Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Swiss Linguistic Insecurity?
Other readers of Mr. Verb will have noticed the Linguistics and soccer side note about NPR's faux pas (here), but I am wondering if any soccer fans know whether Switzerland is the first team to face an all L1 Spanish group or whether there have been other 3 vs 1 (L1) linguistic group brackets in World Cup history. Have there ever been linguistically hegemonic groups (i.e., all one L1 or dominant language)?
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3 comments:
OMG ... the Stranded Preposition posted on Mr. V. I had long thought this was an empty category (so to speak) ... an inflation of the contributor list or something.
This will fuel speculation about who's who on 'Team Verb', no doubt.
You'd have to go back to the
very first World Cup of 1930 to find three countries speaking the same language (there must be a word for this -- homolinguistic???) in the same group: Argentina, Chile, France and Mexico.
Another group of unique linguistic interest came from the 1954 tournament: Hungary, West Germany, Turkey and South Korea -- four countries whose national languages have no known genetic relationship with each other.
Speculation? I've got some strong bets...
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