Prague • All told, this has been altogether too easy.
We have now traveled through six countries, having touched down in 20 cities. And our ability to do everything we need to do without speaking more than a few words of French, one in Portuguese (“obrigado” means “thank you”) and basically none in Hungarian, Slovak, German or Czech, has been amazingly simple.
The reason, of course, is that so many of the people a traveler is likely to encounter speak at least a little English. Even if the words and phrases they know are specific to being a hotel clerk or a barista, they, and we, get by.
It has also been comforting that so many menus, transit signs and announcements, captions on the paintings in museums, etc., are in at least two languages: The tongue of the nation you happen to be standing in, and English. Not always, but a lot.
This ease does not always carry over to grocery stores. We have more than once brought home a container of sour cream we hoped would be cream.
It did strike me strange that more of the words aimed at travelers weren’t in Spanish in Paris, in French in Vienna, in German in Budapest. (Well, maybe Hungarians are among the nationalities who still have a bad taste for anything German.)
Some Google research suggests that there is a long history of people across Europe learning at least basic English from elementary school on.
They study other languages, too. But it is the English that sticks, well past the age where Americans have forgotten their high-school Spanish or French, because it is constantly reenforced by being used in business and heard in American and British TV shows, movies, music and online communications.
A lot of the background music playing in shops and restaurants is, startlingly, American or British pop; Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra croon Christmas carols in the otherwise local-culture-centered outdoor winter markets.
It makes sense for young, urban French, Germans, Portuguese, Spanish, Italians and Czechs to all learn English as their second language so they can use it to talk to each other, even when there are no Yanks within earshot.
The movie “The Two Popes,” which I recommend as drama but not necessarily as history, imagines the German Pope Benedict XVI and Spanish-speaking Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (later Pope Francis) speaking to one another in English as a common language. Credible, but it is more likely that they would have conversed in Italian.
The downside of all of this for Americans, of course, is that there is little incentive for us to learn another language. You can get by without it, not just traveling but getting health care or even, in some places, a graduate degree, in English, for little or no money.
The long-term disadvantage to that for Americans is that Europeans can slip back into other languages to talk about us.
As Pamela Druckerman, a Paris-based opinion writer for The New York Times, observed in a 2019 commentary, if Vladimir Putin’s trolls speak English, but we don’t speak Russian, it becomes much easier for them to manipulate our media. And we don’t even know it is happening.
Anyway, if the world is going to come to Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics in 2034, that gives us plenty of time to ramp up our French Crown Burger menus, our Spanish TRAX signs and announcements, our German greetings at Grand America.
It will be good practice.
And about those trains
You may recall that, back in June, I wrote a column about how much I like European rail service and how I wish America had more like it.
The hook was news that the Utah Department of Transportation had applied for a $500,000 federal grant to study building passenger rail service connecting Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Idaho was also looking at a Boise to Ogden to Salt Lake rail plan.
I speculated that the plan probably wasn’t going anywhere because those pitching it suggested a nine-hour trip, one-way, from Saintsville to Sin City. That’s not worth it. It’s not only much slower than driving, it’s way worse than 21st century high-speed rail, which could easily make the trip in less than three hours.
I called it. Last week we learned that the feds rejected the Utah and Idaho applications.
There was no official reason for the decision. Advocates for passenger rail hereabouts said UDOT, forever focused on ever-wider highways, just didn’t demonstrate enough local enthusiasm for passenger rail.
To me, it would be more accurate to say that, by not specifically envisioning high-speed service, Utah gave the feds no reason to be interested.
Then Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was asked what he thought, and he said he is “a huge believer in high-speed rail” and would love to see such a line linking Salt Lake City and St. George.
If so, he needs to tell UDOT to start drafting its application for next year. And it needs to be very overtly high-speed.
Otherwise, that train will never leave the station.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, hopes nobody tells his high school or his college that he can’t speak Spanish. They might revoke his diplomas.
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