Sir, - Mr John Dandy (August 6th) is wrong in saying that foreign students in Ireland "chatter loudly because they are supremely confident that we do not understand their language." In their own countries Italians and Spanish talk loudly; this is their custom and nature.
In the mid-1970s I worked as an interpreter for Italian companies on industrial installations throughout Poland. With a group of Italian engineers we would occasionally go to local restaurants. These were dull and rather drab places - typical for Polish provincial towns of the time. Observing the public, one of those Italian engineers said to me: "People are ill-mannered here. Everybody chats sotto voce [i.e. in a whisper]. It seems like to gossip and to speak ill all the time! We talk loudly because we don't mind to be overheard. . ." He was wrong, of course, but that was how he saw it.
As the Romans would have said: De gustibus non est disputandum. - Yours, etc.,Hanna Dangel-Dowling,
Woodley Park,
Dublin 14.