Volkspolitik

Christdemokrat
Sie besitzen zwei Kühe. Ihr Nachbar besitzt keine.
Sie behalten eine und schenken Ihrem armen Nachbarn die andere. Danach bereuen Sie es.

Sozialist
Sie besitzen zwei Kühe. Ihr Nachbar besitzt keine.
Die Regierung nimmt Ihnen eine ab und gibt diese Ihrem Nachbarn. Sie werden gezwungen, eine Genossenschaft zu gründen, um Ihrem Nachbarn bei der Tierhaltung zu helfen.

Volkswirtschaft

Amerikanisches Unternehmen
Sie besitzen zwei Kühe.
Sie verkaufen eine und leasen sie zurück. Sie gründen eine
Aktiengesellschaft. Sie zwingen die beiden Kühe, das Vierfache an
Milch zu geben. Sie wundern sich, als eine tot umfällt. Sie geben eine
Presseerklärung heraus, in der Sie erklären, Sie hätten Ihre Kosten um
50% gesenkt. Ihre Aktien steigen.

Französisches Unternehmen
Sie besitzen zwei Kühe. Sie streiken, weil sie drei Kühe haben wollen. Sie gehen Mittagessen.
Das Leben ist schön.

Soap

The following letters are taken from an actual incident between a London hotel and one of its guests. The hotel ended up submitting the letters to the Sunday Times.

Dear Maid,

Please do not leave any more of those little bars of soap in my bathroom since I have brought my own bath-sized Imperial Leather.

Please remove the six unopened little bars from the shelf under the medicine chest and another three in the shower soap dish. They are in my way.

Thank you,
S. Berman

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Dear Room 635,

I am not your regular maid. She will be back tomorrow, Thursday, from her day off.
I took the 3 hotel soaps out of the shower soap dish as you requested. The 6 bars on your shelf I took out of your way and put on top of your Kleenex dispenser in case you should change your mind. This leaves only the 3 bars I left today which my instructions from the management are to leave 3 soaps daily.

I hope this is satisfactory.

Kathy,
Relief Maid

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Dear Maid

I hope you are my regular maid.

Apparently Kathy did not tell you about my note to her concerning the little bars of soap. When I got back to my room this evening, I found you had added 3 little Camays to the shelf under my medicine cabinet.

I am going to be here in the hotel for two weeks and have brought my own bath-size Imperial Leather, so I won't need those 6 little Camays, which are on the shelf. They are in the way when shaving, brushing teeth etc.

Please remove them.

S. Berman

Language Notes

* grammatical number
"Number" is the singularity or plurality of a noun or verb or what have you. Today, in English, we only have two categories of grammatical number, singular and plural. There used to be a third category, called "dual," which was used to indicate the "twoness" of something. Hence, there were pronouns not only for "I" and "we" but also "we two". This feature has dropped out of most Indo-European languages, but is apparently present in modern Arabic.

* Chinese "we"
Chinese has two pronouns both used to express we: (1) The "we" that includes the listener (and possibly others) and (2) the "we" that includes the speaker and one or more others, but not the listener. Thus:

(1) John, it's great that you and I both liked that movie we just saw.

(2) John, my husband and I saw a movie last night. We recommend it!
This is a great example of how some conceptual distinctions are given more weight in some languages than in others; of how some meaning is implicit and some is explicit; of the role of context in communication.

Source:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~aahobor/Lucy-Day/About-Me/Language-Notes.shtml