[Sca-cooks] globetrotting

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

i wrote:
>  . . . even though my French is not what it had been,
>  after not speaking it for almost 30 years.

30 years before, when i was in France, French people couldn't figure
out where i was from. I didn't have a foreign accent, but my syntax
was often strange.

When i went to Morocco last year, my French was not a whole lot worse
than my daughter's (who had 4 years of French in high school and, i
think, a year or two in college) and way better than the French my
daughter's friend spoke, who was going to attend the Sorbonne for a
year.

Most people in Morocco, even if they aren't well educated, speak
French (often not too well) along with Moroccan Arabic (and boy, do
other Arabic speakers in other parts of the world make fun of the
Moroccan accent/dialect) and some still speak Berber. There's also a
region in the north - around Chefchaouen - where they speak Spanish
instead of or in addition to French. It was interesting bargaining
with a very old man there who was spoke Spanish to me while i was
spoke French to him and my daughter did the number thing in Arabic.
Talk about polyglot!

And when we were in Spain, everyone (my daughter and her two friends)
made ME do the talking, even though i've never studied Spanish. In
fact, the girl who was going to the Sorbonne had studied Spanish for
several years in jr high or high school, but she couldn't speak it. I
stammered through with the little tourist Spanish phrase book i had.

I do think that the 2 years of Latin i had in high school has helped
me (i wanted to take 4, but i switched schools after my sophomore
year and the other school didn't teach Latin :-( At the first school,
after taking 3 years of Latin, i would also have been able to take
Classical Greek my senior year and try reading Homer - i was really
looking forward to it. I was so disappointed that my new school was
so dumb - it was a girl's school, and after taking bio and chem i
wanted to take physics, but they told me that girls don't like
physics (so, like, what? i wasn't a girl?) Anyway, i could understand
the Latin dialog in "The 13th Warrior" even without looking at the
subtitles... That was very weird.

So for my total language studies i had 2 years of Latin and 3 of
French in high school; 1/2 year Mandarin Chinese as an undergrad; i
took 3 years Bahasa Indonesia in 2 summers and one school year, and
one year of "reading German for grad students" in graduate school;
and not quite 1/2 year of ASL which i took about 8 years ago just
because i wanted to (i really want to take it up again).

I spent not quite a month in Japan in 1972 when the art school i was
in sponsored a trip there for a group of us, and after a couple weeks
i could sound out Japanese writing because it's phonetic (i don't
recall if it was hiragana or kitakana), although i didn't know what
it said (well, i was starting to learn some of that, too). My 1/2
year of Chinese allowed me to write down everyone's food choice after
we examined the wax food in the front of the restaurant since menu
items were in a mixture of Japanese writing and kanji (Chinese
characters).

I also taught myself the Greek alphabeta on my own in jr. high; the
Hebrew alephbeth while riding on the BART to work in SF; and the
Arabic alifbet since joining the SCA. And i created a Phoenician font
for my personal use. Now, none of this means i can understand what i
read, but i can make approximate sounds...

Now I want to study speaking and reading Arabic... in that "copious"
spare time...

Anahita
and all that language study comes in hand when field heralding :-)