Good grief. And we thought ours was lousy.

Published: January 17, 2015 at 2:21pm




33 Comments Comment

  1. Gahan says:
    January 17, 2015 at 2:48 pm

    Is he from Zimbabwe?

    Reply
  2. C. Calleja says:
    January 17, 2015 at 2:55 pm

    Whatever it is, it’s worse in Italy lol.

    Reply
  3. Freedom5 says:
    January 17, 2015 at 3:02 pm

    Dear oh dear you picked on a parody .

    Ok , far from perfect English .

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oqJY4MLK2r4

    [Daphne – An educated person should be able to speak fluent English or fluent French, wherever he is from, but most particularly when he is prime minister of an EU member state.]

    Reply
  4. Freedom5 says:
    January 17, 2015 at 3:08 pm

    And perhaps you wish to listen to this interview .

    Jihadis , disaffected youth ? Hardly .

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArsK5qGIYBE

    Reply
  5. Observer says:
    January 17, 2015 at 3:19 pm

    “My mother cried when the shish shish”, or whatever, happened.

    I think she is crying even harder now, after hearing him shishing.

    What on earth was he shishing about? Can someone please tell me?

    Reply
  6. PB says:
    January 17, 2015 at 3:21 pm

    The worst spoken English I’ve ever heard. Can this guy actually speak his own native language?

    He seems to have a problem with logic. Serious European leaders rarely speak a foreign language publicly even if they speak it impeccably.

    [Daphne – Of course they do. It’s considered good manners. It is extremely unsophisticated to insist on speaking your own language in a context where others do not speak it too, and when you are perfectly able to speak a language which they do understand. Polyglots are much admired too.]

    Reply
    • Matthew S says:
      January 17, 2015 at 4:00 pm

      Speaking more than one language is always a great advantage for politicians. People always appreciate it when others speak their language fluently so when a politician speaks different languages, it endears him to a larger number of people.

      It also makes bilateral relations between countries easier because it makes a personal relationship between leaders much easier. Kevin Rudd always spoke Mandarin when the Chinese visited Australia for instance. John Kerry spoke in French when commenting about the Charlie Hebdo case.

      It is only the British who unfortunately have put learning foreign languages on the back burner in recent years because they assume that the rest of the world is learning English instead. The rest of the world admires polyglots.

      All that said, it is clear that Matteo Renzi should stick to Italian (and whatever other language he might know well) and provide translators until he learns how to speak English fluently. That speech is simply an embarrassment and, after watching it twice, I still can’t figure out what he’s on about. It sounds like absolute gibberish.

      Reply
      • join the dots says:
        January 17, 2015 at 6:50 pm

        The British always have struggled with languages. This is because those in state schools do not see a language teacher until they are 11 years old. It is a class thing, the elite do not want the working class getting too clever as they may threaten the status quo.

        [Daphne – What rubbish re the working class. The British never bothered with languages because they never needed to. Their empire covered much of the world and almost everybody spoke theirs as a result. People learn languages only when it is a necessity. Languages are not a necessity for British people, but their language is a necessity for the rest of us.]

      • Matthew S says:
        January 17, 2015 at 9:02 pm

        Your first sentence makes sense, join the dots. Your second doesn’t.

        Unfortunately, there is no universal system which introduces pupils to a foreign language in primary school but, up till 2002, a foreign language was compulsory in secondary schools. The Labour Party did away with that. That’s when language learning took a really big hit in Britain.

        It is only under the current government that small steps are being taken to re-introduce foreign languages into the curriculum. The English Baccalaureate, a school performance indicator, now has to include a language other than English as one of its five core subjects.

        Languages offer benefits beyond communication. People who can speak two or more languages fluently tend to be brighter and do better at school than monoglots.

        Labour might be re-elected this year so who knows what will happen to the coalition’s plans.

      • Mila says:
        January 17, 2015 at 11:45 pm

        ”It is a class thing, the elite do not want the working class getting too clever as they may threaten the status quo.”

        I did not realize that only the elite read for their bachelor’s, master’s and doctorates in the UK. Are you sure you did not mistake the Downton Abbey Series for a current documentary?

    • PB says:
      January 17, 2015 at 5:21 pm

      There were European leaders who refused to speak English publicly, I think Jacques Chirac was one of them, can’t remember others.

      [Daphne – The French antipathy to English has historical roots. Also, French is the other international language (it is the language of diplomacy). Italian is a minority language spoken only in Italy. Educated people working at that level should speak either fluent French or fluent English.]

      Reply
      • Marlowe says:
        January 17, 2015 at 7:10 pm

        And in my experience, many French citizens can speak English relatively well, they just feel anxious about using it, since like French, English is very specific. One verb means just one thing with all the implicated baggage that that context provides and so on.

      • Tabatha White says:
        January 17, 2015 at 9:25 pm

        @Marlowe

        In mine too.

        It is often a case of who permits himself to make the first mistake: if this can diplomatically be a mistake made in French by the anglophone, then communication opens up quite easily.

  7. Marlowe says:
    January 17, 2015 at 4:19 pm

    Now hold on, for an Italian that’s an impeccable level of English.

    Reply
    • ron says:
      January 17, 2015 at 5:03 pm

      Marlowe, your sweeping statement is far from the truth. There are many Italians who know how to speak English perhaps even better than some prominent Maltese persons who believe they do.

      [Daphne – The number of Italians who speak English is disproportionately small. It is the result of Italy’s insularity and has in turn compounded it.]

      Reply
    • Sun Tzu says:
      January 17, 2015 at 5:22 pm

      Compare with Enrico Letta’s impeccable English in an address he delivered after meeting the British Prime Minister.

      Reply
  8. John says:
    January 17, 2015 at 4:43 pm

    This is Francesco Rutelli with his “inglese maccheronico”:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp2uDyzxP6g

    Reply
  9. chico says:
    January 17, 2015 at 4:48 pm

    Socrates couldn’t have put it better.

    Reply
  10. Painter says:
    January 17, 2015 at 4:57 pm

    Thank goodness for those 164 years or we would’ve ended like Lampedusa and speaking like this.

    Reply
  11. ciccio says:
    January 17, 2015 at 4:58 pm

    Martin Scicluna must feel relieved. I expect him to write another piece for Times of Malta, stating how Joseph Muscat’s speech to the London School of Economics was a masterpiece of English pronunciation, and to tell us once again that he does not read Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog.

    Reply
  12. Freedom5 says:
    January 17, 2015 at 5:05 pm

    Daphne, BOTH clips are spoofs. That was my point.

    [Daphne – The first one is not a spoof.]

    Reply
  13. Freedom5 says:
    January 17, 2015 at 5:46 pm

    Ciccio , the first video is a collage of clips from the one you posted , where Renzi hesitated or got stuck for the English word , rendering it totally unintelligible , and ridiculous subtitles . That makes it a spoof .

    Reply
  14. kev says:
    January 17, 2015 at 7:07 pm

    And here’s Don Tusk, the man who took over Haiku Herman’s job as President of the European Council. It’s Polish English, which explains why he was unable to answer the question: http://youtu.be/XF8n5vvpOUk

    Reply
  15. Karl says:
    January 26, 2015 at 10:51 pm

    ‘acciaio’ means ‘still’

    https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1550435091871077

    Reply

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