Ian Llorens versus the European Union

A close relative of mine, who also happens to live in Massachusetts, got published the attached letter in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. He tells me that when you send a letter to La Vanguardia, several things happen: they always give it a haircut, without any reason, even if the letter is relatively short. They love to edit it. The result is very often a little bit awkward, but the truth of the matter is that the try to keep the essence of the message.
The second thing that happens is that they correct your spelling and grammar mistakes, even though Bill Gates takes care of the first ones through his outstanding word spell check (in this case for Catalan). But my relative never learnt Catalan at school, it seems that it was banned when he studied, and from time to time, he makes some grammar mistakes, like making intransitive transitive verbs. He does not feel bad about it, however, because in the Valencian variety of Catalan, the construction would have been correct. There is always a loophole.

This is the English version of the article:
"Second class language
What Aleix Vidal-Quadras did when he voted against the use of Catalan in the European institutions, was to condemn the Catalan speaking community to become second class Europeans. The fact that Gaelic and Maltese, spoken by far less citizens and both of them co-official with English, can be used and not Catalan, discriminates us absolutely.
I would have understood that limits are imposed on languages spoken by less than 25 million people due to cost reasons, but this targeted discrimination is a violation of the rights of Catalans, citizens of the Balearic islands, Valencians, Galicians and Basques. I advise the Catalan government and institutions to file a class action lawsuit."

This is the original modified version in Catalan:

"Llengua de segona

El que va fer Aleix Vidal-Quadras en votar en contra de l´ús del català a les institucions europees és condemnar la comunitat catalanoparlant a esdevenir europeus de segona classe. Que es pugui utilitzar el gaèlic i el maltès, parlats per menys ciutadans i ambdós cooficials amb l´anglès, i no el català, ens discrimina absolutament.

Hauria entès que es posessin límits, per motius de cost, a la utilització de llengües parlades per menys de 25 milions d´habitants, però aquesta discriminació és una violació dels drets dels catalans, balears, valencians, bascos i gallecs. Recomano a la Generalitat i institucions catalanes que endeguin una acció col · lectiva als tribunals."


For those who do not know him, Aleix Vidal-Quadras is one of the vice presidents of the European parliament. He is a Catalan, member of the right wing popular party and he was the swing vote against the resolution to allow us to be able to communicate with the Eurochamber in Catalan. He is a clear example of why Catalans have never won any war in the last 600 years, there was always a "botifler" (traitor) that would sell our interests. Note that out of 14 vice presidents, there are 2 Catalans, that's 15% of the presiding body. I really cannot understand.

When asked, Aleix said that he had voted against due to technical reasons, the complexity of having even more languages in the E.U.

This is my answer to that:

• You know my opinion about languages in the EU. Only English should be use by the people who work there (most probably a more legally acceptable compromise would be, however, that the 3 european union languages that are also official in the United Nations, become the three working languages in the EU: English, Spanish and French)
• Communication between the citizens and the EU should be in the official language of the citizen. A webportal set up and paid by the regional or national government, should act as intermediary.
• What you you cannot do is a targeted ethnic discrimination. If you are Maltese, you can use your small little language, if you are Catalan, you cannot. THIS IS A CIVIL RIGHT VIOLATION. Therefore I encourage all you Catalans to file a complaint to the European Ombudsman following this link.
• Finally I would like to add that all these problems will be solved in 15 to 20 years. Today I attended a series of speaches/presentations at the JFK Library in Boston organized by MassMedic. One of the keynote speakers, Ray Kurzweil talked and demonstrated the future of interpretation with the improvement in computation. He predicted that in the next decade, google-kind interpretation algorithms will be built in our cell phones in such a way that when you call a colleague or friend in Germany, you will be speaking English and your counterpart will be hearing the same conversation in German. Both the software and the computation power will be available in any handheld device. I start to wonder why I learnt 9 languages. Looking from this perspective, Mr. Vidal-Quadras becomes irrelevant.