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Why Mayor Pete’s Multilingualism Matters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwcPtc1Gtok
(I included a little self-promotion at the end, I hope it’s not too obnoxious)
My name is Mark Olmsted, and I feel qualified to speak on this topic because I edit film subtitles for a living, and I speak several languages.
There was an article by this… yahoo, frankly, in the New York Times of all places, that claimed that Pete Buttigieg’s intellectual erudition was meaningless, was just the equivalent of a party trick.
He particularly sort of dismissed his ability to speak so many languages, and so let me tell you why that’s complete bullshit.
When you learn a second language, there are two ways: sometimes you learn it as you pick it up along with your native language, so you grow up speaking bilingually, and then there’s when you acquire it afterwards.
Now, Pete Buttigieg learned a lot of Maltese from his father growing up, and that was an easier way to learn it than teaching yourself or going to school, but it still counts for a lot because Maltese is one of those super-interesting languages that takes a little bit from a lot of different languages and so it was a very good basis for him. Then, to my understanding, he learned French, (which is my second language,) and the…
