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solipsist comments on Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (257)
Yeah, your explanation sounds absolutely correct. But before you think "silly monoglot Americans", remember that London is closer to Istanbul than New York is to Mexico. Countries where people don't mostly speak English are thousands of kilometers away from most Americans.
Those are suspiciously convenient examples. A more relevant comparison would be: Los Angeles is closer to Tijuana than London is to Paris.
Here is a map with London and Istanbul on it. In between them are many countries with at least six majority languages (and that's a low count, where some people would lynch me for saying that their language is the same as the one their neighbor speaks). Los Angeles and Tijuana on the other hand are two cities right by a border, and the only languages commonly spoken between them is English, the language of the USA, and Spanish, the language of Mexico.
I understood solipsist's argument to mean that Americans can be excused for being ignorant of other languages because most of them live too far from other linguistic communities, and pointed at the mutual closeness of European countries for contrast, implying that it's likelier to find a Turkish-speaking Brit than a Spanish-speaking American.
What I tried to say was that there was no need to artificially inflate the comparison distance by choosing Istanbul. Londoners can find speakers of a completely different language by merely driving to Cardiff. But the U.S. is not a monolingual bloc of homogeneity either: ironically, solipsist chose New York for his example, a multilingual smorgasbord if ever there was one.
Well, I don't know. Some of the US is near Mexico, but most of it isn't. In Europe the farthest you can get from a border to foreign speaking country is perhaps southern Italy. The four US states which border Mexico are each bigger than Italy. Germany is a bigish country in Europe area-wise, but it's less than 3.7% the size of the US. The Mercator projection makes an optical illusion -- the US is huge.
Just because they have an excuse that geography made them silly monoglots doesn't mean they aren't silly monoglots :p
I think solipsist's point isn't that they have an excuse but that they have a reason -- being monoglot hurts them less than it would if they were e.g. on the European continent, so monoglossy (or whatever the right word is) isn't necessarily silly for them.
[EDITED to add:] Disappointingly, OED suggests that the right word is just "monoglottism".