# a somewhat overused phrase/ a phrase that is overused + soccer clean-up



## i_roy

you should use the verb "usiter" (meaning to use a phrase" : avant-garde est une expression usitée à tort et à travers de nos jours


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## Boileau419

gvozd said:


> Hi. Are opinions of the native speakers of Russian welcome?
> 
> Ukrainian sounds very FUNNY to my ear! As well as Polish which is also a Slavic language. I heard that  Russian sounds to Poles like a language of rednecks.
> 
> Everything is relative.



I wouldn't say that. Portuguese has more vowel sounds than Spanish. This is a fact. For me, Portuguese is more interesting than Spanish.

What do you mean by funny? Unsophisticated?


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## gvozd

Boileau419 said:


> Ears can be trained and tuned, you know. I definitely do not believe in the irrevocable subjectivity of esthetic judgement.



French sounds very unpleasant to my ears. Sorry. How can you tune my ears???


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## Boileau419

gvozd said:


> French sounds very unpleasant to my ears. Sorry. How can you tune my ears???



In my experience, a piece of music may sound unpleasant or just so-so on first hearing it. But if you keep listening to it, then appreciation comes. The same applies to books, which we may find irrelevant or boring when we first read them, but which will suddenly reveal new and interesting meanings when read a few years later or after a teacher has pointed out the beauties in it. Therefore it is a truth that one needs training (and love or attention) to hear and see things as they are. 

French as it is spoken in France, specially by media people is awful, I agree. But this is because French in France and among the ruling class has been corrupted. Nobody is being taught the rules, not even the people who play in theaters or movies. I myself feel like vomiting when I hear some Frenchmen speak their modern English-laced French.

But if you listen to 'old' songs (let's say before the 80's), you may find that French is indeed wonderfully beautiful and quite musical. This language has been considered the most beautiful by the whole West since the Middle-Ages. Marco Polo had his book translated into French right from the beginning and Saint Francis of Assisi sang in French. Russian elites spoke French until the Communists came. 

The problem for people now is that there has been so much Anglo-Saxon propaganda against French and so much cultural pressure to adopt the American way of life that people have come to think that French is either a dead language or an ugly language. Such propaganda has also been used to defame Spain and its policies in Latin-America. Everything now is seen through Anglo-Saxon glasses, unfortunately. The case of Russia is also a good example : if you listen to the Western media, Russia now is worse than the Soviet-Union. But this is a lie, obviously.


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## berndf

Boileau419 said:


> The problem for people now is that there has been so much *Anglo-Saxon propaganda against French* and so much cultural pressure to adopt the American way of life that people have come to think that French is either a dead language or an ugly language. Such propaganda has also been used to defame Spain and its policies in Latin-America. Everything now is seen through Anglo-Saxon glasses, unfortunately. The case of Russia is also a good example : if you listen to the Western media, Russia now is worse than the Soviet-Union. But this is a lie, obviously.


I am afraid you over-estimate the amount of attention the "Anglo-Saxons" pay to the French language. The times when they considered the French as serious rivals are long gone.


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## Boileau419

An American lady, Dianne Hales, has written a book entitled _La Bella Lingua _to tell the whole world how beautiful Italian is. 

Here is a link where you can listen to Ukrainian : 
http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/l-ukrainien/declinaisons/super-pack-livre-cd-audio-cd-mp3-3745

It sounds softer than Russian.


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## Ben Jamin

Boileau419 said:


> Portuguese has more vowel sounds than Spanish. This is a fact.


 You have counted vowels in print? But certainly not in speech. Only about 25% of written vowels in Portuguese are pronounced in normal everyday speech.


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## JeanDeSponde

berndf said:


> I am afraid you over-estimate the amount of attention the "Anglo-Saxons" pay to the French language. The times when they considered the French as serious rivals are long gone.


Boileau's opinion was about a conspiracy from French _élites_, not Anglo-Saxon ones...


Boileau419 said:


> French as it is spoken in France, specially by media people is awful, I agree. But this is because French in France and among the ruling class has been corrupted. Nobody is being taught the rules, not even the people who play in theaters or movies. I myself feel like vomiting when I hear some Frenchmen speak their modern English-laced French.
> [...]
> The problem for people now is that there has been so much Anglo-Saxon propaganda against French and so much cultural pressure to adopt the American way of life that people have come to think that French is either a dead language or an ugly language.


This should obviously be the topic of a separate thread.
But the belief that our _élites_ are imposing an "American way of life" upon us French hoi polloi is so weird that I cannot let it pass without mentioning that this is _not_ a general belief...!
You are mainly following Michel Serres' line of thought:





> Il y a plus de mots anglais sur les murs de Toulouse qu’il y avait de  mots allemands pendant l’occupation. Par conséquent qui sont les  collabos ?


Michel Serres, as most philosophers do, is fighting the wrong battle...


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## Pedro y La Torre

Boileau419 said:


> French as it is spoken in France, specially by media people is awful, I agree. But this is because French in France and among the ruling class has been corrupted.



What is this supposed to mean? How has French been "corrupted"? Furthermore, would French pronounced in an accent like Eric Cantona's be any more (or less) "beautiful" than French as spoken by Charles de Gaulle?



Boileau419 said:


> But if you listen to 'old' songs (let's say before the 80's), you may find that French is indeed wonderfully beautiful and quite musical. This language has been considered the most beautiful by the whole West since the Middle-Ages. Marco Polo had his book translated into French right from the beginning and Saint Francis of Assisi sang in French. Russian elites spoke French until the Communists came.



Where is your evidence to support these rather fantastic assertions?

18th century French, as spoken in Paris and its surrounding regions, sounded quite close to, if not exactly like, the Québécois French of today. We know this as French clerics and travellers in the Canada of the 18th century mentioned how "les Canadiens" had "no distinguishable accent" and could "pass unremarked in Paris), indeed, the accent of the Ancien Régime court approximated modern québécois pronunciation.

I love Québec and Québécois French in particular, but not even its stoutest fans would call it "beautiful".

Furthermore, Jean-Jacques Goldman recorded most of his hits after the 80s, I might be wrong, but he sounds quite "musical" to me.



Boileau419 said:


> The problem for people now is that there has been so much Anglo-Saxon propaganda against French and so much cultural pressure to adopt the American way of life that people have come to think that French is either a dead language or an ugly language. Such propaganda has also been used to defame Spain and its policies in Latin-America. Everything now is seen through Anglo-Saxon glasses, unfortunately. The case of Russia is also a good example : if you listen to the Western media, Russia now is worse than the Soviet-Union. But this is a lie, obviously.



Those nasty Anglo-Saxons are like the Borg, French is not a threat, it is irrelevant.


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## JeanDeSponde

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Boileau419 said:
> 
> 
> 
> [...], you may find that French is indeed  wonderfully beautiful and quite musical. This language has been  considered the most beautiful by the whole West since the Middle-Ages.  Marco Polo had his book translated into French right from the beginning  and Saint Francis of Assisi sang in French. Russian elites spoke French  until the Communists came.
> 
> 
> 
> Where is your evidence to support these rather fantastic assertions?
Click to expand...

I'm ready to die to defend this opinion, Pedro, yet I agree with you that evidence is rather thin...
Aaaah the good times when Louis XIV was the beacon of civilized nations...

Okay, end of the _French rules over all other (inferior) nations_ time. 
Back to Ukrainian now...


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## berndf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Boileau419 said:
> 
> 
> 
> But if you listen to 'old' songs (let's say  before the 80's), you may find that French is indeed wonderfully  beautiful and quite musical. This language has been considered the most  beautiful by the whole West since the Middle-Ages. Marco Polo had his  book translated into French right from the beginning and Saint Francis  of Assisi sang in French. Russian elites spoke French until the  Communists came.
> 
> 
> 
> Where is your evidence to support these rather fantastic assertions?
Click to expand...

Well, there is a grain of truth in it. It is correct that French (together with Norman French and Occitan) was _the_ language of Western European medieval epic literature which is also the reason why in most Western European languages novels are still called _roman_. This French cultural dominance which was visible in other areas like architecture (Gothic) ended only with the Renaissance (which interestingly is also a French word). Since Luis XIV, French had once again been viewed as the most civilized language until the 19th century in Western Europe (being a catholic country, the term "Western" also included Poland here) by the aristocracy and educated commoners.

But he is not right in assuming that this role the French language played throughout the centuries was due to some "inherent beauty" of that language but mainly to the economic dominance of France over much of the 2nd millennium; much like the the modern international popularity of English has mainly economic reasons. _Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein_, as Marx rightly corrected Hegel.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Ben Jamin said:


> I can't tell about Ukrainians, but the Russians speak usually a better English than Poles, Russian being a stress timed language. The Russian foreign minister does far better than the Polish one. Listen to Polish celebrities educated in English and American universities: they sound as if they never had  left their native city. But for me the most tiring English pronunciation is the French. 90% of Frenchmen never bother to change the vowels (and many consonants too) and stress (!) from French to English when they try to speak English.



It's (very) difficult for them, the sounds in their form of French are so very different to English.
Canadian French speakers do a better job, generally, due to the sounds they employ in their dialect of French being a better match with English (and the fact that they live in a bilingual state).


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## Boileau419

To the person who asks about Spanish and Portuguese : 

Portuguese as spoken in Portugal (the only one I studied seriously) has diphtongs and nasal vowels, which I cannot write here properly (ao, ae, oe). Spanish has no such diphtongs. It is a very poor language in that respect. A E I O U and that's it. French has even more vowels.


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## Boileau419

berndf said:


> Well, there is a grain of truth in it. It is correct that French (together with Norman French and Occitan) was _the_ language of Western European medieval epic literature which is also the reason why in most Western European languages novels are still called _roman_. This French cultural dominance which was visible in other areas like architecture (Gothic) ended only with the Renaissance (which interestingly is also a French word). Since Luis XIV, French had once again been viewed as the most civilized language until the 19th century in Western Europe (being a catholic country, the term "Western" also included Poland here) by the aristocracy and educated commoners.
> 
> But he is not right in assuming that this role the French language played throughout the centuries was due to some "inherent beauty" of that language but mainly to the economic dominance of France over much of the 2nd millennium; much like the the modern international popularity of English has mainly economic reasons. _Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein_, as Marx rightly corrected Hegel.




Marxists reduce everything to economics, but this is just ideology. 

 I cited Saint Francis of Assisi for a good reason. The "Poverello", who lived in the XIIth century in Umbria spoke some kind of Italian dialect. He had therefore at his disposal a language that was very musical to begin with. But his biographers say that in his ectasies and moments of joy, he would sing the praises of God in French. Francis could not write nor read, apparently. Umbria is not close to France. 

 As for Marco Polo, he dictated his Book of Marvels on the empire of Kubilaï Khan in his own Genoese dialect but had it translated on the spot into French by Rustichello da Pisa, and the reason given explicitly by the translator is that French at the time was considered the sweetest and most educated language. The original title is Le Devisement du monde or Le Livre de Marco Polo. Marco Polo dictated his book at the end of the XIIIth century. 

Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor was fluent in French. He spoke it to men, while he preferred to speak Italian to women and German to his horses. Charles V lived in the XVIth century.

Frederick the Great spoke French at his court. This happened in the XVIIIth century. 

Stefan Zweig, in "Verwirrung der Gefuehle", has a short novel entitled "Untergang eines Herzens" in which the heroes, a family of German Jews, make friends with count Ubaldi, a handsome young Italian officer. The conversations between them, says Zweig, are entirely in French.  We have now arrived at the beginning of the XIXth century. 

English, in comparison, has become dominant only since the Second World War. And English-speakers like Don Watson ("Death Sentences"), consider it a dead language already.


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## Boileau419

gvozd said:


> *Boileau419*, you're still not a "relativist"?



I find Italian beautiful objectively, but I am not attracted to it.


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## DenisBiH

Boileau419 said:


> The problem for people now is that there has been so much Anglo-Saxon propaganda against French and so much cultural pressure to adopt the American way of life that people have come to think that French is either a dead language or an ugly language.



I'm not aware of such anti-French propaganda. Rather, the way some Anglo-Saxons (those of the American persuasion) talk, one would think that France is the only country in Europe.


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## Boileau419

DenisBiH said:


> I'm not aware of such anti-French propaganda. Rather, the way some Anglo-Saxons (those of the American persuasion) talk, one would think that France is the only country in Europe.



You need to live in France or Belgium to see it. It is both subtle and blatant. Recently, the Socialist government in France passed a law to make it possible to teach in English in French universities. French teachers could soon be teaching French phonetics to French students in...English ! This already happens in Germany and some Scandinavian countries. We are colonies of the US Empire. The cultural drones are with us.

The worst thing is that there is a general feeling of self-hate and self-denial among French-speaking people, a "défaitisme" which prevents us as a group from defending our language and identity. There is a good example of such a 崇洋媚外的 mind on this thread.

I think that only Russia can help us now. J'aggrave mon cas, haha.


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## rusita preciosa

Boileau419 said:


> The problem for people now is that there has been so much Anglo-Saxon propaganda against French and so much cultural pressure to adopt the American way of life that people have come to think that French is either a dead language or an ugly language. Such propaganda has also been used to defame Spain and its policies in Latin-America. Everything now is seen through Anglo-Saxon glasses, unfortunately. The case of Russia is also a good example : if you listen to the Western media, Russia now is worse than the Soviet-Union. But this is a lie, obviously.


Boileau, You will probably like this thread. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories about some sinister entity behind English to suppress other languages, including promotion of tongue surgeries in Asian Children and monitoring of all English content that goes out to non-English speakers.


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## berndf

Boileau419 said:


> To the person who asks about Spanish and Portuguese :
> 
> Portuguese as spoken in Portugal (the only one I studied seriously) has diphtongs and nasal vowels, which I cannot write here properly (ao, ae, oe). Spanish has no such diphtongs. It is a very poor language in that respect. A E I O U and that's it. French has even more vowels.





Boileau419 said:


> Marxists reduce everything to economics, but this is just ideology.
> 
> I cited Saint Francis of Assisi for a good reason. The "Poverello", who lived in the XIIth century in Umbria spoke some kind of Italian dialect. He had therefore at his disposal a language that was very musical to begin with. But his biographers say that in his ectasies and moments of joy, he would sing the praises of God in French. Francis could not write nor read, apparently. Umbria is not close to France.
> 
> As for Marco Polo, he dictated his Book of Marvels on the empire of Kubilaï Khan in his own Genoese dialect but had it translated on the spot into French by Rustichello da Pisa, and the reason given explicitly by the translator is that French at the time was considered the sweetest and most educated language. Marco Polo dictated his book at the end of the XIIIth century. The original title is Le Devisement du monde or Le Livre de Marco Polo.
> 
> English, in comparison, has become dominant only since the Second World War. ...


Rustichello da Pisa wrote in OF (Old French) because her was a writer of the romance literary tradition. I wouldn't be surprised, if he had considered OF to be the most beautiful language. If you "live" in a certain cultural tradition, you will find the language of this tradition the most beautiful one. If you ask a fan of classical opera he will probably tell you Italian was the most beautiful language and if you ask a Rock'n'Roll fan he will probably say English. But this doesn't mean there is any kind of objective "beauty" in a language as such. The perception of beauty, of sounds probably even more than in other senses, is a question of what you are used to. If you say lack of diphthongs and nasals impoverishes a language, then speakers of such languages will reply it is an advantage because both are ugly, much as speakers of many European languages find Arabic ugly because to has so many guttural sounds while Arabs would say those European languages were "poor" because they lacked so many sounds.

It is a well known fact that the pleasantness of sounds is related to its familiarity to the listener. One biological purpose, probably the most important one, is to warn an animal of possible dangers, so the animal feels generally safer when surrounded by sounds it is familiar with.

I don't have to be a Marxist to agree with Marx on some points.


Boileau419 said:


> And English-speakers like Don Watson ("Death Sentences"), consider it a dead language already.


Watson laments the decay of public language in general, not of a specific one. He talks mostly about English because that is his language. Well, culture is going down the drain and this is due to the philistinism of young generation.... Plato know this already.


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## DenisBiH

Boileau419 said:


> We are colonies of the US Empire.



But don't you think that this American dominance can have an adverse effect on the perception of English as beautiful? The more it becomes a useful tool, so often butchered by us non-natives, the more it loses of that normal foreign language charm. For example, I recently discovered that I prefer listening to audiobooks in British English, because the American variety is starting to sound too everyday, bland and, to a degree, loaded with socio-political connotations that you mentioned.


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## Boileau419

I said it, I _know_ that Italian is beautiful but I don't _like_ it. I'll stick to that.


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## Boileau419

DenisBiH said:


> But don't you think that this American dominance can have an adverse effect on the perception of English as beautiful? The more it becomes a useful tool, so often butchered by us non-natives, the more it loses of that normal foreign language charm. For example, I recently discovered that I prefer listening to audiobooks in British English, because the American variety is starting to sound too everyday, bland and, to a degree, loaded with socio-political connotations that you mentioned.



I agree, too much success is not a good thing. 
I think the future of English may be rather bleak. Just now it is strong not so much because of any inherent qualities, but because the speakers of other languages are hypnotized by it or too...too cowardly to put up a fight ? 

I think English has long ceased to be the language of particular, historic nations, to become the language of a System. In a way, it is more and more like Latin in the Middle-Ages and the Renaissance. but without the great culture behind it. It will fall with the dollar and rock and roll.


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## Boileau419

berndf said:


> Rustichello da Pisa wrote in OF (Old French) because her was a writer of the romance literary tradition. I wouldn't be surprised, if he had considered OF to be the most beautiful language. If you "live" in a certain cultural tradition, you will find the language of this tradition the most beautiful one. If you ask a fan of classical opera he will probably tell you Italian was the most beautiful language and if you ask a Rock'n'Roll fan he will probably say English. But this doesn't mean there is any kind of objective "beauty" in a language as such. The perception of beauty, of sounds probably even more than in other senses, is a question of what you are used to. If you say lack of diphthongs and nasals impoverishes a language, then speakers of such languages will reply it is an advantage because both are ugly, much as speakers of many European languages find Arabic ugly because to has so many guttural sounds while Arabs would say those European languages were "poor" because they lacked so many sounds.
> 
> It is a well known fact that the pleasantness of sounds is related to its familiarity to the listener. One biological purpose, probably the most important one, is to warn an animal of possible dangers, so the animal feels generally safer when surrounded by sounds it is familiar with.
> 
> I don't have to be a Marxist to agree with Marx on some points.
> Watson laments the decay of public language in general, not of a specific one. He talks mostly about English because that is his language. Well, culture is going down the drain and this is due to the philistinism of young generation.... Plato know this already.



I don't accept relativism as a valid philosophy because if everything is relative, this must include relativism itself. Then, how can you go on ? If you say "there are no such criteria", then you follow your bias and become a self-enclosed entity. The stuffy world of "Me". But I prefer to say : "Let's explore", so that I may go beyond my likes and dislikes. 

In matters of beauty and morals, I don't accept objectivism because no truth can be completely universal, except maybe the highest truths on the origin of the universe. My position is between the two, namely that we can *strive* to a measure of objectivity, but at the same time we will always be time and place-bound, so that our truths will always be to some extent singular. This is the beauty of the human condition. 

I am sorry if I cannot explain everything here, but if you read Rudolf Steiner and his P_hilosophy of
 Freedom_, you may get a notion of my own position. I find Steiner's epistemology quite satisfying.


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## gvozd

Boileau419 said:


> I said it, I _know_ that Italian is beautiful but I don't _like_ it.



For some reason this reminds me of an old joke. 'Do you have your own point of view?' 'Yes, but I don't agree with it'.


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## Boileau419

Never said : Yes, she is beautiful, but I don't like her ?


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## gvozd

When it comes to women, we are dealing with a lot of dimensions. When we discuss how a language sounds, we are dealing _only_ with the sound of the language. So, your comparison is incorrect.


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## DenisBiH

Boileau419 said:


> I don't accept relativism as a valid philosophy because if everything is  relative, this must include relativism itself. Then, how can you go on ?  If you say "there are no such criteria", then you follow your bias and  become a self-enclosed entity. The stuffy world of "Me". But I prefer to  say : "Let's explore", so that I may go beyond my likes and dislikes.
> 
> In matters of beauty and morals, I don't accept objectivism because no  truth can be completely universal, except maybe the highest truths on  the origin of the universe. My position is between the two, namely that  we can *strive* to a measure of objectivity, but at the same time  we will always be time and place-bound, so that our truths will always  be to some extent singular. This is the beauty of the human condition.



Now that reminds me of something I read recently, only it was about historical studies rather than beauty and morals. Where was it...ah, here:


> The idea of scientific history is large enough to embrace History’s metaphysics, objectivism, and positivism, and because of these, relativism especially for the era to which its history is to be related (STEENBLOCK). One may retain the ideal of objectivity and its practice in examining information sources scientifically from an individual perspective, and even by multiple individuals sharing their perspectives and recognizing their relative commonalities and differences. Relativism does not necessarily negate objectivity. It need not be subjective.


   McCrank, Lawrence J. _Historical Information Science: An Emerging Unidiscipline_. Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 2001.


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## berndf

Boileau419 said:


> I don't accept relativism as a valid philosophy...


We are not talking about a philosophy but about a contention concerning a fact of life and this fact is that there is no such a thing as an objectively beautiful language where "objectively" means "inter-subjectively reproducible", because it is genetically programmed or whatever reason.

The statement is that the perception of beauty in sounds in general and languages in particular, depends on the biographic history of a person to such an extend, that the concept of beauty of a languages _per se_ does not make sense. Again, this is not a philosophy, this is a synthetic statement about the real world.

By the way, I *am *an objectivist, quite a radical even (of the Popperian kind). Truth is objective, absolute and beyond control of humankind. Truth is objective and absolute even in a world without the Cartesian thinking being. It might then not be very important, if there is nobody to state theories about what is true and what is false, but that is a different matter.


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## JeanDeSponde

berndf said:


> By the way, I *am *an objectivist, quite a radical even (of the Popperian kind). Truth is objective, absolute and beyond control of humankind. Truth is objective and absolute even in a world without the Cartesian thinking being


I'm afraid this won't fit into Steiner's view:





> The being of Christ is central to _all_ religions, though called by different names by each. Every religion is valid and true for the time and cultural context in which it was born.
> Historical forms of Christianity need to be transformed considerably in  our times in order to meet the on-going evolution of humanity.


Honestly, I understand words when spelled apart, although the whole meaning is a bit blurred — but we are rather far from Popper...


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## Pedro y La Torre

Boileau419 said:


> I think English has long ceased to be the language of particular, historic nations, to become the language of a System. In a way, it is more and more like Latin in the Middle-Ages and the Renaissance. but without the great culture behind it. It will fall with the dollar and rock and roll.



No country in history has ever had the scope, power and cultural dominance of the United States of America. Until the 19th century, French was the language of an educated, diplomatic elite; English is the language spoken by your average shopkeeper in Bombay or Manila.

[…]


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## DenisBiH

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Until the 19th century, French was the language of an educated, diplomatic elite;



And in the 19th and early 20th century it was also the language of railway workers, apparently. From "Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway".


> In fact, the Ottomans showed no inclination of wanting to favor German trade at the expense of its rivals or to further the Pan-German aims. After all, he remarked, the official language of the railway was French, not German, and the percentage of German railway employees was steadily declining. ... Exploring the length of the proposed line, another English traveler, David Fraser, was surprised by the nonpolitical character of German involvement in the railway construction project: All the police are Turkish, all the minor officials Turks, Greeks, and Armenians, while the only languages used are French and Turkish. ... Marschall further stated that even the lowest classes of the Ottoman population recognized the need to learn a foreign language. By largely ignoring the Ottoman population in the pursuit of its strategic objectives, Germany had failed to recognize the fact that the region's diverse nationalities and existing trade relations made learning a foreign language an economic necessity. He warned that Germany would make no material gains in the region unless it provided an alternative to French and English instruction. ... There reigns here an unmistakable discord against Germany, partly due to our previous good relations with the sultan and the palace, partly due to the fact that any Turk, who can speak any foreign language at all, understands only French and . . . the French papers here [are] doing everything possible to incite [hostility] against us. ... Wanted: German engineers for Turkish service. The Turkish Ministry of Public Works is seeking engineers to build railroads in the year 1911. Required are knowledge of the French language and practical training.  ... The observer, however, was puzzled and then perturbed by the prevalent usage of the French language on the construction sites. No matter where he looked, he could find no visible signs of a German presence.  ... In May 1914, Figdor resumed his journey along the route to Aleppo where he noted that French schools outnumbered German ones 50 to 1.


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## rotan

Myridon said:


> Since I'm a stupid liar, I guess I'll give up on this thread.


I never said you were lying - you live in the US after all
I just know it's developing, might go at a snail's gallop, but it's developing

But don't just take my words for it
Go on the Internet, type "is soccer growing in the US", and see yourself


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