Welcome to le Salon de Amateurs de la Langue!

Hello, my name is Murr and in addition to English, my first language, my other languages are (high school) French and German, Mandarin Chinese, which I use on a daily basis, although I do not read or write it, and some smatterings of ancient Greek left over from a classics degree I took in a previous life....

Welcome, Willkomen, Beinvenue, Yuan ying guang yin to all new members!!!!

Hello,

my name has many permutations,

and if Our Most Beloved Thread Leader is going to go by Murr, I will stick with polutropos, which many LTers have abbreviated to polu, which is quite acceptable.

I love language; I am passionately in love with languages.

What a great idea this thread is!

My first two languages, mother tongues, I suppose, are Slovak and Czech. Next I studied Russian, German, English, French and Latin.

I would claim total fluency in Slovak, Czech and English, reasonable fluency in French, and struggling passable (usually passive) knowledge of the others. Slavic languages are similar enough that a speaker of Polish, for example, will be understood by a speaker of Slovak.

Hello,

My name is EnriqueFreeque. Note the internal rhyme scheme of my name: that "ri" (pronounced "ree") rhymes with "Free"! I don't believe my Hispanic handle could be translated into English w/out losing this rhyme. I was born in the United States of America, southern California, and so I speak English and at times in my life could speak Surfer & Stoner speak often simultaneously. I mostly speak English these days, and nothing else. A little Spanish, and that's about it. Though Macumbeira, unintentionally, has been teaching me French, with phrases like "le salon" and "litteraire," etc.

I expect to listen much, and speak little here, in this (what I can see) will be an exquisite group, as the topics under discussion here are way outside my area of expertise - other than indeed like both of you above having a lifelong love of language and the sound and the enunciation of language particularly. The first word I remember really loving and using over and over in any contrived context I could come up with, sounding out all three syllables slowly, was... "in-ter-cept".

Welcome to you both! Polu, it will be great having a slavic expert here. I hope you can get us started on some ideas in the translations thread, as I know you are a professional translator.

Enreeeeeeeque, I am having visions of a three-year-old softly intoning 'in-ter-cept' over and over, and I must confess it is rather a sinister and creepy image!

Hello all,

I'm a recovering academic - specialty English literature. Currently I am teaching myself Swedish. I am having no problem learning to read and write Swedish; however, the sounds are an altogether different problem. I have a program that allows me to slow down the pronunciation of words and phrases. Individual words are not a problem; the elisions in phrasing are driving me wild. Even with the sentence pronunciation turned down to a snail's speed, I either hear extra sounds or cannot tell what the general rules for eliding words are. I need a tutor.

I read French fairly well, but I have lost the ability to speak it. I have never studied Spanish, but I read it quite well. Go figure??? I am confused. I took German for reading knowledge in graduate school. That experience left me confused and bemused. My professor told me I wrote elegant translations. How that could be, I've never determined. Even thinking about German gives me vertigo.

My mother tongue is Flemish, which is the language of the Menapian tribe living under the Rine , above the Seine and close to the North Sea. It is very close to Norwegian, so much so, I can read a Norske newspaper without help.

As a toodler , up to my 6 th birthday, I spoke three languages : Flemish at home, Swahili with our employees and French at school.

I forgot most of my Swahili and French, but I got a nice accent of negro-english when living in Surinam close to the Amazon jungle.

Strange enough the indians living in that jungle along the Maroni , suriname an commewijne river speak my mother tongue...

French became again my second language at school, when we moved to French speaking africa. I was in a French college at a very influential age ans so French language and culture stuck to my skin.

With English at school as my third language later on, movies and television and a love for English literature and a few holidays in English speaking Africa, help me to master that idiom.

I love Spanish and can have a simple conversation. I understand and speak German pretty well but their is no affinity with it at all

Hello! I was just going to exist on the list of this group--like pretty much any other of my groups--but Andrew says I must explain my lingo baggage, so, as briefly as possible--I have passive knowledge of a dozen or so languages I won't list, that's stuff I can read at a high level, from literature to non-fiction, with low use of a dictionary, but cannot or do not habitually speak or write (although I'd be happy to try, if I had a chance). There are at least a dozen other for which I need a dictionary and other help moderately or frequently--these may or may not pass into the first group eventually, depending on when my brain goes kaputt.

My active languages, chronologically and overlapping, are/were Greek, English, Croatian, French, (Arabic--fallen into disuse, except some conversation), Italian, German, Spanish and Russian. Of these, Russian is the only one I learned on my own, and the one I speak and write least well. I also speak several Italian and Croatian dialects, and there's also the difference between Greek dimotiki and katharevousa--probably worth noting as my best Greek is actually Cypriot dimotiki.

I had the great advantage of early, from-the-cradle multilingualism, and there may be some genetic inclination as well; in my wider family (including uncles and aunts) we speak, by the last count, 19 languages. However, I am by no means an expert on linguistics, nor do I read much about the theory of language etc.

In the past few years I've noticed that my memory is worsening, and the mistakes I make increasing in all my languages. Goes with being alive, so I'm not too torn, although having to be extremely careful, proofread etc. really doesn't fit my character... That aside, I'd say the thing I'm most grateful for is the ability to sound native--having a very good ear. When words abandon me, I hope I'll still have tone!

How shall poor benighted Porius follow this most recent gallimaufry of tongues? Well I have in my memory uncounted words from many languages but I have no string, alas, to string them together. Just words I've collected from more years of reading than I care to admit. The Trollopes' produced 300+ works, where the hell am I going to get the time to distinguish between Cypriot dimotiki and for crying out loud Kon-Tiki? I will be most happy to follow the lead of my betters though.

where the hell
oh where the hell
am I
am I
going to get the time
time
time
time
to distinguish between Cypriot dimotiki

and for crying out loud KON-TIKI?

Porius, 2009 (slightly adapted)

Welcome to you all.

Urania, when you say you have a program that allows you to slow down the pronunciation of words and phrases, what do you mean? Software program? Where did you get it? Do they have other languages?

Mac, your linguistic background is fascinating, as is yours, Lola! when words fail me I hope I still have tone! nice one. Alas, with age, tone is the first thing that goes......Porius, be warned, anything you say will be taken down and used as Poetry against you.

Welcome to you all!

I feel hurt,

dismayed,

overlooked,

constipated,

(no, just a minute, that did not belong there...)

oh, hell.

So it is the linguistic background of Mac and Lola that deserve commentary and mine, I guess, is oh, so....I don't know....pedestrian, I suppose...

I shall have to flounce off and found my own linguistic group. Harrrumph, good-bye then.

exits, sobbing

Ladies and Gentleman of all species, our resident poetry translator is something of a drama queen. Humour him until he changes shape again.

Now, constipado/constipated is an interesting word. Any Spanish speakers?

I always look for situations that are stocked with brighter people than myself. I don't mind, I don't mind. That's just the sort of fellow I am. Yehcaghthid deen koon. Said the blind man to his deaf followers.

Yehcaghthid deen koon???

Having them on?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dJf5rO0-BM
Don't need to know too much about Languages or History to know we should get out of Afghanistan immediately if not sooner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocvLICvoTt0&feature=related

I have spoken and responded to American English for nearly 65 years now. Often enough I pay attention to it, and I have studied it and other languages and language from time to time too.

I have used French in Canada and Tahiti but didn't feel I could survive on it. I can read Le Figaro magazine if I warm up but not poetry.

I have use Japanese in Japan and felt I could survive on it but not really converse in it. I cannot read it or write though more than thirty years later I can recognize some kana and maybe even a few kanji.

I have also studied German in a reading for graduates seminar as an undergraduate. I passed, but I didn't go to class. My cramming hasn't stuck.

I took an introduction to Biblical Hebrew in my senior year. It was hard. I cannot remember all of the alphabet anymore.

As an unclassified graduate student I took a year of Latin. Before I took the courses Latin looked comprehensible, just unknown, to me. Having had the classes, I think it is incomprehensible.

I had to memorize the Greek alphabet for the frat I was in for a couple of years. I don't remember all of it anymore.

I have a bachelor's degree in English. I am a drop out from a master's program in linguistics.

I have read some in the philosophy of language. I know enough about reference to consider it a religious notion.

I am thankful to have been invited here.

Robert

PS Also, in the Philippines I learned the phrase hindi ko alam ng tagalog.

R

There is a character in the name of the rose who speaks " European". I forgot his name ( Tomcat ? ) but he babbles all the known languages, mixing and reshaping them in (yes ) very understandable sentences.

Polu, we know you are great, don't overdo it !

>17 Macumbeira: Salvatore his name was. Great character, and great speech!

Welcome Robert! A dropout from a master's in Linguistics! just what we need: hurrah!

I know enough about reference to consider it a religious notion.

I'm curious about this. What do you mean?

as i've mentioned several times, i am linguistically impaired. 40 yrs ago i could read French quite fluently, we at least well enough that i could read our 3rd yr Latin text easily as an undergrad since it was a French text w/ the French translation on the facing pages. Didn't help on the final, sans convenient French text. And i never got to the point of thinking in French (or Latin)..It was always translate -> respond. I had a morbid fear of being stranding in France and starving to death since the native real time translation of spoken French was FAR beyond my capabilities

I also used to enjoy diagramming sentences..50 yrs ago.

And welcome Bob sahib, who speaks Arabic with a French accent!!!

Bob's our man for any computer/linguistic related issues, as he uses voice recognition software to make his posts. (Assuming you still doing that Bob?)

My first language is Dutch, which may or may not be the same as Flemish, depends on whom you ask. I'm not prepared to debate that issue.
English is a close second, I've used it for talking to my family in the USA, studying physics, writing software documentation, giving customer support, reading about obscure subjects and so on.
I had German for three years at school, after that I didn't touch it for eight years. But suddenly, I felt the urge to read 18th and 19th century literature and philosophy: Goethe, Heine, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer (didn't finish Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung though), so with a dictionary I started going to this stuff and after a while I was up to speed again. The software company where I work had a number of german customers, so this increased my capacity for conversational German.
For French the scenario begins in the same way: desiring to read Voltaire and Diderot I dusted off my school French and became reasonably proficient in reading 18th century French. However, I decided that 19th and 20th century French was too florid for my limited vocabulary. I also didn't have irate customers conversation partners. But now, to my amazement, I'm doing quite well in Les Miserables, so maybe all is not lost, and maybe ISOLT is finally feasible (stopped 10 years ago around page 50).
I have no formal education in Italian, I read it by considering it a mix-up of French, Latin and musical terms (a bus stop is a Fermata). This helps my with books on art and history, and I can do the usual holiday interactions.
Russian: it is as if there is some dark force in my life that constantly pulls me to Russia. I started learning Russian when I was 15. There were about four more attempts that didn't work out, but during the last four years, since I started singing russian folklore songs, progress is continuing. I can read texts on subjects that I know well, guessing my way through. Writing is painfully slow, as I have to look genders, verb types, declensions and so on. Talking is on holiday level. I listen to podcasts on familiar subjects (science, literature) and sometimes I understand entire sentences.

I plan to discuss the relationships between language and music.

>17 Macumbeira:,19:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaronic_language

I feel ashamed to admit it in such august company, but I really only speak English.

I do, however, have the ability to speak this tongue in 3 different styles, depending on location and circumstance:

- Home county English English
- New Zealand English
- Australian English

I also have tried to learn other languages from time to time: French (at school - took me some years to recover from this and decide I could like the language), German at night school out of choice - I have always loved the sound of this language, then self taught to a very basic level in Russian and Latin, again because I liked the sounds these languages produced.

I keep meaning to have a try at Maori - maybe one day.

I have an interest in how languages emerge, branch out and grow over time.

I also like to delve into lexicography. I buy any book I come across by the lexicographer Eric Partridge who, like me, travelled to the UK via New Zealand and Australia.

Pim:

Russian: it is as if there is some dark force in my life that constantly pulls me to Russia.

I hear you, man! delighted to have you in the group and look forward to your help with Russian. Link between music and language: fantastic!

And welcome also to Zeno, who has one of the most interesting and thoughtful reading logs in Club Read 2009, with a special interest in Phenomenology.

BTW, do please feel free, everyone to start your own threads according to your own language interests.

>21 tomcatMurr: - function of how bad (or improved) my arthritis is at any given moment. I have the bad habit of when my hands don't hurt badly reverting to typing instead of continuing to train/improve Dragon (the voice recognition software). At the moment i'm either taking advantage of having my hands being in pretty decent shape - or being stupid by not just "talking."
While i don't have an iphone..friends who do, and who have tried the free Dragon / Nuance app, have said it works pretty flawlessly. Since the install file for 10.1 is 1.3 gigs in size, the seeming effectiveness on an iphone kindof blows me away.

All right, all right,

I have been appropriately spoken to and I apologize for the theatrics. sobs silently It won't happen again. (Unless I am in need of another laugh.)

So Porius, I remain suspended in anticipation: what IS the meaning of that phrase? I have been making up my own versions ("I will see, and you will hear about it," said the blind man to his deaf followers) but I am sure the original is much better.

Robert, a dropout from a master's program in linguistics: hail! I was heading that way myself but the winds of fortune blew me in another direction.

Pim: Voltaire is one of my great heroes. I admire your fortitude in pursuing French in order to be able to read him. Last summer in France I picked him up in French but I confess I have been reading him in English instead. And Russian, well. I have a love/hate relationship. I started learning it in grade school in Czechoslovakia, rammed down all our throats. Then the Russians OCCUPIED Czechoslovakia, which did not endear them to the populace. But of course how can one NOT love Dostoevsky and Chekhov. And the language IS so beautiful, so musical.

Zeno: all I know about Maori is from The Bone People which I loved. I would love to learn it myself.

This is SUCH a great group, Murr. Thanks for thinking of it.

I am A_Musing and I have failed to learn as many languages as some of you speak, and hope, some day, to fail to learn as many languages as Lola has actually learned. Because I do not give up easily.

I am particularly bad at Latin, which I spent the most time on, all through high school, before I went to college and failed to learn either Spanish or Greek. Nonetheless, while in college, I found I could make a respectable living typing professors' books, because I did not fail at typing, and moreover found books written in other languages fetched a premium, because they required mastery of funky keyboard commands on what was at the time a clunky mainframe computer system with a dot command word processing system, and so I can type in several languages, even using the Cyrillic or Greek alphabets, even if I can't read them (though it has been a while since I've used this skill).

Some of my interests in language may be very different than others here. We have very strong strains of dyslexia and dysgraphia in my family, which require great effort and thought to overcome. My now 12 year old daughter, who now reads a book a day, was once told by a reading teacher that she should accept that she would never read fluently. So I have spent a fair bit of time, and my wife even more time, dealing with people doing interesting sorts of research on language acquisition and literacy from the perspective of overcoming learning disabilities. In particular, Maryanne Wolf, whose Proust and the Squid is an attempt to deliver some of her ideas in a form accessible to a more general audience, was absolutely phenomenal at a practical level in helping our kids.

Thank you TomcatMurr for inviting me to this wonderful group. My name is Anna, and in college my majors were Spanish and French literature. I learned Arabic as well and I lived in Arabic speaking countries for several years (Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt). I speak the Egyptian dialect (Arabic differs extremely between countries). My son is now taking German of which I know a few words.

My sons were raised to be bilingual, but when I separated from my Egyptian husband and moved to the US three years ago they stopped using Arabic much (though they still speak it conversationally to each other).

My degree is actually supposedly a linguistic degree so I took four semesters of linguistics courses but they were all quite introductory. However I did have to read Foucault and Barthes and those guys. No Chomsky for some reason though I have read lots of his political stuff.

Language always fascinates me and I often read the linguistic blogs "Language Log" and "Language Hat" and other things like that. I'm glad to be here!

22 - 23 Thanks Pim for your interesting link and allow me to be peculiar about our mothertongue. We do indeed speak the same language but you have not experienced our cultural oppression and the resulting inferiority complex. I am of that generation which have been asked at school to speak ABN. The B being ofcourse very insulting for the common of us.

Ironicaly at age 12, I was speaking Dutch with a heavy Surinaams accent even peppered with some Neger- Engels, ( being the only white boy in the class for the last four years ).

I made quite an impression when I went back to school in Belgium. : )

Thank you for the invitation to this group, Murr.

I have no particular language skills. I speak and write English. This is a disease we Americans suffer. That's it. I know the usual smattering of phrases a person picks up after sixty-five years living in the US. Wie gehts, estoy muy bien, n'est ce pas, nyet (usually accompanied by banging a shoe) and so forth. I once made a joke about this representing multiple languages I speak, but it was just a joke.

On the other hand, I took a minor in Classical Greek which I have forgotten most of over the years, which is a real shame because I had great plans for reading my way through the Greeks in the original (or what we have of them anyway). You can see I'm quite a parenthetical sort of guy.

During my college career I took several language courses aimed at teachers, although I had no interest in a teaching degree, simply because of my fascination with learning and language.

I'm interested in all aspects of language, both spoken and written. I'm curious about the mechanics of language as well as how language mediates our interaction with and understanding of one another and the cocoon of existence surrounding us. I am fascinated by the demagoguery going around these days, on both sides of the spectrum.

Probably the most intense look at the nature of language in human interactions I've read is Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu. I enjoyed the way he trashed the use of language by the followers of Heidegger, not because I know anything about Heidegger, but I knew some people in college who wished to be Heideggarians. They seemed to have this know it all attitude that only the cognoscenti have. I dislike ego trips and the abuse of power, and didn't care much for them. I suppose Heidegger's language is obfuscatory and obscure because he was dealing with deep subjects, but I find any thought that can't be communicated in plain, easy to understand, everyday language, either isn't worth having, or has not yet been completely thought through. That's not to say it should be simple to understood, but there's no need to hide meaning in the cracks of obfuscation, unless you have something difficult to sell and need to shroud it in mystery to make it worthwhile. I foun bd the Heideggerians mostly of the authoritarian bent. A personality type with very little to say to me.

I once took an exam from a professor of the Chicago School (whatever that may mean) on the subject of the unreliability of language. I wrote fifteen hundred plus words on the fact that my paper was bullshit, no matter what I said, the unreliability, the incompatibility between language and the inability to accurately communicate a thought via language turned everything, ultimately into bullshit. I guess it was okay when he was skewering philosophers he didn't like, but it wasn't okay to carry his conclusions to their absurd extremes. He didn't like it, gave me an "F". Needless to say I was pissed. After all the entire class had been on the unreliability of language, what was wrong with pointing out the problem this kind of thinking represents for the success of communication, any communication. Oh well, I guess he was only serious about that if it wasn't his ox being gored.

Of course this proved what Bourdieu said about Heideggerians. I guess they are more a philosophical club than anything else. A club with stringent rules, understanding the gobbledygook as being the most important.

It is this essential lack of reliability in language that has me all ears when it comes to post-modern relativism. I am a great believer that the Tower of Babel was a post modern construction of the world. I believe in absolute truth, not rolling our own reality as we go along. that's what we've been doing for the last eight or nine years and you see where it got us. Allow me to clarify my belief in absolute truth. There is a truth to everything in existence, we have not yet necessarily arrived at all truths.

I despise the use of language as a tool of power. I understand the need for power, but I am opposed to power for the sake of power and we seem to have way too much of that going around in our country right now. Mostly, once again, based on the quicksand of an ever shifting foundation. We just experienced a government that just made it up as they went along. Created their own reality out of whole cloth and now are all upset that, not bearing much relationship to the reality most of us live and have our being in, the American people have decided to stop following them.

I am most interested in language as a tool in the never ending struggle to see what is in front of our nose.

Finally, (yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus). I am intimidated by my surroundings, both here and in Le Salon proper. I like to think of myself as a reasonably bright but unpolished student. I get a little hinky and tend to go quiet when people start discussions with, "I asked my students this, that, and the other thing." Having been a student of some very bright people, I realize two things: I enjoy learning, and I really don't know all that much. The more I learn, the worse this ratio gets. Go figure!

Thanks again for inviting me, I hope this hasn't bored you too badly, and I hope to learn quite a bit about language. For my attacks on post-modernism above, I limit them strictly to the idea that truth is what the consensus makes it out to be. Anyone who knows anything about chaos theory knows the importance of being as straight up with the truth as it is possible to be. The truth of something is what existence is working with and reality doesn't give two hoots in hell about our home-grown, alternate constructions. It is incumbent upon us to know what's real, not what we want to be real. I took a few undergrad courses in post modern lit which I didn't really care for. I have a BA in Literary Studies. I worked toward a Masters in Humanities (an interdisciplinary degree) but had to drop out for personal reasons.

I look forward to this group. Thanks, again for the invite.

>10 tomcatMurr: Murrushka,

The software program is the deluxe version of BYKI (Before You Know It). You can try out a free version of it on the Internet, or you can pay and download the full version. Transparent Language, the company providing BYKI, offers a lot of different languages. I have the French and Swedish versions. The program is basic. I do like the way the BYKI uses repetition and the addition of new words for practice. I supplement with two Swedish grammar textbooks so I can learn conjugation, declension, etc. The program does not provide this information.

I purchased BYKI so I could hear the sounds "semi-properly" as I have no one with whom to converse on a daily basis. BYKI also has a section that provides a sound graph of a word as it is pronounced. One can then speak into a microphone and try to match the graph. I doubt it is much good, but just for kicks I mean to have some friends of mine from France try that section to see how well they score. I suspect that this feature will prove to be something of a joke.

Additionally, I am learning songs as singing seems to work better than anything else for me. I have a decent collection of Swedish music. I am also watching a lot of films. If anyone has suggestions for accessible and good Swedish language films with English subtitles (even though the subtitles usually leave much to be desired), I would like appreciate recommendations.

A decent alternative for learning/polishing one's language skills may be the method I have been using while reading Les Mis. Baron von Kindle has kindly provided me with the French version of the text from PG, which I am translating. I am also listening to the free French language version of the text available for download through Libre Vox. Unfortunately, this method is time consuming; consequently, I have only read a few pages of Les Mis and cannot participate in the conversation on Le salon.

urania

P.S. Yes >11 polutropos: (Andruska). You are a diva.

P.P.S. I hate being an insular American with few opportunities for learning other languages. Fortunately the immigration of native Spanish speakers is increasingly making the acquisition of Spanish a necessity for Americans.

Hi, everybody. I'm amazed at the linguistic brains we have in here. I speak and write English tolerably well. I studied Spanish in school. (I wanted to learn French instead, but my mother insisted that as I lived in Texas, French would be useless. Lo, these many years later as a composer & grad student, I'm surrounded by French speakers and have dim hopes of making it to Paris for a semester or two. Thanks, Mom.) Used to read and write very well in Spanish, and speak and listen somewhat poorly. Now I need a dictionary rather more often than I should.

I did speak Spanish well enough to sort of communicate with the Spanish speakers who called in while I was at my job scheduling outpatient procedures for a hospital, back in undergrad. So I still know such useful and often awkwardly constructed phrases as, "¿Qué es su fecha de nacimiento?," "¿Quiere una cita para una mamografía?", and "¿Qué tipo de seguro tiene?".

I have to learn to read another language in the next couple of years. I supposedly learned to read Italian a few years ago while I was doing my master's degree, but to state so outright would be stretching the definitions of "learned," "read," and possibly "Italian." French would be much more useful to me now, so that's the plan.

Hello everybody, and thank you Murr for inviting me too!

Alas, I do not know as many languages as most of you do, and am only fluent in Italian (my mother tongue) and English.
I used to know Latin and ancient Greek, which I studied for a good number of years, and some German.
I can say I have forgotten most of the three, even if I can still read all with a dictionary's help. I can also read a decent amount of Spanish and French although I cannot speak either.

In my younger days I used to translate, mostly from English into Italian, in a variety of subjects (medicine, engineering, mathematics, pharmacology) and eventually focused on art.
Lack of time (my daily job became too demanding) and parental responsibilities forced me to give up.
It seems that my daughter, who is now almost 22, is gifted with a particular ability to learn foreign languages. All my three children are fluent in Italian, which they learned before English, but she has an excellent ear for different languages, among which Mandarin Chinese.

Anyway, it is a pleasure to be here, and I am sure I shall learn a lot from all of you.

Well! This is fun! I'm Martin, and I am pleased to (re-)make everyone's acquaintance. I am fluent in the English of the Canadian West Coast, the emerging distinctive features of which I study in school and which are few and subtle but not the less interesting for all that; I am also fluent in Standard English, as it is virtually identical to my dialect. I speak Austrian German quite well with a Carinthian accent, which I cherish, as my mother is from near Klagenfurt and we spent a good deal of time going back and forth when I was a kid. I later attended German school in Canada and took some courses in university, so my German is an unholy mix of the Austrian that feels homey and good to me and High German, of which I am trying to expunge every last trace. I read High German (Hochdeutsch) better than I read Austrian, however.

I speak enough Japanese to yammer on happily in social situations, but not enough to use it at work unless people are making allowances; I used to have around 1000 kanji, but I have not been in Japan in a few years now and my reading level has become essentially nonexistent. I have high-school French and probably fifty phrases of Turkish from a few months there last year, which I count among my languages only because I think Turkish is lovely.

I think I have been involved with language in just about every way I'd care to, meaning as a dilettante, mostly; in seven-going-on-eight years of university I've moved from English/German lit to creative writing to "professional writing" (journalism/communications-type laffs) to an MA in "English language", which ostensibly was about philosophy of lang and rhetoric and discourse analysis and things like that, but which in my case turned out to be more sociolinguistics and dialectology--looking at dialectal variation in phonology has led me into phonology and phonetics in their own right, and when my MA is done I intend to complete an MSc in speech pathology and become a clinician. My current research project (which I am doing in lieu of a thesis) is about "creaky voice" as a gender marker in young West Coast speakers, and if anyone is interested in knowing more, I will be happy to bore them comprehensively.

I've done a little bit of translating and an ass-pile of copyediting, and I'm excited to talk to all of you about all aspects of writing and speech.

Klagenfurt

Celovec. :)

Hmmmm.

Lola,

mysterious as ever.

I suspect that the Serbian word above is the same as the Russian Celovek and Slovak Clovek, which can be translated most obviously literally as "person" but can perhaps be a swear word, or exclamation? As in "what a lowlife???" or "Damn it, from there? Can any good come out of Nazareth/Klagenfurt?"

That is called "grasping" in translation circles. LOL

No, it's not a Serbian word, it's the name of the Slovenian town the Austrians call Klagenfurt.

Both Cs are pronounced similarly to ts in tsar: Tselovets.

But it was a lovely theory, was it not???? :-)

I think I prefer the etymology of the Slovenian name from Latin (must admit I don't remember which Latin word or phrase, though.)

"Man" (or "person", in the sense of German "Mann") is človek in Slovenian; čovjek in Croatian, čovek in Serbian.

>37 LolaWalser: Ha, I am not to be drawn into any Central European tribal disputes:) Should a rowdy crew of South Slavs care to get together and tear down all the signs saying Klagenfurt and Kärnten and put up signs saying Celovec and Koroška and kick anyone who calls them "Windisch" in the pants, I will cheer, and then we can all dance a merry jig on Jörg Haider's grave. But surely "Klagenfurt" qualifies as the English name too? The Greeks and Finns and Hungarians and Egyptians don't raise a fuss when we call their countries by names inherited from third parties (some of them dastardly imperialists) instead of going with Hellas andSuomi and Magyarorszag and al-Misr.

I mean, I know that's a whole conversation in itself:)

Welcome to all the newcomers!

A_musing, I hope you will share with us some of your experiences and insights about language acquisition and literacy in connection with learning disabilities. Dyslexia is especially intriguing.

Anna, welcome welcome!!!. It's great to have a speaker of Arabic in the group. I know nothing about the language, and am excited about learning more from you. Thank you for adding those links to le links to le cool language sites thread.

Gene, what can I say? Thank you for your thoughtful and passionate introduction. Not at all boring, just rather ...Dense? Thick, Creamy? Rich? There are many, many ideas there worth exploring:

I am most interested in language as a tool in the never ending struggle to see what is in front of our nose.

I despise the use of language as a tool of power.

I'm sure les amateurs will join me saying hear hear!

Medellia hugs hugs hugs. Do you approve of Das Hintergrundmusik? I hope you will share with us your travails (INTERNATIONAL MULTILINGUAL PUN ALERT) in learning French.

Aluvalibri hugs hugs hugs! I'm so glad you joined us! (ONLY fluent in Italian and English, she says, we should all be so lucky to be fluent in that most beautiful of languages, Italian, I mean.)

And Martin, Welcome welcome to the group: Phonology and phonetics!!!! Wow! We are all looking forward to being bored comprehensively!

I don't particularly care what the English call Celovec, but I'm not surprised if it's "Klagenfurt", for so many reasons, from sheer ignorance of the history and the makeup of the region, to racism and xenophobia they traditionally exhibit toward the Slavs (as do others...) Moreover, Slavic languages are so, I've been told, "odd", "unwieldy". Many, many Slavic towns are known in the West by their German, Italian and other non-Slavic names--I'm sure Andrew can come up with Slovak and Czech examples.

Anyway, I like to mention this when I get a chance for the same reason gays claim visibility: in order to exist. And it's not a Central European phenomenon: I've yet to meet an Irishman or a Scotsman indifferent to be taken for an Englishman. Too many people in Europe keep their history and origins in occultation out of fear anyway.

Oh, and--this is mere conversation, I'd hate to sound preachy. Being quadruple-ethnic by my nearest ancestors (not to mention the older ones), I have a particularly complicated relationship to these things; one of my hobby-horses, I'm afraid.

One thing that strikes me from the introductions so far, and from the brief exchanges to others' introductions, is that language and identity are so interlinked. Mac and Pim, Lola and Polu and Martin, all areas for potential conflict as different people use different signs for the same things. Highly emotive. WHo says language is dull! Not I say I!

>44 LolaWalser: You ride that horse, girl!!!!!!!!!

I think one of the problems especially with slovak names -at least for me- is the sheer difficulty of pronouncing them from their orthography, I mean I have no idea to how to say 'Celovec', but 'Klagenfurt' is clearer, (apart from the fact that I know German.) Polish names and words are especially difficult in this regard.

But I agree with you completely when you say this:

Too many people in Europe keep their history and origins in occultation out of fear anyway.

I'd like to say a few words to les lurkers, or those who might possibly perhaps perchance mayhap be feeling in the shadow and therefore reluctant to introduce themselves due to the fact that they only speak one language -English.

Le Salon Des Amateurs de la Langue is not only about translation or about multilingualism, but about all aspects of language. So even if you only speak English, even if you have never tried to learn another language, you still have a relationship with your own language that we want to hear about! Speak up, let your voice be heard! Don't be shy to ask questions or help yourself to more vodka.

I have no idea to how to say 'Celovec', but 'Klagenfurt' is clearer

But that's exactly it--why is "Klagenfurt" is clearer? It's more likely that you (I mean generally anyone who feels like this) simply doesn't know how to pronounce it. As it happens, Slovenian has one of the easiest pronunciations, it's completely phonetic (as is also true for Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian...) One needs to learn German pronunciation in order to pronounce German correctly and there are ten times the rules for it as for Slovenian.

This is a digression, ...

Outrageous.

I don't know if it's an American thing, though, Lola. Even here in Taiwan, students are given English names in addition to their Chinese names and vice versa: I have a Chinese name which I have to use on all official documents.

Some English names chosen (for them) by Taiwanese people are quite bizarre: I once had a student called 'Onion'. I suggested, respectfully, that it was not quite appropriate, but he was quite happy with it and refused to change it. I also had a case where an employee in a company for 20 years was forced to change his English name because the new boss - Singapore Chinese - had the same English name.

Outrageous.

But Taiwan and Hong Kong lean away from mainland in all kinds of ways, no? I think it's semi-political, semi-economic strategy. I notice on my wushu films (Taiwanese and Cantonese all) practically all the actors have English first names.

Although, as it happens, my big fave and crush (though he's a geezer by now) is All-Chinese: Ti Lung.

Okay, now THAT digression could take us far and away... :)

Lola! Come back!

*shaking her as she goes off into a Ti Lung induced trance*

44 45 46 huh ?

Too many people in Europe keep their history and origins in occultation out of fear anyway.

What the hell ? It is our last line of defense before we will be oblitered by mass-culture ! Allow us smaller tribes to have our particularities !
We don't want to live in a dull world after all. My history and my origins are a big chunk of my identity and if we protect it, it is not because of fear, it is because of our pride !

My history and my origins are a big chunk of my identity and if we protect it, it is not because of fear, it is because of our pride !

Mac, I think that's what Lola means, but I think she was talking about the Slavic/East European/Northern Balkans peoples, who have often had to keep their identity secret since the early 90s. Steady on there.

Lola, before we go further in this conversation, could you elucidate the sentence :
Too many people in Europe keep their history and origins in occultation out of fear anyway.

I want to be sure I understand your remark correctly. : )

Mac sits down again, fills his glass, leans back and waits...

MY GOD WHY ARE MY POSTS SO LONG.

>49 tomcatMurr:

A friend studied in mainland China and lived with a host family. The English names of her host sister and the host sister's best friend were, respectively, Snoopy and Woodstock.

I hear what Lola is saying about the renaming epidemic and do agree. I think it is also interesting how often language classes in the US encourage the students to choose new names in the foreign language. Does this happen much in Europe? I'm not talking about me picking up a Chinese name, which is more understandable to my mind; I'm talking about my friend John being pressured to go Juan when he took Spanish, then Johann when he tried German. I'm pretty sure the German tongue can pronounce a comprehensible John if need be; the Chinese tongue might have a bigger problem with my birth name, Anna Lafayette. (Anna is nasal and my Southern relatives have forced a twang into Laugh-hey-yet, but my Chinese mother can't help but mutate it to En-ah Lah-fa-ye-tuh, which, while an improvement on the Lafayette, still does not quite cut it.)

Since this post is super long already I might as well welcome myself. I have studied many languages but I'm afraid I don't have the memory for it. I know English, which I am quite satisfied with. My Mandarin is all right but reading characters has recently become torture. I'm not very good at playing the intellectual so if I ask you a totally dumb question, sounding like some sort of a sarcastic teenybopper or whatever, no, it is not a dumb question, it is just a question, possibly from a dumb person, so, like, just answer it, please, or whatever, I don't even care, okay.

And I too am interested in hearing Lola expound on that sentence.

amaranthic,

Welcome! And I don't think I'd be presumptuous in declaring on everyone else's behalf that there is, in fact, no such thing as a post that's too super-long here in Le Salon des Amateurs de la Langue. Weeeee ... absolutely welcome what others might perceive as excessive loquacity!

--deleting this post, as it was indeed duplicated below --

My post seems to be lost - though I've found in the past that when I repost, it usually appears twice. If that happens, forgive me. Solla here. About Americanizing names, I have been told that Solla is Scandinavian or Arabic, and a Polish friend told me her sister was named Solla, but it got changed to Sally by immigration officials on coming to the U.S. I cringe at that. Solla is not my birth name, I made it up. It is my legal name though.

I admit I feel inferior when it comes to anything concerning fluency in a language, or traveling to different places. I never even left the country aside from short trips to Tijuana when I was a child so my brothers could get cheap haircuts, until I was 50 and spent 3 weeks in Barcelona for my job, and then nine days in Mexico. The first language I studied was Latin, God knows why, except it was what smart kids did in Virginia where I was in 8th grade. I tried to switch to Spanish in 9th grade, but the counselor wouldn't let me, saying I needed two years of a language to get into college so I had to stick with Latin. I was pretty good at translation, but it being a dead language, never had it speak it. After Latin, I took German in high school. Later I took a grad course in reading German, and I got to the point of reading Siddartha in German. In college I took a couple of years of Russian. Russian is hard, difficult to pronounce and has all the declensians and conjugations of Latin. Aside from that I've studied Spanish on my own and I can read some things - history seems easier than novels. But, as for speaking, I'm really nowhere with any of them. I can get by a little with Spanish (don't know how it sounds to natives, though) but I can't understand anyone who is not speaking very slowly to me.

What fascinates me about language is how my Russian teacher told me that Russian had a word for goodbye at the end of a visit in someone's house (I've forgotten it), that meant, "forgive me" because they thought that after a visit in someone's home that they must inevitably have done something to offend them. And how birth in Spanish is expressed as "coming into the light".

And about diagramming sentences - in 9th grade an English teacher challenged everyone to write a sentence with 17 prepositions. I don't remember why anymore, but I did it. When I gave it to her, she asked me if I could diagram it. Well, the truth was that I could have, and that in some way it was a challenge that appealed to me, but my belief as a ninth grader was that diagramming sentences wasn't needed to learn to speak well, and shouldn't be required, so I shrugged her off. The next day, this teacher brought me back my sentence, neatly diagrammed. I was impressed really, and a little ashamed of myself for not doing something that really did appeal to me. I felt like she was telling me that things like that really were important enough to follow through.

Welcome Solla and Amaranthic! I'm delighted that you both could join us.

Annalafayette (I love that name btw, so ...ornate) it will be great to have another Mandarin speaker in the group (we can gossip in Chinese and no one will understand us, one of the great benefits of learning a foreign language, duei bu duei?) And NO ONE should be ashamed of asking what seem like dumb questions. Tell you a secret: it was MAC's question in le salon: "what is philosophy of language" that gave me the flash of inspiration to start the group. So there! (Not that that was a stupid question, Mac... oh dear, I'll shut up now.)

Solla, my belief as a ninth grader was that diagramming sentences wasn't needed to learn to speak well, and shouldn't be required, so I shrugged her off.
Actually, I think your reaction as a ninth grader was totally correct, imo. I have never understood the value of diagramming sentences in order to be able to speak a language. You will be happy to know that this approach is now frowned upon in language learning. (I assume you will be happy.....)

'forgive' and 'coming into the light', these are exactly the kind of linguistic quirks that really get my juices flowing. May I confess that i am now moist? I hope you will start a thread to collect more of these everyday idioms.

oh and about length, le longuer, le better.

Enrique, thank you for your welcome. My post was longer before but then I shortened it out of shyness. Just wait until I loosen up - you'll never get a straight response out of me again. I'm afraid that with internet posts my policy is to keep typing until savage thirst drives me to remove my hands from the keyboard and reach for my yerba mate.

I also love the Russian "forgive me." I have always wanted to learn Russian but have never really gotten down to it. Nabokov has a short passage in his Lectures on Russian Literature (I'm capitalizing because that is the title of the collection) - I believe it is in the essay on Gogol's "The Overcoat" - where he talks about how "all great literary achievements are phenomenons of language and not ideas" and therefore the only way to get to Gogol is to read him in the original. My paraphrase makes it trite and unexciting - Nabokov too is a phenomenon of language and not ideas - but it is actually quite a beautiful little passage on the Russian language and made me run out and buy a dictionary which I have never since cracked.

Murr, you're right, Mandarin would absolutely come in useful as a secret language. It's funny though, I swear a lot in English - I'm afraid I'm one of those simple-minded fools the intellekshuls are always warning about, the ones without enough imagination to keep from throwing feces around or however the admonishment goes - but I am not a successful swearer in Mandarin. Once a long time ago I got into a drunken fistfight with some kid from Beijing and tried to put all the swears I had learned from Ba Jin to use, but unfortunately I had failed to notice that the text I had gotten the swears from had been censored (qu ta ma de --> qu ta X de). After that I tried to get my swear words from the dictionary but it turns out that my slang dictionary is for Cantonese, not Mandarin. But hey, something about reading Cantonese slang with standard Mandarin pronunciation appeals to me, you know?

Now for my nightly neurotic ritual of whiskey and sleep.

HAHA! Amaranthic you totally crack me up!

Nabakov is a phenomenon of language and not ideas.
AWESOME!

(Some of you will have noticed I have a fondness for American youth speak.)

With the erudition exhibited here, I think I'll stick to questions and refrain from answering. One cannot ask a stupid question, or so it goes. But answering..?

Mac, leans back in his Chesterfield and serves himself a glass of Aloxe - Corton.
and enjoys the mindstorm...

Life can be a spectator sport.

macumbeira

Allow us smaller tribes to have our particularities !

Er--that's exactly what I'm arguing for. I think we're on the same side of this one. :)

Murrmurr- I thoroughly approve of Das Hintergrundmusik.

I find that American youth speak is popping up in my head of late. I'm working on an octet right now that is heavily focused on the tubular bells. The downside of this is that as a child, I was raised on a late '80s cartoon called the Teenange Mutant Ninja Turtles, so what constantly comes unprompted into my head is, "AWESOME! TUBULAR! RADICAL!"

I also found this.... website of sorts.
http://tubularradicalawesome.ytmnd.com/

Murr (no trying to hypnotise unsuspecting posters with pics of fine young flesh!!)

I think she was talking about the Slavic/East European/Northern Balkans peoples, who have often had to keep their identity secret since the early 90s.

Actually, I was thinking of a much longer and more general history of almost any group threatened by or subsumed territorially by another. Depending on who the overlords du jour were, the Slovenians (to stick to people whose example is at the beginning of my response) underwent waves of germanisation, magyarisation, italianisation--political attempts to destroy Slovenian language (which boils down to destroying identity) and replace it by another's.

Once a Slovenian nation state was established (as we know, it took several forms to reach the current shape), the Slovenian identity had a "safe" harbour--but unfortunately there are still many places where it's better not to be Slovenian, not even vestigially. It's this "occultation" I was talking about--not a completely voluntary assimilation, rather a forced one, subtly and not so subtly (and this happens even in regions where the "occulted" are numerically dominant, as often happens along political borders).

Anyway--I think the conclusion is that you can take language out of politics, but you can't take politics out of language. ;)

I am so not worthy tcM (seriously) so thanks even more for the invitation to join this group!

If I am a lover of language, and I am, I am a jealous paranoid Parisian cine noir lover - with a broken nose - sitting on a bar stool, smoking a cigarette, watching from the shadows, as that whore Contessa Lala Linguissima sashays about the tables, flirting like a slut with a dozen tall dark and handsome ideas, cultures, and fads. Who knows what she might pick up, in the course of an evening? But I hate sleeping alone! And always take her back. Even though I wake every morning, look at her puffy face and tabac stained teeth with self-hatred, and find myself itching from a bad case of the puns.

Then of course, I have this paraphilia for mama Marina's mammary patina, that mischievous cunning linguist -

http://www.hotforwords.com/2009/12/14/mischievous-part-deux/

I've had a reasonably good education for an amerikun. Fours years of French, two years of Latin, half a year of Greek. (Got an A in all of 'em - once upon a brain) I also once taught myself the Russian alphabet, inspired by a biography of Peter the Great, and found it interesting how many French terms had crossed the borders to St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad whatever. I'm terribly lazy, tho. And that was that for the Cyrillic.

I suppose if I traveled more, I would know at least 25 ways to say "where's the bathroom"? But as anyone who has every visited NYC can tell you, that doesn't actually mean there is a bathroom for YOU my friend - unless you buy something (ah, Freud, gilt, feces, guilt...and then there's the problem of toilet paper...but I digress)

As I grow older, and even more taciturn, I have come to worship silence. I usually answer my wife's questions with a 15 second delay...even questions like "your toast is burning?"

Zen rings my chimes, and I'm quite sure I was once burned for my gnostic beliefs a long long time ago.

And yet, and yet, I write...right?...a hypocrite but author (of sorts), and semblance of a friend...or frere or friar or a fryer in hell.

All of my posts, without exception, are quite long.

Mine, too.

Robert

!

&

‽

∞

>67 LolaWalser: I think we're all on the same side, which is pleasant. I unconditionally endorse everything you're saying here--I do, however, have difficulty extending it to the matter of familiar names, the kind you feel in the bones. While I understand and support the implications of using Celovec as opposed to Klagenfurt, it would feel as unnatural to me as referring to Vancouver (where I live) as S'ólh Téméxw instead of calling it after the Dutch captain who "discovered" it. When I speak of Celovec/Klagenfurt, it's in a cultural context that makes "Klagenfurt" feel right (i.e., to German-Austrian family and friends). That doesn't mean things don't change--nobody in English would ever refer to "Laibach" anymore, and I have the sense (without being able to prove it) that 'Ljubljana" is the more common term in German too. Here in BC, we've just officially changed the name of the former Queen Charlotte Islands to Haida Gwaii. I guess I just mean, things do change for the better, but it's also important to understand where people are coming from:)

I do note that the city's name is interestingly complicated--the below is copied from Wikipedia:

Carinthia's eminent linguists Primus Lessiak and Eberhard Kranzmayer assumed that the city's name, which literally translates as "ford of lament" or "ford of complaints", had something to do with the superstitious thought that fateful fairies or demons tend to live around treacherous waters or swamps. In Old Slovene cviljovec is a place haunted by such a wailing female ghost or cvilya.2 Thus they assumed that Klagenfurt's name was a translation by the German settlers of the original Slovene name of the neighbouring wetland. However, the earliest Slovene mention of Klagenfurt in the form of "v Zelouzi" ('in Celovec', the Slovene name for Klagenfurt) dating from 16153 is 400 years younger and thus appears to be a translation from German. The latest interpretation, on the other hand, is that the Old Slovene cviljovec itself goes back to an Italic l'aquiliu meaning a place at or in the water, which would make the wailing-hag theory obsolete.4
Scholars had at all times attempted to explain the city's peculiar name: In the 14th century the abbot and historiographer John of Viktring translated Klagenfurt's name in his Liber certarum historiarum as Queremoniae Vadus, i.e. "ford of complaint", Hieronymus Megiser, Master of the university college of the Carinthian Estates in Klagenfurt and editor of the earliest printed history of the duchy in 1612, believed to have found the origin of the name in a "ford across the River Glan",5 which, however, is impossible for linguistic reasons. The common people also sought an explanation: A baker's apprentice was accused of theft and executed, but when a few days afterwards the alleged theft turned out to be a mistake and the lad was proved to be totally innocent, the citizens' "lament (= 'Klagen') went forth and forth". This story was reported by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who later became Pope Pius II.6

On the pronunciation thing, I guess the difficulty for English speakers is that they have to have some Slovene orthography? Like, if an English speaker with no knowledge of German says "Klagenfurt" as though it were an English word, all the sounds will be close analogues of the German (a more fronted a and schwa instead of /u/, if you'll forgive the IPAness of those examples, being the most salient differences). Whereas an English speaker with no Slovenian will immediately be confronted by the question "Kelovek or Selovek?" with no way to know that they are meant to read "c" as the /ts/ affricate. That's possibly what was referred to?

>76 MeditationesMartini: Exactly. Thanks for expressing it so well.

Ganeshaka, Welcome! Please please continue your story of your love affair with the Contessa. i was completely gripped!

And I LOVE the link: I feel like thenaughtyhottie has returned!!!!!

I get you, Martin, please don't think I was attacking you! That "Celovec" above was half-teasing, you know. ;)

On the pronunciation thing, I guess the difficulty for English speakers is that they have to have some Slovene orthography?

Again--in order to pronounce German correctly you have to know the rules of German pronunciation; same goes for Slovenian. Now, in this specific case, perhaps an English speaker without any knowledge of non-English alphabets can approximate "Klagenfurt" better than "Celovec", but, not knowing German rules he can't KNOW that he pronounced it correctly. So, that is mere coincidence. It's specific to that instance--it is not true generally for German vs. Slovenian. (I.e. there are hundreds of opposite examples--where the Slovenian name is "easier" to approximate--pronounce correctly--for that putative English speaker than the German one.)

While I understand and support the implications of using Celovec as opposed to Klagenfurt, it would feel as unnatural to me as referring to Vancouver

Yes, of course, but out of curiosity--did you even know the Slovenian name before this? If you visited there, it's possible (the signs being bilingual, if nothing else), but if not...? In my experience, it happens too often that people don't know these things, whereas sometimes they are very important, in what they suggest of the situation--as in the case of Celovec, where people of Slav/Slovenian origin are still a majority, although the town is technically within Austrian borders... nowadays.

And again, the reason why I think it's important to mention this when an opportunity comes up is precisely because it tends to be widely ignored, not just passively, but actively. (Why some groups of people--Jews, Slavs, blacks, women, your-entry-here) are or have been actively "ignored" is of course a whole slew of other, huge debates). Basically, writing out of history, politics, power structures etc.

My mission here is done! :)

Lola my love, no explanations needed, ever:) knew you were teasing--uncalled--for earnestness is, alas, my flaw. That and I'm allergic to beestings.

(Also, =)=)=)

This: Now, in this specific case, perhaps an English speaker without any knowledge of non-English alphabets can approximate "Klagenfurt" better than "Celovec", but, not knowing German rules he can't KNOW that he pronounced it correctly. So, that is mere coincidence. It's specific to that instance--it is not true generally for German vs. Slovenian.

is very true, and very eloquently put. I actually did know the Slovenian name, but that is mere coincidence based on having some familiarity with the town/being a word nerd/liking to imagine an alternative world in which a cosmopolitan multicultural Central Europe exists in 2009 instead of a succession small, insular, right-wing, immigrant-unfriendly places like modern Austria. (I'm no Habsburg irredentist, but the hopelessly romanticized idea of a federal Danubina state and no 20th-century fascist wave always did appeal to me). Doing a quick google, I see a fair number of people using both names with a slash or just going Celovec, although certainly Klagenfurt is dominant. One question, though:are you sure people of Slovene origin are a majority? Or do you mean "people,originally of Slovene origin, but thoroughly Austrianized/German-speaking/with German names/etc.?" All the people I met there were Hubers and Starks and Strausses and things like that. I'm not doubting you; I'm just surprised and would like to learn more!

now look you two, this is a welcome thread. Please take it outside, or get a room. ok?

How about a thread on orthograhy, or on the complexity of Mid European linguistic history, Lola, lovely luscious lola, lola light of my life, fire of my loins?

Wow, TCM, you are the most active moderator I have ever seen. By gum these threads are going to be organized! You are giving EF a run for his money!

Yeah, how 'bout a little less activity - and more disorganization - tomcat!

Isn't it enough that five (5!!!) of your freaking threads are in the top 100 on Hot Topics (even though the group is still private!) and that you're demolishing le salon on Hot Topics as well! THANKS A LOT TOMCAT!

I've had to resort to opening threads featuring mooses mating with inanimate objects just to try and keep up with you, jerk.

oh Anna, your comment throws me into paroxysms of anxiety? is it too much? I'm a moderating virgin, so I may get the balance wrong. I am also exceptionally anal about structure and organisation and like things to be nice and tidy.

If I get too bossy, it means my litter tray needs to be changed, and you can just put me outside for a while, ok?

got the wrong thread sorry. was meant for Philosophy of Language thread, where it fit somewhat better, I believe. once again how can you forgive me for fucking up so badly.

So this is what they mean by "thread rot":)

Keep that tomcat and his loins away from me! I'm too poor to raise a gaggle of kittens!

Martin--yes; either; "occultation" and all that--but I agree it's time to get off the welcome mat and let others enter. See you in other threads!

Kid named Onion my favorite post so far. Could it have been a PaRappa reference? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZcV1UuUzI

I know I have read a book with a kid named Onion in it. At least I am pretty sure...

I don't often enough see the term "occultation" effectively deployed, so that was a close second.

88
Ahem. Some of have been in occultation for some time now. Or would be if we could keep our big mouths shut.

For an historical antecedent, see The Living Imam. You may note that I managed to write my review when I was eight years old, possibly before Tim Spalding was a gleam in anyone's eye. If that doesn't prove I'm the Messiah, then brother I give up.

#81, 82, 83

Murr,

PLEASE no paroxysms of anxiety.

This is the most fun since....hmmm...I don't have any idea when I've had quite this much fun.

Continue to organize, to be active and be assured that the balance, YOUR balance, is just perfect.

And bossy? You ever bossy? I just cannot imagine that. LOL

Do remember that Le Dictateur, Most Blessed Be His Name, frequently issued imperial fiats, only because it is right for Dictateurs to do so. And you of course are a Dictateur in your own right. So, rule away.

(Which brings me to second your idea, not that le Dictateur's ideas need seconding, that a thread on "the complexity of Mid European linguistic history, Lola, lovely luscious lola, lola light of my life, fire of my loins?" is a spectacular idea, and I would love to participate in it as soon as Lola (known hereafter as LLLLLLOMLFOML) starts it up.

LLLLLLOMLFOML

ROFL

HAHAHAH! brilliant, thank you P.

I would like to welcome my good friend Makifat to the group. Maki (not to be confused with Mackie, our favourite Belgian Waffle OH the intricacies of orthography!!!) can usually be found in the more politically oriented groups, where he stirs s*** in the name of reason and sanity. Maki, it's great to have you here.

Also, we welcome Tim Jones, published poet from the mysterious land at the bottom of the globe (or the top, depending how you hold it): New Zealand. In addition to his own poetry, Tim also is a Russian expert and has been responsible for lifting the profile of the neglected Russian poet Essenin with his translations. Hearty Welcome to you, sire.

what is Waffle OH ?

#92: Thank you for inviting me, tomcatMurr! But I must correct your over-generous characterisation of me as a Russian expert before it takes hold - I have met genuine experts in Russian, and am thus well aware that I am no such thing.

I have a BA in Russian which I completed in 1995, and in the course of this made some translations of Esenin/Yesenin which helped to kick off quite a fruitful LibraryThing thread here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/55769

Other than that, I have bits and pieces - mostly small and isolated bits of pieces - of French, Latin, Spanish and Maori floating round in my head. On my blog, I have interviewed the author and translator of the only two (so far as we know) books of English-Niuean poetry here:

http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2008/12/interview-with-lee-and-nogi-aholima.ht...

and talked about what I like in books of translated poetry here:

http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2008/06/facing-pages.html

This group sounds like a great idea to me - I look forward to some stimulating conversations!

92
Thank you, tomcat. My only reason for being in this group is that I can't refuse an invitation from one of my oldest and dearest LT friends. I have no idea what I could possibly contribute, although I'm happy to lurk.

I am Lisa. Glad to see this group go public! I was raised with some Calabrian dialect, most of which is not polite, started taking French in first grade and ended up with a minor. lo these many moons ago, and am still not fluent. I can read and write, but really must keep the dictionary handy. When I travel, I try to learn a little of the language, and did an okay job of teaching myself enough Italian to get by. Taught myself the cyrillic alphabet about twenty years ago so I could read the subway, street and store signs in Moscow, but have forgotten most of it. Taught myself a little Portugese for a trip to Brazil, and have forgotten that, too. Can understand a little Spanish, but for some reason cannot teach myself to speak it. Go figure! French and Italian, but not Spanish. That's it--so I will mostly lurk in this group. But it sure looks like it will be a good one.

Welcome LisaCurcio! Another Russian Amateur! How wonderful. You might enjoy the Macaronic genesis thread. I am hoping to get the whole of chapter 1 turned nicely into Macaronic, and some input from speakers of Romance and slavic languages would be especially welcome.

Hi all, I've snuck in here today and have no idea what I could contribute, but look forward to reading what I'm sure will be lively exchanges.

Let's see, I'm a native English speaker who has studied both German and French in high school and college and have probably forgotten more than I ever learned. I've picked up a smattering of Spanish through the years and I've just begun studying Mandarin Chinese with a tutor. My daughter has been taking Chinese at school and is studying with said tutor for the past three years. She can read and write about 350-400 characters and is fairly conversational, so she will be a big help to me as I move forward.

Looking forward to following the conversations.

Hello, all. I'm so glad to see this group going public. I'm an American English speaker, specializing in the Upper Midwest dialect (think of the movie Fargo, although like most "city" kids I imagine that I don't have that accent). In high school and college I took some Russian, but now that I'm in my mid-forties I can really only sound out the cyrillic letters, very occasionally hitting upon a word I remember. I took French in college, even going so far as to take various literature classes, including some poetry in middle French. However, even then I was better at reading than speaking, and now an awful lot of my vocabulary is gone.

In graduate school (literature) I took the requisite introduction to linguistics, along with a few classes on contemporary criticism. I spent some time with semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, etc., never really buying into one belief system. I tend to lean toward thinking that language is mostly culturally influenced, and that words are slippery but oh so intriguing because of that very slipperiness. I am most definitely not an expert - I'm able to state my beliefs based on what I "feel" is right, but will be unlikely to back it up with references (probably - mostly - because it's been 20 years since I read any of the reference material, and now that I'm older I have a stronger sense of my own convictions than I ever did in my early twenties. Either I've gained a bit more confidence in myself, or I'm starting to solidify into my always-right grandmother.)

I am one of those strange beings who grew up reading encyclopedias and dictionaries, and who today loves to get out the OED and read through entries until I get sick of reading with a magnifying glass. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens in this new Salon!

I wish Lola would remember that I am supposed to be her this year. She promised. However, if it is any consolation Lola, I have been renamed so many times in my life that I have to look at my driver's license to remember what my name is.

>99 Talbin: Talbin, have you read Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages?

>101 urania1: I put it on my ever-expanding wishlist the moment I heard about it. :-)

It bears reading but is not great. You needn't rush to it.

Robert

Welcome to thealizabet and Talbin! it's great to have you in the group.

Thealizbet, can I ask how old is your daughter? I'm hoping you will be able to share with us your experiences and thoughts in learning Chinese. There are several Amateurs who are learning that language and i think it would be great to get a thread going on that topic.

Talbin, I hope you will find the discussions on semiotics interesting. Don't worry about references and all that stuff. We all have different levels of 'expertise' and everyone's hunches are interesting and valid here: Nous sommes tous les amateurs!

I remind you of Dostoevsky's famous remark about academics: "'The books are there, one can look them up."

I would also like to welcome Kaixo, who so far has not had the chance to introduce her/himself. Kaixo is a German speaker and is very active on the German LT- so great to broaden the salon's language base!

I see from your profile, Kaixo, that you are a fan of Eco. I especially like the quotation from Eco on his library that you have on your profile page. (Check it out amateurs!) Eco was one of the impetuses for me to start this group, Kaixo, so the more Eco readers the better! Again, Welcome!

Welcome to the Salon, horselover-cross, who seems to have just joined LT: double welcome! and to wandering star, who has also just joined us.

And to all the other lurkers out there!
lol

104--Murr, my daughter is almost 14 and is in eighth grade.

When she was six, she began attending a frothy, fun Chinese class that met once a week for an hour. They played games, learned songs, learned how to tell basic stories, etc. Nice exposure. We stumbled on a GREAT tutor when she was in 5th grade and she began to study in earnest. In 6th grade, she began the language program offered at the middle school and kept working with the tutor. Next year, at the high school, she will enter the Honors program and begin with Honors Chinese II. She's good student and is motivated, but the key here is the steady one-on-one with the GREAT tutor.

I've just begun my studies with the tutor in anticipation of my third visit to the mainland in the next couple of years. Would love to hear other's stories about progress with this difficult language.

thealizabet, let's start a thread for this. I agree, hearing about others' experiences will be very interesting and helpful.

We have a number of new Amateurs joining us this week. Please, everybody, let's give a hearty welcome to: Phlox72, cwc790411, and Samjoseph. (If I"ve missed anyobody else, please be lenient, MAikfat's whiskey and I d not a good marriage make. My mother said I should always stick to vodka and she was right.

My good friend Christopher (Cwc790411), and Samjoseph are both teachers of English, the former teaching in Tokyo and the latter in Seoul, I believe. I'm sure they will have lots to contribute to our discussions!

Also welcome to bjza, whose profile picture is TOTALLY relevant to this group (go check it out before he changes it, quick!)

Also, a warm welcome (Ah here at last come the fresh batch of herring, quick, everyone dive in!) to nee-nee, who is also new to LT and has an excellent AWESOME collection of Dickens in her library. And to horselover_cross, who is cross about loving horses, or something. Anyway,

Welcome to all new members!

"pant, pant"
arriving late to the party, as usual, wearing inappropriate outfit and missing a shoe from tripping on the threshold
Sorry I'm late, Murr, and many thanks for inviting me. snatching a herring I would love a nice whiskey (thanks, Makifat)...and after a couple of drinks I'll be so tongue-tied it won't matter what languages I claim to speak.

My first language was American English (northern Indiana) until we moved to the desert southwest. At age six I learned my first foreign words (Japanese) from a missionary aunt who spent her life in Japan (this would prove oddly prophetic). I studied French from 7th grade into college (I can still hear the grinding voice on the vinyl language records: "Harcourt, Brace, and World, Incorporated"). I played around with a couple years of German in HS. Curiosity provoked me to enter Mandarin Chinese class as a college freshman in 1973 (the cold war was thawing, etc., and Chinese teaching materials and methods were stuck in the 1940s). This became my "major". I spent a glorious year in Taipei, Taiwan, at age 21 and one of my life's regrets is that I didn't stay there forever. In Los Angeles I got a job with a Japanese company and attended night school to learn Japanese, married a coworker and now live in Tokyo.

The only point to this narrative is to say that I've mostly learned the least effective ways to acquire second and 3rd, etc., languages. I'm glad there have been so many improvements in the last 30+ years.

Today I'm Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Japanese) and trying to learn as much as I can about second language learning/teaching. This is embarrassingly ironic, as I cannot explain English grammar to save my life. (Yet my students seem to achieve some learning outcomes from our time together...)

If anyone here read this far, thank you for your patience. I truly look forward to learning from everyone here, especially from the monolingual English speakers.

Murr, thanks again; delicious herring!

I'm one of those life-long student types, presently between degrees. After the MA, I didn't want to pursue a PhD in Linguistics where I was, so after a too brief detour through the History and Philosophy of Science, I will probably end up in a Cognitive Science program (like so many young linguists these days) pursuing thoughts on compositionality and the syntax/semantics interface in through modelling and AI.

Despite three years of Latin in high school, the only language other than English that I read with any degree of ease is French. My pet professional family is Afro-Asiatic, so I've taken in-depth structural looks at Arabic (MSA, Moroccan, Sudanese), Maltese, Coptic, Tamazight, and.. Sumerian (ok, so that's not actually Afro-Asiatic). I've made no effort to memorize vocabulary in any of these. Sitting on the shelf waiting to be devoured are books on Ugaritic, Akkadian, and Ancient Egyptian. I will probably sneak Turkish in there.

Thanks for the welcome! And the uh... herring. I am very interested in language, and am enjoying the conversation so far. However, I have no real knowledge in this area. I speak bad french and can order drinks in a few other languages. I plan to just learn and lurk.

I never introduced myself, did I?

I am Annie and I am a native speaker of Bulgarian, still living in Bulgaria. Learned Russian in my early years in school (mandatory the first few years, then the changes prompted the government to drop it... but I kept going to classes until I changed the school and the new school did not have a teacher ) - I am not sure I can talk it anymore but I have no issues reading pretty much anything or watching a movie. Learned English in high school and never stopped using it since then. Due to the then nice educational system, I also had 4 years of German and still remember enough to be able to read (even if I need a dictionary quite often). Picked up Esperanto at some point and can use it freely if needed and understand pretty much everything (no, I do not think that this should be the international language but I still like it). Add to this some Spanish (did not like it much so dropped it after a year), very little Finnish (one day I will learn it... just now I am going to classes for a few weeks/months, dropping them for a while and so on) and a life-long fascination with Icelandic and the Scandinavian languages...

I like reading about languages - any aspect of them and I am always up for a challenge - if I can find the time and/or I am not in one of the periods in my life when I am interested in something very specific.

Hello all.

Just found this group via the salon. It took a while since I'm having trouble catching up with all the salon groups now that they're expanding exponentially.

As for my language background I was born and raised in Texas but I'm French. I'm the only one in my entire family who wasn't born in France or a French colony (grandfather born in Saigon, aunt born in Dakar). So, despite being born in Texas, French was still my first language. I'm fluent in all aspects of French, preferring to read in it, but still grabbing the grammar book when I write the occasional email.

Obviously, being from the States I'm fluent in English. However, speaking to me it would be difficult to pinpoint where in the States I'm from since I refused to pick up the Texan draw.

Next language I learned was Spanish and still read, write and speak in it fluently. I lived in Spain briefly back in high school and then recently went to Argentina to get my Spanish back and get some work experience.

My fourth language is Japanese. I'm very advanced in it but am now needing to reach the post-taking-classes-in-undergrad level. So I've recently started reading and studying fiction to get myself back there since I feel comfortable with conversation but am not used to reading descriptive passages. I also lived in Japan as an undergrad.

When I had fulfilled and taken every class for my Japanese major as an undergrad I had a semester left so I took some Korean. I found Korean very easy as it was so similar to Japanese. But I only took one semester so I only remember a few phrases and the vocab I learned and I can read but I have no idea what I'm reading when I read it.

Can't wait to explore the different threads more!

Welcome to you both! Annie, I'm so envious of your Russian abilities! Reading in Russian and watching movies in it must be great!!!!!!

Sigh. I will never be able to do that!

Lilisin, I have seen you all over the place on LT, in club read and le salon, so it's nice to finally meet you properly! You seem to have a nice basket of languages there!

Things have been a bit quiet in this salon recently. Hopefully the presence of fresh blood will spur discussion again.
Welcome anyway!

Thanks for the welcome!
I have obviously seen you all over the place as well but am only now saying hello. So hello!

Hello, lilisin. Welcome:

I tried this on another thread in this salon about three weeks ago and got no replies, and seeing that you're French, by way of Saigon, Texas, etc., I'll give it another shot, and hope you float this way again:

I'm not sure it's slang or whether it's just French that I don't know. Years ago someone laid a French phrase on me that I should have written down and didn't, and I've been looking for it ever since. It means something like: attraction to, or affection for, settings in which things are falling apart. Do you have any idea?

Copyedit, is it:

Nostalgie de la boue you're looking for?

I had no idea, but until someone can improve on nostalgie de la boue, that's what it is. Thanks.

>117 tomcatMurr:. tomcat: Having thought about it, or rather, let it sit awhile, nostalgie de la boue might well be the phrase. Is it in fact slang?

copyedit -
I'm sorry but I can't come up with anything and I'm not familiar with nostalgie de la boue. Hope that is indeed what you were looking for. If you're asking about modern slang then I'd say it's not current slang.

Googling gives this :

"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home.

I am not familiar with this expression

I see. Then that's not what I was looking for. The expression I was given meant having an affection for the underside of life, run-down places, for instance, decaying towns or cities that had seen better days. The faraway and primitive had nothing to do with it, as these places are all too real. Perhaps you know Rouen, Macumbeira; or Orleans. Places like that.

First, la nostalgie de la boue is just an expression, not slang; second, Mac's google-find doesn't jibe with how I always understood it--definitely not "ascribing higher spiritual values" to anything, rather a nostalgic attitude toward the seamy/"simple" side of life, bohemia, underworld, "primitive" emotions, situations etc.

Copyedit, it was the first (and only so far) thing that popped into my mind too reading your #116. Otoh, while "an affection for the underside of life" (#122) fits very well, tying it to physical decadence of geographic places seems a bit stark. Too too literal. But then again, it would depend on personal style in wielding the phrase.

Thank you, Lola. In fact, "a nostalgic attitude toward the seamy/"simple" side of life, bohemia, underworld, "primitive" emotions, situations etc." is exactly what I was looking for. I will now have to find someplace (maybe even invent a character) so I can use it.

copyedit -
Now that you have a better definition of what you're looking for I'll have to ask my dad. On top of being French, he is a linguist and knows all of the old French sayings. So he might have an idea as to what you're looking for.

Well, okay, that's good of you. But now that we have both Lola and tomcat in agreement on this phrase, I don't want to intrude too much on this thread, lest someone start a new one (which seems the fashion now) called La Nostalgie de la Boue, which might run out of gas pretty fast.

The expression is neither old (in the sense of archaic) nor odd, btw. It signifies perhaps a certain education, a literary experience, but there are tons of similar examples.

All that fits. It was laid on me by a woman who floated around the underbelly of what at the time was the New York quasi-sleazy Andy Warhol scene. (A terrific French cook, by the way.) The notion of it came up, and she told me the French have a phrase describing it, and I asked her to repeat it, intending to write it down--it was like a wonderful found object--and didn't. And now, thirty years later, it seems I've got it.

Ever been to the Chelsea, anyone? Peter? speaking of quasi-sleazy Andy Warhol. Sarah Vowell, if anyone is interested, wrote a really insightful and humorous essay on the Chelsea in Take the Cannoli called "Chelsea Girl".

Advance apologies for the digression. Been in ubiquitous hospital waiting rooms all day, just back catching up salonabouts, everybody's fine, no worries.

I take it to mean a yearning for the seamier side of life, the gutter, slutting it, whoring it, putting aside the civilised for a while and revelling in the body. Think Jean Genet, Villon, Rimbaud etc. this meaning would tie in with your original informant as you describe her, I think.

If I had it all to do over again I would be a a heroine addict. Is that nostalgie de la boue?

Robert

nostalgie de la boue a desire for degradation and depravity. The French phrase, meaning literally ‘mud nostalgia’, was coined by the French poet and dramatist Émile Augier (1820–89), in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855). In response to the comment that a duck placed on a lake with swans will miss his pond and eventually return to it, the character Montrichard replies, ‘La nostalgie de la boue! Longing to be back in the mud!’

> 116 Should we understand your expression as a fascination with decay, crumbling dystopias and abandoned or ruined urban landscapes?

Then it could be "la fascination des ruines"

Ha! I am no archeologist, but rather, someone who has a fascination for people who lead ordinary lives in settings that have seen better days. In fact they don't have to be bohemians, or sleazy: I got carried away with that notion as nostalgie de la boue, or whatever it might be, became the phrase of the day. I enjoy being in old mill towns, for instance--before they're renovated, of course, and adapt the mall aesthetic--finding the local eatery, if a downtown still exists (the French are better at preserving the heart of a town than we are), imagining myself living there like an ordinary person; or perhaps just enjoying the notion of ordinariness itself, since it's beyond me.

So it could have been that the person who laid that phrase on me had it wrong or mistranslated it; or that I heard what I wanted to hear. The notion that there's a word or phrase in a language other than English that captures something I'm thinking about or would like to say is a powerful one. In I Think, Therefore Who Am I? I wanted a word that conveyed the sensation in the air when I was stoned, and went with flere, a word described in a book by a Russian whose name I've long since forgotten. Outside of the context I used it in, probably no one would have any idea what it means.

>135 copyedit52: I remember turning up a piece of writing my dad did in the seventies in which he said he "always felt at home in Vienna, which like Victoria (BC, where we're from) is a place which used to be more important than it is,and a place where people go to cultivate their eccentricities." There's a nostalgie de la boue element there, I think--somewhere between wanting everything stained sepia and wanting it covered in moss.

I recognize the sentiment.

For those who might be interested, I believe the book where I came across flere (#135), and a lot of other interesting things, was All Things Are Possible, by Lev Shestov.

Aha! A brainstorm. Perhaps even an inspiration, as I stared at the forest in back of my house this morning. To insert a new chapter into my book, Digging Deeper, which is all but finished: "Nostalgie de la Boue," reflections on a route I delivered as a mailman. Of course, it might not work; it often doesn't.

while we're on the subject of that ole nostalgie, I thought I might share this pic I chanced upon at Huffpo :-)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/pirelli-2010-calendar-pho_n_437677.html...

I suppose, G, your link refers to "the French phrase, meaning literally ‘mud nostalgia,’ was coined by the French poet and dramatist Émile Augier (1820–89)," in message #133. Otherwise, I don't know what to make of it.

You're absolutely correct, Peter (my communication was a bit muddy).

But I do like puzzles.

Re: brainstorm, message #139. It didn't work, and I can see there's no way this French phrase will fit anywhere in my book. R.I.P., nostalgie de la boue ... for now.

After my five senses in the prime spot, my next strongest link to the world is language. At an age when my hearing and vision are not as acute as they used to be, I feel more and more comfortable deriving sense experience from imaginative literature.
In simple terms, I often miss conversations in real life, but at the moment I can still get every snippet of a literary conversation, even if I have to read 8-point type, which I can still do, as long as I take off my glasses and hold the text 10 cm away. I guess this seems like a banal observation to many of you, but I find my mental capacity strained by trying to listen to many people talking at once.
20 or 30 years ago, I was consumed by listening to music; at that time, reading was just a sideline, albeit a significant one. I do not want to get into that tired argument about whether music constitutes a language (non-verbal) because it is not a very important question. I just like music, period.
But the point I did want to say is that 20 years ago I could listen to music with optimal concentration for 6 hours at a stretch, or read for 2 hours at a stretch, often alternating between the two.
But now, I can read for 3 or 4 hours at a stretch, for totals of 7 or 8 hours per day, but the most I can listen to music before my brain loses concentration is half an hour to an hour. I do not know why this is happening, but language is taking over from music to a significant degree.
My mother tongue is English, but I have studied German and French. I am also trying my best to learn Russian. This is with the goal of reading in the original tongue as much as possible. I would like to be able to read Thomas Mann, Friedrich Schiller, Goethe, and others in German, and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gogol, Akhmatova, and others in Russian. I still have a long way to go on those two projects.
To test if this was a goal worth pursuing, I did an experiment by reading several works in both the original and in translation, to see what difference would be. Some examples done this way were:
Les Miserables.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Faust Part I
I felt more satisfied after reading the originals, and hopefully it was not just out of vanity, but rather because of some significant improvement in the connection with the thoughts of the author.
After I finish this post on the welcome page, I will search to see if language topics mentioned above are present in other threads.
I am glad to have found this group.

Welcome to the group libraryhermit.

I think you will find quite a lot of threads which fit in with your interests here. And you have as much latitude as you might require to start your own threads on related topics (it has been a little too quiet around here recently).

Also welcome to the group msladylib! I'm enjoying your messages already!

>145 libraryhermit: herzlich willkommen!

My mother-tongue is American English. It was only when I moved to Canada at the age of 25 that I discovered, however, that I had not grown up speaking standard Midwestern American English, but I had been speaking Canadian English the whole time. Much to my surprise, the English of Michigan's Upper Peninsula turned out to be basically standard Canadian English and highly differentiated from Midwestern American English. I grew up in a little "dialect pocket" which even today few people realize exists.

At age 15 I spent a year living and studying in Marseille, France, so added French to my language inventory at that time. This time I did learn the standard continental variety, which means that I'm still stumped from time to time when trying to understand Quebec French.

Languages studied at university were French, Russian and German. I retain little of the latter two, though I can still transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet.

I now live in Fortaleza, Brazil, and my day to day life (outside books and the internet) is totally in Portuguese. This time round I learned the New World variety, and it's continental Portuguese which gives me headaches.

Don't ask me why, but my next language goal is to learn Arabic.

149: That's a great next language goal. I heartily approve. Marhaban wa Ahlan wa Sahlan (welcome, welcome in Arabic)

Welcome to snykanan! Everyone go and read "about me" - it will give you a laugh.
Welcome to stancarey - he's from Ireland! And shares 88 books with me. Have you read Ulysses, stancarey?
Welcome to angelrose who has a huge collection there! and a huge list of favorite authors.
And finally welcome to Ifland who's from Romania and is now a translator. Have you met polutropos? Maybe you two would have something to talk or at least commisserate about, such as how publishers don't publish enough E. European stuff...

Pull up a chair, and word to the wise, don't overindulge in the herring and vodka although our host has an unending supply...

By way of intra parietes, I am a-Muser cum laude carta before the hearsa, still waiting for the magna whatcha, und was ich gelernt tried and true to versucht,
tentes par histoire de salvacion, like Mochtezuma the sucker with feathers ca ihuinti in toyalla just wondering.

In schule sat for a spelling be do be do; learned bitte but heard da music.

Dining with Professor Worms (spracht 100 langue) akst him how many there were really? Sez tres gran familia. And one was occultated. Still, mein bein was not mothered by no tongue, no consuelo, no sound has meaning (Kein Ton hat eine Bedeutung for thee is me solido). And this is why all sounds mean soi something disant.

Now groined alte y gray pilo head. Found some crutch in Deutsche, amour e sauver en Francaise, escapada en Espanolita, y Nahautl naci en Mexico con Indiano tolderia, 90 kilometers and 400 anum out of Cuidado. Leiden years ago.

The foregoing is a nod to the great Umberto Eco's character in Name of the Rose who spoke "European". OK there is some Aztec Nahua in there too.

My collection:

Ou sont les neiges d'antan {where are the snows of yesteryear -- Villon}

Ic motoma xochuic ihuinti in toyalla {where do we recover the smells of our youth/past times -- Mochtezuma}

Wo bist Ewigweiblische das dran uns hinan {whence /where is the eternal feminine that draws us on?}

"nostalgie de la boue" - longing for the mud we remember

The language above in 152 also reminded me a little bit of "The German," a secondary character in Secretum by Monaldi and Sorti, but who has a florid language that I found fascinating.

It reminds me of my desire for an eight-tongued Scrabble set.

155: Yes yes yes! It is so frustrating to have the perfect word, but it is not English.

152: it was a lot of fun to read this. Also re 153: The salon discovered nostalgie de la boue last year or was it 2010? And somewhere in the archives should be the discussion. I hope you will find it entertaining.

How very Beast of you.

How very Beast of you!
Epic!

And always, the point under the pole. (!)