Comment on:
Chris Bray,
The Historian as Soldier: Shadows and Fog
(1)
, HNN Cliopatria [pseudonym], Jan. 14, 2006
(01/15/2006 12:16 PM, 05:34 PM)
Languge Issue
Here is an interesting discussion of the language issue.
http://www.intel-dump.com/posts/1136553910.shtml
What it comes down to is that you have to start teaching all major
third-world languages in the first grade on a compulsory
basis, and go on doing so for twenty years, before you
get usable results. Naturally, there would be more people wanting
their children to take Chinese than other languages, so
classes in Amharic, Berber, and Pushtu would be filled by use of the
compulsory power. Most of the places where the Marines are
likely to be sent in are places where the State
Department doesn't want you to go, and doesn't want you to
trade with. If there is a distinctive local language, there is
likely to be no good reason for learning it, save for military
purposes.
[To Bray's objection that he would be content with phrasebook-level
knowlege, as better than nothing, I replied]
The problem [of phrasebook-level language instruction] is that a
hundred sentences is the vocabulary of a two-year-old, if that. Your
basic tourist is operationally at the level of a two-year-old,
in the sense that his communications are overwhelmingly
self-centered: "I want a room, I want something to eat, etc.
Me,me,me,me,me!" Washoe, the signing chimp, could operate at
approximately that level. I've got a book in front of me, James
Britton's Language and Learning (1970), which deals with language
acquisition, working mostly from the recorded utterances of the
author's daughters from the ages of twelve months to seventeen
years, as they went through the successive Piaget stages. If you
make some conventional substitutions in his samples (rifle
instead of teddy bear, etc.), a typical counterinsurgency raid
can be made to fit into the conversation of the four-year-old and
the two-year-old. It might be better to remain silent than to give
the locals the idea that you are a heavily armed cretin.
Neighborhood politics are conducted at a vastly higher level.
Consider the following passage, earthy rather than highbrow:
"Mayor Nasta said... "This is a mistake. I should not have been
imprisoned. It was all a mistake.'
'Is that so?' the [American] Top Sergeant
said in a slow Brooklynese Italian. 'You are a mistake?
We have several mistakes here. All mistakes here must clean
the latrine. You are our newest mistake, so you will have the
privilege of cleaning the latrine this week.'"
John Hersey, A Bell for Adano, 1944, ch. 19, (p. 139,
pbk. ed. 1965-1970).
This sort of thing is totally beyond the ken of a two-year-old. The
premise is that the Sergeant is a bilingual Italian-American,
capable of heavy sarcasm.
[Retrospective Comment, June 3, 2023, seventeen years later.
What Bray was really asking for was an American soldier who could
bridge the gap between being an American and being Iraqi. Someone
like Major Joppelo, in John Hersey's _A Bell For Adano_. But Major
Joppelo was a product of specific historical circumstances. Millions
of South Italian peasants were brought to the United States, circa
1870-1920, to work s cheap labor in construction and industry.
Middle-class South Italians did not come to he United States-- they
went to South America, where the languge-- Spanish or Portuguese--
wasn't too different from Italian, and it was comparatively easy to
secure employment as clerks, etc. The children of the peasant
immigrants to the United States went to school, and became small
businessmen and government clerks. Major Joppelo did not come
to the Army from nowhere. He had worked his way up through New York
mayor Fiorello La Guardia's civil service. That said, Achmet Chalabi
was more or less representative of the kind of Iraqis who made their
way to the United States, people whose contact with the Iraqi people
was minimal. We still import our hewers of wood and drawers of
water, but now we do it, sub rosa. You need much less money and
paperwork to swim the Rio Grande than you do to get on an airliner.
So we have a lot of Mexicans, and more recently, Guatemalans.
Of course, with the coming of the Internet, we have a lot more
"virtual immigration," people in various countries who speak English
because English is the language of the Internet. Likewise, with the
availability of advanced communications systems, such as Starlink, a
human translator does not have to be up forward with the troops, or
in-country at all.]
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