"... that he’d told aides that he wanted to pay his first visit 'to a place where they speak Spanish, because I’m bilingual,' proceeding to show off his fluency in the language. Mr. Rubio acknowledged America’s complicated history with Panama, a former Colombian territory that was founded after President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, eyeing the potential for a shortcut between America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, backed breakaway separatists who declared independence in 1903. Mr. Rubio noted that the country 'was born in many ways here as a result of the interests of the United States,' and said the relationship had had its 'ups and downs.' The downs include a 1989 U.S. invasion of the country to arrest the country’s de facto ruler, Gen. Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking and racketeering.... [Panama's President José Raúl] Mulino also said on Sunday that Panama, which in 2017 became the first country in the region to sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a far-reaching infrastructure program, would not renew the agreement...."
I'm reading the NYT coverage of Marco Rubio's trip to Panama,
"In Panama, Rubio Says China Threatens Canal, Demanding ‘Immediate’ Action/The secretary of state said the United States could take steps to 'protect its rights.' Panama’s leader said he was sure that President Trump wouldn’t seize the canal."
The NYT says Rubio "showed off" his fluency in Spanish and "joked" about it, as if it were an amusing side line. But it is important and tremendously useful to his role as Secretary of State. Perhaps to recognize its high value would be to impugn all the many Secretaries of State who were not fluent in Spanish.
If my research —
hastily done on Grok — is correct, there was only one other Secretary of State who was fluent in Spanish. That was Henry Clay, back in the time of John Quincy Adams, 1825-1829. What about Thomas Jefferson? — you may be wondering. Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, was fluent in French, Latin, and Italian, but had only a minimal knowledge of Spanish.
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Trump will get what he wants in Panama.
With Rubio one of the Democrats roads to power is blocked. They spent decades courting the "Hispanic vote" to gain a permanent electoral advantage. At minimum, the Democrats efforts go back to Jimmy Carter's Hispanic federal employee affirmative action programs of the 1970s.
I love JD, but if Trump and Rubio have a "beautiful" foreign policy over the next 4 years, I wonder if Rubio could challenge Vance for Pres 2028?
The difference between a BS and a BA degree is not knowledge of science but ignorance of Latin.
Latin is precursor to all of the Romance languages - French, Italian and Spanish. He may not have been a fluent speaker but #3 could probably winnow his way through a letter or text in Spanish.
The focus on language skills has always been a priority of foppish-bookish Americans, a marker of intelligence or cultural awareness or something but it’s mostly about the need to communicate. How profound 🧐…
While working in Madrid, my Spanish friends could talk to a group of Italians we'd met. I don't speak either language, but each group could understand enough to get the gist.
If TJ had minimal knowledge of Spanish, it was because he didn't have a need to.
Because he got the standard elite education of his time. He could probably communicate in Spanish. We were still focused on Britain. Spanish elite also spoke other Romance languages too. South America may as well have been Mars at the time. Bossa Nova was quite a ways off. And so on.
Wasn't Kerry supposed to be fluent in French? Did he ever cut loose en Francais? Not sure I ever heard mention of it.
It's seems pretty useful to have a SecState who's fluent in the language spoken natively by 500 million people, especially when we're trying to change our relationship with several of the countries where it's spoken. Not to have to rely on translation means not only faster exchanges but - possibly - more clear ones (I have no idea how versed Rubio is in the vocabulary he'll need for diplomacy, but even if his fluency is of the "kitchen" variety, vocabulary deficits are easy to correct).
In college I had a facility with languages, and thought I might make a career out of it, but my advisor pointed out that if I really worked at it, I might be as polylingual as a bellboy in a Swiss hotel.
When my wife and I were taking a course on Italian I would joke that there wasn't really a difference between Italian and Spanish, it was just a scam. She did not think it was funny when I would order in Italian in Spanish restaurants, but sometimes the wait staff understood me.
No, that’s the difference between a BA degree and an AB degree.
Are you suggesting Marco Rubio is the bellboy at the Trump Hotel?
"Perhaps to recognize its high value would be to impugn all the many Secretaries of State who were not fluent in Spanish."
I'd wager that we've had many more Secretaries of State who were fluent in French than in Spanish, including those who served in recent decades. (Insert John Kerry joke here.) I think it's great to have a Secretary of State who is mindful of our history with Latin America and is fully fluent in Spanish.
I'm in my late 50s now. When I was in middle school in the early 80s (when kids in my school system were expected to start studying a non-English language), the conventional wisdom was:
French, while declining, was glamorous and was seen as the most useful language for diplomacy, though there was a lot of interest in Russian.
German was seen as the most useful non-English language for STEM, with Russian coming in second.
Japanese was seen as the language destined to dominate Wall Street and the business world. My school system didn't offer it, and there was a lot of hand-wringing over that.
Spanish was seen locally (NYC area) as popular and practical, but it didn't carry any particular prestige. It was the default language for most kids.
Chinese was an afterthought.
40+ years can be a very long time.
…my point, except better…and NTTAW with being a Swiss bellman…
Panama has now stated it will not renew its MOU with China. Seems like a potential result.
The US would do well to have more foreign policy officials that speak other languages. Non-native fluency tends to impress foreigners, most of which have been gaining various levels of fluency in English since childhood.
"What about Thomas Jefferson? — you may be wondering. Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, was fluent in French, Latin, and Italian, but had only a minimal knowledge of Spanish."
Fluency in Latin and Italian gets you to a decent understanding of Spanish, especially Castilian, which was more prevalent in his day than the New World dialects. There are those pesky borrowings from Basque, but even most of those can be interpreted from context.
Leisure travel in Europe and Latin America is often distressingly easy for an English speaker today. It's no harder than travel to some Spanish-speaking neighborhoods in the US.
All global eyes went to English after WW2, and everything else seems to be an afterthought for non-native-English bilinguals. "If I can speak English I can travel anywhere and get a job." Given the installed base of English in all forms of technology and its huge technical vocabulary, this isn't going to end any time soon.
Did Rubio reach down between his legs and ease the seat back?
Left Bank of the Charles said...
"No, that’s the difference between a BA degree and an AB degree."
I'm positive that has something to do with blood types.
@rehjam, the Swiss have a reputation for being lousy tippers.
Heartless Aztec said...
"Latin is precursor to all of the Romance languages."
Interesting side note: Sicilian and Sardinian (or maybe Corsican?) started out as sister languages to Latin. However, they were heavily influenced by the dominance of Latin and can partially be considered daughters of Latin, too, just like the other Romance languages.
Perhaps to recognize its high value would be to impugn all the many Secretaries of State who were not fluent in Spanish.
The question you might ask Grok is how many Secretaries of State, besides Rubio, Clay, and Jefferson, spoke any foreign language at all.
"[Panama's President José Raúl] Mulino also said on Sunday that Panama, which in 2017 became the first country in the region to sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a far-reaching infrastructure program, would not renew the agreement...."
A significant win, it would seem. Venezuela and now Panama.
The only time I've been in France I was standing next to a street corner newsstand where an Italian tourist was speaking English to the French attendant lin order to complete the transaction.
This reminds me of one of the 2016 Republican primary debates, where Ted Cruz spoke, haltingly, in Spanish, which caused Marco Rubio to react in bemusement and sympathy embarrassment and remark that Cruz's Spanish was terrible. Similarly there is a YouTube creator named Xiaomanyc. He is a white guy who studied Mandarin in Beijing during college. He continued to practice, and I believe even married a Chinese woman so has stayed immersed in the language. He frequently makes videos of him going to ChinaTown markets and stores and surprising folks there by speaking fluent or near fluent Mandarin. The people are surprised because it is a white guy, but they are all almost universally happy and positive to encounter someone else speaking their language. Having an American leader speaking to Latin American folks in Spanish is a lot of soft power. Especially considering the previous group of Americans they were dealing with were trying to make LatinX a thing.
Rocco, no, Rubio’s got no time to cruise around in a car. He’s got to carry the bloody baggage out! Always runnin at someones ‘eeelll…..
JSM
I have traveled extensively for both business and pleasure, and English appears to have become the universal language, and not just for business and science. The spread of influence of our entertainment (music, movies, and now pop tech apps) is pervasive. Especially among the young. We've won. I think.
What was the joke?
GWB and Jimmy Carter spoke Spanish, fwiw.
Big Mike said…
“The question you might ask Grok is how many Secretaries of State, besides Rubio, Clay, and Jefferson, spoke any foreign language at all.”
My expectation is that - until the last few generations - the majority were toffs who had a solid classical eduction which included at least a passing familiarity with Latin and Greek, and to a lesser degree, French.
I was tepid, at best, when The Donald chose Rubio to take the reins at State. If first steps are true, the pick was brilliant.
First; it indicate's the President's understanding of Central and South America's importance to interests of the United States.
Second; it gives me hope that Rubio has matured into someone who understands that putting team first actually makes him stronger as an individual .player.
In barely more than a week, Trump initiatives, skillfully advanced by Sec State have directly produced significant positive results in Columbia, Venezuela (thanks, Mr. Grenell) and Panama. These events, I believe, will influence decisions made in other Latin American countries in a good way. More has been accomplished than in all three Obama Administrations!
Talk with us. Walk with us. Rubio is opening the American gateway.
Things were already changing in the Eighties and have changed a lot since. In the Sixties and Seventies, French was still a popular option. There were all those new countries in Africa that communicated in French. De Gaulle had the bomb. France was big in philosophy, literature, film, autos, cuisine, couture, and other things. People and their parents and grandparents remembered French phrases from their school days. Spanish, many of us thought, was for the "dumb" kids.
How much things have changed. Now everybody picks up at least a little Spanish and the foreign phrases and words people use are likely to be Spanish, rather than French. Even in those fields where French was important 50-60 years ago - literature, film, fashion, food - Spanish has taken a lead, and those African countries are teaching English in the Schools. Meanwhile, the "smart" kids are taking Mandarin.
"What was the joke?"
I know.
I think it was just that he expressed something that could be taken as a boast with modesty. Unlike Trump, who might brag that he could negotiate like no one has ever done before, Rubio made is sound like a lightweight preference of his. And yet the NYT still said he "showed off"! I wrote this post to express optimism that Rubio could really help the United States here because we have not had this extra value in recent times.
I did look up to see with Secretaries of State were fluent in a foreign language, and Kerry and Blinken had French, Albright had Czech, and Rice had Russian.
My AI tells me that Elihu Root was fluent in Spanish and that Cordell Hull and Colin Powell had some proficiency in Spanish. My AI also tells me that Warren Harding and William Howard Taft were secretaries of state who did not speak foreign languages. Neither was secretary of state. Grokker beware! AI is asshoe!
It stands to reason that Hull, who served in the Army during the Spanish-American War, might have some understanding of Spanish. "Iask" AI didn't talk about dead languages, but if you graduated college in the 19th century, you were likely to have studied Latin and Greek to get your degree (you were also unlikely to remember much of either language).
The joke was press two for English.
Note that even when they are fluent, Secretaries of State might rely on expert interpreters when there's anything challenging. They may only use their language skills in media interviews and for symbolic purposes. That was the case with Kerry, Blinken, Albright, and Rice.
We'll see what Rubio does.
Please remember that I'm relying on Grok for these facts, so do your own research.
I learned menu Spanish very quickly when I moved to Miami 39 years ago.
Vaca frita, con moros y maduros.
Translated, that means fried cow, Moors and old men. Ay, muy sabrosa!
I spent a lot of time deploying near small towns in Korea in the late 80's. I quickly found out that when I was in the markets and started to speak to the shop keepers in English, I was ignored and given the cold shoulder. When I learned a few words in Korean and started out with "Olma imnika - how much, please") they would light up and start rapid fire Korean. I'd raise my hands, bring them together with-in and inch, and say, "Hongul mock, chock-um, Speak Korean very little,)" they would always find someone who spoke english. Sometimes it was a little kid, sometimes it was an old Korean war vet, sometimes a student, but they were always helpful and pleased.
Hillary spoke graft really well.
Rubio has found his mojo as SecState. With him in charge at State, why are we even screwing around with Greenland? Let's take over Central and South America. Yeah, we can be "THE Americas" (as in THE Ohio State University). No dispute then about Gulf of America.
Noem shows up at the border in jeans and cowboy boots, and expertly rides horses. Rubio shows up in Panama and speaks Spanish. Competence demonstrated at the front, leadership at the front. The 'troops' appreciate this. Think how much less the Boarder Patrol would think of Noem if she showed up a designer pant suit wearing Prada shoes.
John Mosby, that Bell Boy comment Stings.
TaeJohnDo: "Boarder Patrol." Brilliant. That's what it used to be, TJD. Now under new management.
Take back the Canal. If Panama doesn’t like it, give Panama back to Colombia.
Los legumbres de mi madre son los mas deliciosos en todo el mundo.
I took two years of Spanish in high school--even represented at the Spanish competition at the university (which conflicted with my shift at McDonald's and got me fired [not the last time, either])--but never used it afterwards.
Memphis public schools held onto Latin (and ROTC) a lot longer than most systems did, and I would have done better to take Latin or French. I think there was a German program at Central--my father's alma mater, and sometimes called Hebrew High--into the 70s, maybe?
My son was in the MPS Optional Program (formerly CLUE) in the '90s, and took Japanese, but never pursued it.
Something that struck me recently, reading about WWI, was the observation that during discussions of the Versailles Treaty the top American leaders--Wilson, TR, and Senator Lodge--could have conversed in fluent German.
And even at that time, I think Mencken was already noticing that having fluency in a foreign language was becoming suspect among the Boobs.
Every era has its lingua franca for people of different languages to communicate. Latin had its day, as did Greek, French was widespread for a time, now it's English.
The problem with being a native speaker of whatever the current lingua franca is, is that you have much less incentive to speak anything else because you can get by almost anywhere with your native tongue. I picked up some Arabic during my years in Egypt, but it was mostly to try to be polite; they always appreciated it, even though we did most communicating in English anyway. It does help pave the way at times.
Sorta off topic: a friend gave me a tour of the old Russian embassy in DC. Beautiful building. There were ornate carvings of various exotic bugs protruding from the walls. That was where the actual "bugs" were hidden, an open joke. I presume the Russians' own bugs because it seems like such a Russian joke.
Does language shape humor? The French are so humorless, but the Vietnamese strike me as having a very American style of humor. The British are the masters of humor, yet Canadians seem so repressed.
Left Bank: Rubio is well known in Florida to be Al Cardenas' bag boy, so by extension, the Koch Foundations' water carrier. No love of Trump among that group. There were better choices, but he's a pretty little boy and we're all trying to get along a bit.
I remember when we were all supposed to vote for Hillary because the pathetic joker Tim Kaine was allegedly bilingual. In this case, it was Spanish that Kaine was fluent in.
They brought it up with embarrassing frequency. They treated him like a golden retriever who could ride a bicycle. As if speaking Spanish were some sort of crazy superower that no one had ever mastered. On the other hand, they mocked W's Spanish because of his accent.
Back in the 70s, it was "German is the best language to learn! They use it to communicate in the pharmacy industry." I took German because my brothers took it. My sisters took Spanish because that (and French) was what girls took. (Dummies that we were, we didn't realize that taking French or Spanish would be a good way to find ourselves in a classroom for a few hours a week with some hot babes.)
I actually served as Raul Castro's personal translator for an entire day back in the mid-'70s when he was Cuba's Minister of Ag visiting Ontario to purchase bull semen for improving their dairy industry, which was a wreck. Fun story, which will be included in my upcoming memoires Beyond the Sidewalks. I even learnt how to read in Spanish at 3 yo, a year before English.
Rubio may joke about his Spanish, but it is totally natural and, as is typical of the Cuban dialect, very rapid fire. He is absolutely a native speaker, right down to certain details of the regional accent.
Having worked as a translator, including simultrans between French and Spanish [and either of those with English] for professional technical conferences in ag sciences, I'm familiar with that world.
One advantage in using a translator for diplomacy or high-level business negotiations is that you can use the translation time to better formulate your response. I turned that to my advantage several times when the translators were provided by the counter party and quite intentionally mis-translated in a purposefully misleading fashion.
They had no idea that I even spoke the language, let alone was natively fluent, and you should have seen the looks on the other sides' faces when I called them out, in their own language, for their distorted bullshit. Immediate shift in the negotiating advantage to our side, after which we could get down to some serious and productive work.
The challenging part is when one of the languages does not differentiate between two English words with different meaning, for example 'like' and 'love' in French are both 'aimer', which can be amusing in a romantic context. With 'efficient' and 'effective' [both are 'efficace'] it gets challenging in a commercial context. One of the worst is French 'confiance', which is rather serious when, as is not uncommonly the case, you wish to say "I'm confident he can do the job, but I don't TRUST the bastard farther than I can throw him."
Now, try committing an agreement, commercial or (even worse) diplomatic, to binding text in two, three or five languages upon which all agree.
Despite his small hands, I think Little Marco will be an effective Secretary of State. We could use someone who is an effective diplomat with our Central and South American neighbors. He'll certainly do better than the Kackler who made her trip to Nicaragua to discern the "root causes" of immigration.
W didn't speak Spanish. He spoke Tex-Mex.
Rubio will eventually say something in idiomatic Spanish that is humorous, but which in English is nonsensical or very vulgar. Or vice versa, in English. I, for one, await the pouncing by the press and oppposition on what will be portrayed as a gaffe of international ramifications, which he will no doubt find cause for a mere sensible chuckle at their lack of nuance.
Rocco: Ha! Yes, one of his best film performances.
JSM
Canadians are not lacking in humour: Mort Sahl, Martin Short, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, David Steinberg, Phit Hartman, Jim Carrey, Norm MacDonald, Eugene Levy, Tommy Chong, Mike Myers, to name but a few funny Canadians.
Monty Python did a couple of shows in German. According to Eric Idle (via Wiki) ""The Germans came to us and said 'Look, we haven't got a sense of humour, but we understand you do. Can we use yours?'".
I think in some other interview one of them noted that anything you do in German is inherently funny. Which I found kind of true; I saw one of the shows, had no idea what they were saying, but it was still funny as hell.
Even though English is a native language for me, along with Spanish, I also speak two other languages fluently, five more comfortably, and another five well enough to be polite.
When dealing with people having another native tongue, but English-speaking, my custom whenever possible is to settle into some other acquired language each of us speaks. Works well in general.
The left will prattle on and on about the benefits of various forms of diversity, including bilingualism, but when they actually see a real life benefit, they mock it because they can’t ever praise a Republican.
Robin Williams was asked by a German interviewer why Germans weren't very funny. He answered "You killed all the funny people".
I believe both Bushes were competent in Spanish.
Hillary was fluent in Russian if I recall. Or maybe she was just in search of Rubles. But at this point, does it really matter?
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