MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

The news that the superintendent of schools for Esmeralda County, as well as his school board, approved a letter asking Hispanic students to shut up unless they planned on speaking in English is almost medieval in its cruelty.

Amazingly, many people would be tempted to go along with such an idea.

Controlling populations by trying to wipe out their original language is an idea whose time is so long past, it is hard to imagine anyone sane, or at least up to date, making use of it. Yet an effort to do so, however unthinking, just happened right here in western Nevada.

Particularly hard hit by such attempts have been American Indians.

Hardly any tribes have gone to school in the English-speaking world without being told at some point that they must not use their native language. A rap on the knuckles with a hard-edged ruler was often the minimum punishment for failing to remember that.

Tlingit people in Southeast Alaska, as one example, were brought up as recently as the mid-20th century believing there was something "wrong" about their own heritage. How? Because when they tried to employ the language of their ancestors (i.e., their parents, uncles, grandparents, etc.), they were told they were doing something not just reprehensible but even evil that required the white power structure to react abruptly and bluntly.

There remain tribes whose knowledge of their own language is virtually lacking, and that's not just an American failing but one that circles the globe. I forget the figures, but an astonishing number of languages are going the way of the dodo. A 2003 article in the British newspaper, The Independent, suggested languages are becoming extinct more quickly than animal species.

True, few of them are being deliberately tossed aside as a punitive measure, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that Robert Aumagher and his board are contriving to eliminate Spanish as a language.

What they are guilty of, however, is forgetting to do what Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird advised his kids always to remember: To learn about someone else, he said, you have to put yourself into his shoes.

Mr. Aumagher and his board have clearly never been told not to use their own native language. Likewise, I'm sure, they have never been told to put aside the Holy Bible or not raise the flag of their own country or avoid eating hot dogs and French fries. That is, they have not been treated as Soviet communists might have treated their people during the unpleasant days of the Cold War.

Yet they have clearly never put themselves in anyone else's shoes and thought about how it might feel.

One has to ask -- when Americans visit other countries, do they feel any compunction to put aside their own language and comment to each other only in Hungarian or Swahili or Danish?

Why not?

Has it ever occurred to them that whispering among themselves in English might raise questions among Japanese or Turks on the same train or plane?

Well, probably not.

Frankly, most nations are so small and we are so immense that visitors who might fade into the woodwork here tend to stand out like sore thumbs over there. Even then, however, there are still community bars and restaurants in Germany or Spain that seldom see or have anything to do with Americans and have no reason to speak the language. (When I spent eight months in West Berlin, it was an article of pride that we could pick up the language and make use of it, at least in brief sentences. When I startled a cabbie into realizing that I was actually American, not a Berlin native, I felt I'd accomplished something.)

Who knows, there may still be grown-ups whose attitude regarding other languages can be summed up in such a phrase as "my gracious, we were in the nicest little Greek village and they couldn't even speak English!"

Similar perspectives appeared last year with depressing regularity during the silliness about the English-only ordinance. There were moments when you could almost hear the troglodytes expressing their lack of understanding about the simple importance of maintaining one's native language.

And lest you think that "good" immigrants -- you know, largely Caucasian in nature -- are all that determined to learn English, I suggest you visit New Britain, Conn., some afternoon and visit one of the local meat markets.

Dig it, they're Polish and no one in the place speaks English, and if you want to find someone who can help you pick up some lengths of real kielbasa to take home, good luck.

(Since the last issue, Mr. Liakopoulos has explained his family's stress on veterans. His wife, as we mentioned, is the daughter of a former prisoner of the communists in Korea. He also specified his son's lengthy career as a Regular who serves as a medic in San Antonio and has spent a tour in Iraq.)