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American Schools and Foreign Languages

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  • American Schools and Foreign Languages

    Originally posted by Mihais View Post
    Very nice kids you have there,gray hair. :)

    Grand-grand-daddy went to US Army,made some bucks and returned to fight for the motherland,or buy it back.That was the norm 100+years ago.
    I wonder what this bunch is really up to.
    But anyway,it's a strange location for Romanian migrants.Most of those from the old days went to IL or Iowa.

    p.s Hopefully the kids went away before they could learn some old Latin,Slavic and even some native descendents of the old Proto Indo-European slurs.
    I thought so too; it's the fucking desert for Christ's sake!! I actually asked a parent one time, "Why Surprise, Arizona?" and she told me that basically one family sort of paves the way and if it's good, they let others know, and they start to move in en masse. It may be the desert, but you can buy a lot of nice house a lot cheaper here than you can in other parts of the country, so that is a factor. They also discovered one sure fired way of making a living, and that is doing something most home grown Americans have forgotten how to do, or decided not to do, and that's taking care of our old people. So the Romanians have cornered the market in what's known as "assisted living" in Surprise, Arizona. They buy a big house (they are known by some wags as "Mormon Boxes"), and fit it out with ramps and stuff for wheel chairs, and all the other stuff you need to take care of old folks, and then take them in, and from what I understand, they do a great job of it. It seems your people honor the old, in a why our people have forgotten how to do. It's really kind of a wonderful success story. The Romanians have gotten into other lines of work too, and their kids are contributing in a positive way. One of my students who, as luck would have it, I had all four years during his stay in school, joined the Air Force, and was given an airplane (an F-15 at to take care of Nellis, Air Force Base near Las Vegas) to take care of. It was quite a transformation, as he had been a little drifty, like all kids can be, but he seemed to have a goal of being all he could be. so it was sort of gratifying in a way. I hasten to add that I had nothing to do with his joining the military. I don't recruit; that's someone else's job.

    As far as those slurs are concerned, when I was handed the whole linguist thing to work on (along with half a hundred other cans of worms), I really was forced to dig down deep into the whole mechanics of linguistics; something I hadn't done since I studied anthropological linguistics in university, and I found out something a little curious about your language. If an anthropological linguist wants to found out if a word in a Romance language, like Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, was found in the vulgar (as in "common" not rude) Latin spoken by Romans back in the time of the Caesars, they don't look at Latin as we know it because we've actually lost a lot of how the language was actually spoken back then. No; they look at Romanian. It seems that for a period of time, the Roman colonies there were sort of cut off from parts of the outside world, and the language retained all of its roots. It's the sort of puzzle that fascinates the hell out of me. I just thought that was pretty cool. ;)
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