Word: linguae
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...Once the lingua franca of the civilized world, Latin today is little more than the fusty muttering of academics, historians and (some) priests. But in Rome a team of linguists led by top Latin scholar Abbot Carlo Egger is working to rectify that unspeakable state of linguistic affairs...
...Chicago sees a "widespread sense of moral disarray." Once, notes Bryn Mawr Political Scientist Stephen Salkever, "there was a traditional language of public discourse, based partly on biblical sources and partly on republican sources." But that language, says Salkever, has fallen into disuse, leaving American society with no moral lingua franca. Agrees Jesuit Father Joseph O'Hare, president of Fordham University: "We've had a traditional set of standards that have been challenged and found wanting or no longer fashionable. Now there don't seem to be any moral landmarks...
Everyone everywhere can drink Coke (almost $3 billion in foreign sales) and wear Levi's ($600 million) and watch Little House on the Prairie (broadcast in 110 countries). The lingua franca dispersion of English is both a cause and an effect of pop's global reach, but American pop commodities are also successful abroad because they work. Blue jeans are well designed and rugged. Most Hollywood filmmaking is technically impeccable. "American TV is extraordinarily beguiling to the Poles," says Sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb, who lived in Warsaw for 18 months, "for the technical quality alone...
...Osman, 21. "We are all combatants, we are all volunteers." His job is to teach reading and writing to the troops. After supper he conducts a lesson: "Maman est tres belle .. . Maman a une belle robe . .. Bonjour, maman." Since there are 300 different languages in Chad, French is the lingua franca...
Indeed, it is Western, not traditional music, that has become the Japanese lingua franca. On television, the strains of Voi che sapete from The Marriage of Figaro plug Suntory whisky, and a Strauss waltz is used as a background for a refrigerator-deodorizer ad. At a children's concert by the New Japan Philharmonic recently, more than 2,000 grade schoolers in the audience rose at the conductor's behest and, in two-part harmony, sang the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth...