{"id":269,"date":"2007-02-11T22:08:11","date_gmt":"2007-02-12T03:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=269"},"modified":"2007-06-27T12:46:14","modified_gmt":"2007-06-27T17:46:14","slug":"is-spanish-necessary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=269","title":{"rendered":"Is Spanish Necessary?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a tirade on the uselessness of Spanish for high school and middle school students, John Derbyshire<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

\n

No offense to anyone, but Spain was always a bit of an outlier of Western Civ. Name a Spanish mathematician; hum a tune from a Spanish opera; etc., etc.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don’t know that I could, but many opera lovers could certainly hum one tune from a Spanish opera. In the Act II finale of Don Giovanni<\/em>, Mozart has the band play a tune from the previous year’s big hit, and the Don himself says ‘Ah! Una Cosa Rara<\/em>.’ The composer, Vicente Martín y Soler, died 201 years ago today. I would dearly love to see a live or DVD performance of one of his operas. Una Cosa Rara<\/a><\/em> and La Capricciosa Corretta<\/a><\/em> sound wonderful to my untutored ears, but I’ve never found it easy to follow a comic plot by ear. Of course Derbyshire could object that the Spaniard Martín y Soler only won fame by leaving Spain and setting Italian and Russian librettos. (He died in St. Petersburg.)<\/p>\n

Later in his post, Derbyshire recommends Latin and misquotes Catullus as writing Da me basia mille, deinde centum<\/em>. That should be Da mi<\/strong><\/em>, where mi<\/em> is the shortened form of dative mihi<\/em>. Whether we take me<\/em> as accusative or ablative, Da me basia mille<\/em> is gibberish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a tirade on the uselessness of Spanish for high school and middle school students, John Derbyshire writes: No offense to anyone, but Spain was always a bit of an outlier of Western Civ. Name a Spanish mathematician; hum a tune from a Spanish opera; etc., etc. I don’t know that I could, but many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}