Paris or San Salvador?

There is an establishment in one of the little malls near where I live called La Baguette de Paris. The stenciled slogan in the window reads: Pan fresco todos los dios. Just noticed it last night while walking past it, but I plan to go inside the store soon. I doubt many people's attention is caught by the juxtaposition of languages, but mine was.  As I've had occasion to remark previously, a knowledge of French is useless in my neighborhood, whereas being able to speak Spanish is very useful.

A bilingual country?

This afternoon I had an unexpected need to communicate with someone I didn't know over the course of an hour or more, resulting from a small story involving a car and a bicycle (details I think will not be furnished on request, sorry).  The point is that he spoke no English and I speak no Spanish, apart from a few words.  (French, which I do speak to an extent (emphasis on the last three words), is useless where I live.)  Everything ultimately worked out, partly because enough people around here speak both English and Spanish.  It just underscores that parts of the U.S. seem to have become virtually bilingual, leaving those who are not at something of a (potential, at least) disadvantage in daily life.

A CNN piece from Sept. 2013 quotes an expert at the Pew Research Center as follows:

"On the one hand, [in the U.S.] the number of Spanish speakers is projected to grow to about 40 million by 2020 (from 37 million in 2011). This reflects Hispanic population growth and a large number of non-Hispanics who will also speak Spanish," said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic Research at the Pew Research Center. "But, even though the [total] number of Spanish speakers is projected to grow, among Hispanics, the share that speak Spanish is projected to fall from about 75% now to 66% in 2020," Lopez said.

These figures don't capture variations from one geographical area to another, of course, nor is there a specific projection here for bilingualism.  It's interesting to learn that the percentage of Hispanics in the U.S. who speak Spanish will drop to roughly two-thirds in 2020, even as the Hispanic population grows, but knowing this certainly does not matter when an English-speaker and a Spanish-speaker have to communicate and can't.  Luckily my experience today did not involve anything serious.  I don't like to think about what would happen if the inability to cross the language barrier implicated a matter of life and death.

Note: edited slightly after initial posting.    

Mem. Day weekend French lesson

I didn't have the patience this evening to read this post on Nigeria, but skipping to its end I saw a note that fighting in Mali has resumed, with a link to an interview (in French) with an historian and W. Africa specialist. Continuing in skim mode, I glanced at the opening bits of the interview, then followed a link to another interview on the military coup in Thailand. The intro to that reads as follows (boldface added):

Entretien avec David Camroux, spécialiste de l’Asie du Sud-Est et maître de conférences à Sciences Po Paris.
Deux jours après l’imposition de la loi martiale par l’armée thaïlandaise, et après plus de six mois d’instabilité politique, le chef de l’armée, le général Prayut Chan-O-Cha, a annoncé jeudi 22 mai à la télévision un coup d’État. David Camroux, spécialiste de l’Asie du Sud-Est, revient sur les tenants et aboutissants de cet événement qui n’est pas si exceptionnel en Thaïlande.

Les tenants et aboutissants -- I had not much idea what that meant. My paperback French dictionary wasn't helpful, but my somewhat bigger hardcover dictionary was. Les tenants et aboutissants de l'affaire = the ins and outs of the case. (Harrap's Concise, rev. ed. 1989, q.v. tenant)

ETA: I see now that I could have just clicked for the English version, but sometimes it's more fun to look things up. (The site is French, and the English trans. appears, from the opening, to be a bit shaky, but "ins and outs" is there.)

Some Many things sound better in French

I was in the library the other day and saw a Paris Match cover that said, with reference to Peter Falk: il a fait d'un flic modeste une star mondiale [rough trans.: he made a modest cop into a world star]. See? The French sounds better.

Speaking of French: a review in NYTBkRev of Marc Fumaroli's When the World Spoke French.

JFK and the jelly doughnut

Did JFK really say he was a jelly doughnut in his famous Ich-bin-ein-Berliner speech? A recent post at the NYT blog Paper Cuts finally sorts it all out... well, sort of. The link is here.

p.s. The Newbolt follow-up is coming this weekend. Stay tuned.

Does the Mole speak Spanish?

Would someone (can someone) explain to me the appeal of reality TV shows? "The Mole" (ABC) involves a group of mostly youngish Americans, of varying though generally considerable degrees of obnoxiousness, who have been plopped down in Chile and are being made to go through a series of seemingly pointless, mildly sadistic exercises at the end of which presumably someone will be exposed as saboteur of the whole project (hence the title) and/or someone else will walk away with a lot of money. One of the contestants in the part of the show I happened to see a couple of hours ago was using his ability to speak Spanish to advantage, an ability resented by the other competitors, though the line between envy and resentment was blurry.

A game theorist might have some fun with these sorts of shows, if she or he had the patience to sit through them. Not being a game theorist, I just find "The Mole" rather boring, even if, at the particular moment in question, it was marginally less awful than everything else being broadcast.