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Subject:Foreign languages a measure of intelligence? From:Arthur Comings <atc -at- CORTE-MADERA -dot- GEOQUEST -dot- SLB -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 3 Nov 1994 14:25:37 PST
Whoever said that a
> person with a strong ability to learn foreign languages is obviously
> quite intelligent is dead wrong. If it were true, Europeans would by
> definition be smarter than Americans. And a further corollary would be
> that people who can't learn foreign languages are unintelligent.
. . .
I beg to differ.
That statement doesn't imply that Europeans have a strong ability to
learn foreign languages, and it doesn't imply that people who can't
learn foreign languages are unintelligent. There's room for more than
one group of highly intelligent people in the universe it suggests, and
it says nothing about how _many_ languages people have learned -- it's
just talking about people with a strong ability for learning
languages.
And _these observations_ don't imply anything about how easy it is for
me to learn foreign languages. I'm just pointing out that you're
reading more into the statement than can be logically inferred from
it.
Arthur Comings
GeoQuest
Corte Madera, California
atc -at- corte-madera -dot- geoquest -dot- slb -dot- com
