{"id":34703,"date":"2005-08-04T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/08\/04\/on-speaking-a-particular-language-in-the-presence-of-non-speakers\/"},"modified":"2005-08-04T10:00:11","modified_gmt":"2005-08-04T10:00:11","slug":"on-speaking-a-particular-language-in-the-presence-of-non-speakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20050804-11\/?p=34703","title":{"rendered":"On speaking a particular language in the presence of non-speakers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Having grown up in a household where I didn&#8217;t speak most of the languages my parents and their friends use, I&#8217;m quite accustomed to being surrounded by conversations in a language I have no chance of understanding. If people are more comfortable speaking in a particular language, I say let them.<\/p>\n<p> Some people object to this on the grounds that &#8220;They might be talking about me.&#8221; Guess what: They almost certainly aren&#8217;t. It may hurt your ego to learn this, but it&#8217;s the truth: You&#8217;re really not that fascinating to other people. It turns out that over 99.99% of all conversations in the world do not involve you to any degree whatsoever. People speak other languages; get over it. <\/p>\n<p> While we were <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2005\/08\/01\/445999.aspx\"> stopped waiting for bicycle repair assistance on the way to the Company Picnic<\/a>, my friend called to inform a new acquaintance who was going to meet us at the picnic that we were delayed. Since they both speak French natively and I wasn&#8217;t involved in the conversation, they naturally used French. <\/p>\n<p> Later, at the picnic, my friend&#8217;s girlfriend remarked in Japanese what a hot day it was. (She&#8217;s not Japanese herself but has been studying it for a while.) I dug deep into my brain to pull out what little Japanese remains there and managed to produce a few words of enthusiastic agreement. At which point my friend interjected, &#8220;No speaking languages I don&#8217;t understand!&#8221; <\/p>\n<p> I wasn&#8217;t quite sure what to make of that remark, especially since he was speaking French in the presence of non-French speakers just a while ago. <\/p>\n<p> (By the way, <a href=\"http:\/\/spaces.msn.com\/members\/thewendyhouse\/Blog\/cns!1pi9WfzARsOGwOQNB3QnZaGw!1099.entry\"> a few butt pictures are now up<\/a>. That&#8217;s my butt in the first picture and my friend&#8217;s butt in the second.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Having grown up in a household where I didn&#8217;t speak most of the languages my parents and their friends use, I&#8217;m quite accustomed to being surrounded by conversations in a language I have no chance of understanding. If people are more comfortable speaking in a particular language, I say let them. Some people object to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-34703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Having grown up in a household where I didn&#8217;t speak most of the languages my parents and their friends use, I&#8217;m quite accustomed to being surrounded by conversations in a language I have no chance of understanding. If people are more comfortable speaking in a particular language, I say let them. Some people object to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}