I think it says something like “Together with our Italian friends, let us make use of the Vatican leader’s absence to launch a special operation in the city, abolish the absolute monarchy and proclaim the People’s Republic of Vatican” but I don’t actually know French
I think partially it’s that people’s eyes just sort of glaze over when they see a foreign language, because they’re afraid a false friend or wrong context-based assumption will screw them over, or because they’re otherwise just expecting it to be harder.
Not to mention that being able to parse French like this for me is making use of knowledge of several different languages which loaned different French words at different times and might use the same loans differently; as well as making use of my past exposure to French; so a text like this might be harder to parse for someone with less exposure to French, and fewer other (esp. Western European) languages under their belt.
My native language is a romance language, so I can make an educated guess in one of those most of the time and be 80% accurate, more or less. Same with germanic languages, but that’s because I know English and studied German in college. But from there to confidently translate stuff or be certain I’m not falling to the traps u mentioned, there’s a really long way.
Then, trying that with the linguistic lacunae that are languages like Basque, Balkan languages, Finnish, Russian, Polish, and so on, it’s impossible.
I think it says something like “Together with our Italian friends, let us make use of the Vatican leader’s absence to launch a special operation in the city, abolish the absolute monarchy and proclaim the People’s Republic of Vatican” but I don’t actually know French
I don’t understand how Europeans pretend to not understand each other, like you have to be lying if you don’t understand it instantly
I think partially it’s that people’s eyes just sort of glaze over when they see a foreign language, because they’re afraid a false friend or wrong context-based assumption will screw them over, or because they’re otherwise just expecting it to be harder.
Not to mention that being able to parse French like this for me is making use of knowledge of several different languages which loaned different French words at different times and might use the same loans differently; as well as making use of my past exposure to French; so a text like this might be harder to parse for someone with less exposure to French, and fewer other (esp. Western European) languages under their belt.
My native language is a romance language, so I can make an educated guess in one of those most of the time and be 80% accurate, more or less. Same with germanic languages, but that’s because I know English and studied German in college. But from there to confidently translate stuff or be certain I’m not falling to the traps u mentioned, there’s a really long way.
Then, trying that with the linguistic lacunae that are languages like Basque, Balkan languages, Finnish, Russian, Polish, and so on, it’s impossible.