(no subject)

Did you know that the Romanian language is a Romance langauge that is only 1500 years away from Latin? Someone told me, yesterday, that Romanian was the closest modern cognate of Latin. I didn't believe him, since I couldn't believe that it'd be closer than Italian, and I'm still not convinced of that. But Romanian is really, really close to Latin -- maybe closer than Spanish or French.

Weird.

(no subject)

I've been involved in an email debate about Massachusetts Question 2, which would make bilingual education illegal in Massachusetts. I asked the person I was talking to why not simply to try to convince school boards to use immersion programs, if the benefits of immersion over bilingual education were so obvious. I'd like to post my response here, too, since I think there's some stuff here that may be interesting to others, if only to see how I think about these things:

( Here's the letter I wrote: )