Thank you for being honest, Gatorade. I learned a lot from your post. There's a lot I could say in return, but my point is not to argue (too much)
but rather to understand why people don't know more about where their tax dollars are going and where their countrymen are dying. Your answer helps me.
In any case, just a few responses to your quotes:
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Originally Posted by Gatorade Frost
I had to do a double take on that one before I realised native language, which I suppose would probably be Chinese. I can see how that's a reasonable mistake to make.
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Just a note to clarify: English doesn't even make the top 10 for number of speakers of native languages...
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The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999) lists the following as the top languages by population:
(number of native speakers in parentheses)
1. Chinese* (937,132,000)
2. Spanish (332,000,000)
3. English (322,000,000)
4. Bengali (189,000,000)
5. Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
6. Arabic* (174,950,000)
7. Portuguese (170,000,000)
8. Russian (170,000,000)
9. Japanese (125,000,000)
10. German (98,000,000)
11. French* (79,572,000)
* The totals given for Chinese, Arabic, and French include more than one SIL variety.
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Certainly, there are LOTS of countries that have English as their second official language, which is how/why it is so influential. I find it admirable that other countries have more than one language as an official one. How long will it take to add another language to our "official" list, I wonder? And how many people would freak out if that happened to be Spanish?
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With the Tonight Show street people, that's all staged. I knew a person who was 'interviewed' and asked specifically to say something obviously wrong about the US Government.
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Good to know; I only watch TV in hotels, so I don't know much about what goes on there. However, my story about my best friend, a teacher, was not staged by any means. She thought Appalachia was a made-up country.
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I have friends from all colors and creeds and I suspect most other people do, too.
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Well, that's good... I really don't think most Americans have "integrated" social groups (especially in terms of black/white residential segregation), so cheers to you. But I'm curious, do you have friends from all classes as well as cultures? I have a feeling that most middle-class Americans don't associate much with lower-class people of color... which means that most of our country is not "well rounded" at all. We don't even know how to locate where 1,000 (mostly black) people died last fall... even after it was broadcast and written up in the news for weeks and months afterwards. I find that reprehensible.
And if 70,000 people died in an earthquake in Louisiana, would it still be a "blip" on the map, like Katrina apparently was? Hmph.