Only at BYU...

Ok, so there are plenty of jokes that start with the phrase "only at BYU" but this is not a joke, it is something I am rather proud of.
This morning in Elang (Introduction to the English Language) we were talking about the similarities that all human languages share. According to noam Chomsky we all speak the same language--only different dialects. We were talking about how sentences are structured in different languages and how all sentences in every language must have these certain commonalities.
So Dr. Baker had people come up and write the same sentence in whatever language you knew. It ended up we had Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian variant and Portugual variant), Italian, German, Polish, and Russian (and probably a few others).

Only at BYU would you find a beginning linguistics class where most, if not all, of the students speak a second language.

I abosultely love this facet of BYU. I remember at freshman orientation President Bateman was saying that BYU offered more languages than any other university in the United States. Yale was second in languages, with about half the number. In my apartment alone we have people who speak at least communicative French, Japanese, Portuguese and American Sign Language. We are six women, all under the age of 23, none of whom have ever served a mission. How is that for impressive?
I would bet that on average, any apartment of BYU housing would represent a knowledge of at least three languages other than English.
I love BYU.

Funny story for the day-
My brother-in-law Seth served a mission in Paraguay and so he speaks Spanish. He also learned some Guatane a local dialect/language. He was listening to some song (in English) one day a few years ago; at one point there were some nonsense words, you know, "doowa, doobe doo" "bop sha-bop" whatever filler stuff we throw into songs. He was very surprised at it though because in Guatane it had actualy meaning:
"I would love to boil your diarrhea."