Hidden in the Grand Mosque of Paris
This should be noted every time they run that photo of the Mufti sitting with Hitler
He might not have. He might just have known they weren’t speaking English, and were wearing headgear he associated with people from that part of the world, and leapt to conclusions.
For that matter, he might not even have noticed one part or the other of that, and just gone by the other one.
Probably. And as leapt-to conclusions go, it’s not terrible: When people who appear Middle Eastern speak a language other than the language of the country they’re in, it’s often going to be Arabic. But it’s also possible to recognize a language without knowing any non-negligible amount of it.
How much “leaping to conclusions” did he do? He was armed. Seems pretty calculated.
While no one died - this time - He was trying for, any intentional murder that is willful and premeditated with malice aforethought. IMHO
Even if you don’t speak a language, if you hear it enough in contexts where you know what language it is, you can later identify it when you hear it. The perp might not even know it’s called Arabic - he may just know that it’s the language he hears whenever he sees Palestinians on TV.
French/German/Italian/Spanish? Easy for me to ID. I can also tell you when I hear Korean, Chinese, Mongolian, or Japanese, though I couldn’t peg specific dialects. I’m not sure I could tell Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese apart from each other, but I could definitely distinguish any of those from the first groups I listed. And yes, I’m pretty sure I could tell you when I’m hearing Arabic, even though I don’t speak a word of it.
Right. Arabic’s rich range of guttural consonants is a give-away for many who (like me) don’t speak the language, but have heard it spoken enough to be recognizable (especially in context with other things, like the headgear, in this case — Arabic isn’t the ONLY language with a range of guttural and laryngeal consonants).
I grew up in a largely Filipino neighborhood. I can’t speak a word of Tagalog but if I hear it I can identify it right away. It’s a subconscious thing. I can’t even describe it, I just know it when I hear it.
My niece has quite the affinity to learning languages, and might be able to do the same thing. (This is the same niece who spent the summer of 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia as an exchange student.) I’m not quite that way regarding spoken language, but I am very good at identifying written foreign languages. I also took a year of high school Spanish and a semester of college French and can identify those languages, although I certainly couldn’t reply back or read anything other than basic words.
In the late 1990s, I temped at a clinic that had a large clientele of recent Bosnian refugees, and I was asked more than once by interpreters if I spoke any Yugoslavian language, because I was able to correctly pronounce their names. (Many of them are, if you will, not pronounced the way they’re spelled, at least not in midwestern English.) No, I didn’t, and don’t, but I did figure out that these names followed certain patterns.
ETA: I can identify the languages if they’re in the Roman alphabet.
To be clear, I meant “These people are likely speaking Arabic” was a reasonable conclusion. “These people are likely speaking Arabic, and therefore I should shoot them” is not. Absent the malign intent, we could still see that reasonable part of the conclusion: For instance, if a person is working in a store and trying to help a customer who doesn’t speak English, it might be reasonable for them to ask “Does anyone here speak Arabic?”.
I should have bolded the, “he was armed…” portion. I’ve lived near Burlington, not a hotbed of random crime and assaults. He was looking for trouble; not the sweet young man his mother spoke of.
When I first moved to Luxembourg, I couldn’t distinguish spoken German from Luxembourgish by ear; they sounded identical to me. But after a few years, even before starting to pick up the local languages, it became easy to tell them apart. Just takes some everyday exposure.