ABSTRACT
Here’s a thought experiment: You are very suddenly taken ill. You clearly need to go to a hospital. Enter the hospital, go to the admissions desk, and say as clearly and loudly as possible that you need to see a doctor immediately. You are quizzically answered by the person behind the desk in a manner completely unintelligible to you. You are in a culture that does not speak your own language. What do you do? I had this problem decades ago in a small city in a Central Asian Republic of the Soviet Union when I came down with food poisoning in the middle of the night. No one it seemed, from the tea lady on the landing to the concierge at the hotel, spoke any of the languages that I knew. The results were less than pleasant and made me very aware of the need for some level of bilingualism on the part of the hospital (if not on the part of the patient). The result was—by the way—a five-hour wait until I could call the American Embassy in Moscow and find an English-speaking local physician.
