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eekee
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Um... what's with the
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Um... what\'s with the \"actually Latin\" nonsense on this and other pages? French was the international language less than 100 hundred years ago, my father was raised with this notion. He grew up as an educated, privileged Greek in Egypt prior to Gamalab d\'Nasser (spelling?) making things more fair for Egyptians. I can\'t think where to find evidence just now, but I remember him saying that French is the international *diplomatic* language. Present tense in the 80s, it\'s possible he was a little out of time. :) He was born in 1918.
Balancing impressions between him and all the older fiction I\'ve read, I get the impression that Latin and Greek were the languages of science and history, stilted academic stuff. For more human matters among affluent tourists of different nationalities, French was the normal choice. This in an era in which you had to be affluent to be much of a tourist, or at least you grew up affluent. I\'m sure the influence of the USA eroded it rapidly, but you don\'t have to go back much more than a century to find a time when the USA wasn\'t significant to western culture.
Balancing impressions between him and all the older fiction I\'ve read, I get the impression that Latin and Greek were the languages of science and history, stilted academic stuff. For more human matters among affluent tourists of different nationalities, French was the normal choice. This in an era in which you had to be affluent to be much of a tourist, or at least you grew up affluent. I\'m sure the influence of the USA eroded it rapidly, but you don\'t have to go back much more than a century to find a time when the USA wasn\'t significant to western culture.
