Democratic Alliance party] was in English,
Afrikaans and Xhosa.
I want to encourage each and every
person in this room to take up a new
language, one of our eleven official languages that you do not yet
speak. I am working on my Xhosa. Perhaps some of us wish to learn
Afrikaans, or Sotho, Tswana, Venda or Zulu. It does not matter whether
you have a knack for languages. Simply learning a new tongue opens up a
new world and builds bridges. We must do that for each other.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 14, 2007 11:21 AM