Rebekah, there’s NOTHING that makes me quite so happy as having a conversation develop like this — so thank you for returning and joining in.
There can be a kind of charm when a foreign speaker speaks English. There can be a freshness, unusual turns of phrase, even of grammar, a different way of saying something that — even though it’s perfectly understandable, you still feel like you’re hearing it for the first time. So correcting someone’s English is tricky — something can be lost. But, of course, something can also be gained, as the ultimate goal (I’m assuming) is not charm but clarity, to communicate clearly.
Interesting that in my lifetime (which admittedly, and gratefully, is long), English has become the first language of the world. It wasn’t when I was born. French still held that position, certainly diplomatically. German was on top in science and scholarship, especially art history and criticism. Now the joke is that English is the lingua franca of the world — itself a harking back to the time when LATIN was the only universally understood language, and France was in the ascendency.
But I still love French, and since it’s my blog I’m gonna indulge myself with a French proverb that’s useful to remember:
tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse. Which means, in the current top dog language, everything ends, everything wears out, everything breaks. Even us. But meanwhile, let’s rejoice in EVERY language!