[Sca-cooks] globetrotting

[Laura C. Minnick]

Ok, just for the record...

My dad was born into a Mennonite family in Manitoba- they spoke German at
home. He learned no English until he went to school, age 6. They moved down
to the States in 1956 and everyone in the family learned English then. In
classic 'use it or lose it' he lost most of his German, as he uses it only
at infrequent family gatherings. I know only 'table German'

Mom grew up in Southern California, when anything Hispanic was looked down
on by the Anglos. She took no foreign language until she went back to
college, after I was married and gone. IIRC she took four years of
classical Greek. Not that it is that useful in Hawaii. :-/

My highschool (Listen up Misha! You don't know how good you've got it!)
offered only French, Spanish, and German. I think I had a year of
highschool French. In college I took two years of French, and suffered
through two terms of Latin.

Thanks to long hours working on papers, I can:

Read silently (maybe with a little help from glossary, etc.) French,
Provencal, some Italian, Middle English, Latin, Old English, Modern
English, a teensy bit German.

Read aloud (and be understood) most French, Middle English, most Old
English, a little Italian, most Latin

Hear and understand (mostly) French, Middle English, some Italian, a little
Latin

Speak (generating and participation in conversation) English. That's it.

I'm told that my inability to generate the language is possibly linked to a
hearing problem I have- with the right conditions (distraction, background
noise, can't see teh speaker, tec.) I can't 'translate' speech- even English.

Of course, as someone else pointed out, there's seldom someone to speak
with. There aren't any native speakers of Latin, or Old English, and the
only time I've known academics to speak to each other in Middle English or
some such, has been int he elevator at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo.
(And I'll tell you, a couple of guys speaking Old Norse on teh elevator is
truly weird.)

I can usually read what I need. And I can read Dante in the original. I'm
not going to sweat the rest- I have a finite amount of time, and language
learning is so hard and so painful for me, that to do more than I have is
not the best use of my resources.

Besides, I'd rather figure out the peculiar syntax of 38-year-old-Male...
;-D);-D);-D)

'Lainie
____________________________________________________________________________
Sometimes Life makes drastic changes without our permission...