SIMMONS, DAVE, MDERPELDING AND ENGLISH | 2008-07-11
The Simmons-mderpelding-Dave colloquy on English leads me to some thoughts.
When I was an air negotiator, I was amused by the fact that an Air France pilot flying into Orly Airport in Paris from Marseilles had to speak in ENGLISH. That infuriated them. But nothing could be done about it.
When you are getting air traffic controller instructions there simply is no room for a melting pot. You can't have one pilot speaking Swahili and another communicating in Urdu. Passengers on an air line include first class VIPs and they are not about to risk their lives on linguistic affirmative action.
At medical schools in Moscow, the first three years are offered in English. That is language all entries from the third world take. In those three years they have to learn Russian.
The kicker is that they also have to take a course in Latin to understand medical terms.
To us, having to learn Latin is quaint. If you are an eighteen-year-old Thai student who has spent TWELVE YEARS mastering the recognized international language which is utterly foreign to you, it is bad enough that you cannot get into a Thai school or a school where they teach in English. It is punishment enough to have to learn Russian.
Then, for no reason you can understand, you are hit with having to learn a dead tongue, plus lots of ancient Greek. All the time you are trying to learn really fluent Russian and make it in medical school.
I can't say it in Thai, but their comment, roughly translated, is "What in the HELL is this all ABOUT!?"
First class passengers trying to stay alive in air traffic won't put up with that crap.