Re: A multilingual F minor, and thank you, Roman Army!

[Elmer Elevator <bobmer@javanet.com>]

A couple of years ago, I signed up to volunteer for a local political campaign
in my town, Northampton, Massachusetts USA (home of Smith College). The nice
lady at the campaign office was taking down my information. "Do you speak any
other languages?" she asked.

"Yes!" I said excitedly. "Latin!"

She looked up at me. "You'd be surprised how many people in this town answer
that way."

Courtesy of the highly efficient Roman Army, I can also bumble along pretty
well, read headlines, menus and highway and train-station signs, and even
eavesdrop in French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian (those guys are practically
still speaking straight Latin) and Portuguese -- the test in my travels in
Europe and Mexico is whether I got where I wanted to go without winding up in
prison or starving to death. (I guess the Roman Army never quite made it to
Slavic Prague, so I was reduced to pointing to my mouth in a restaurant. The
waitress brought me a dentist.)

Internet Relay Chat is a realm of cyberspace where I first encountered
them-there nifty .mp3 thangs. There are literally thousands of chatrooms, and
easily half of these are in languages other than English. Many don't even use
the Roman alphabet, and using them requires special character-coding software.
But in some lingos, like Japanese and Hebrew, a lot of the conversations are
transliterated into the Roman alphabet, so you can learn a lot and follow
along without even learning the alephbet or the Japanese ideograph system.

We'd all love to sharpen up our French, Spanish or Hindi, but we can't
relocate for a year, and who has the time to enroll in school again? The
non-English-language channels of IRC are WONDERFUL! You can lurk all you want,
and you just magically osmose the language night after night while scores of
native-speakers chatter about. If you hit a real mystery, there's always a
bilingual chatter there who can help you in a private side room.

Most wonderful of all is that you get what you never got in school -- slang,
coloquialisms, the naughty bits, the informal, casual way Real People actually
speak these languages to one another. Also -- When an English-speaker studies
francaise in school, he gets only Parisienne. Español, you get only
Castellano. Deutsches, only Berlinerhochdeutsches. On IRC, you get a wide-open
window to all the other flavors, dialects and local vocabularies from Austria,
Bavaria, Peru, Argentina, Quebec. On IRC, there is not just one Received
Standard dialect of each language.

Oh ... did I mention it's free? And nobody gives you a lousy grade? Or makes
fun of your accent and pronunciation? And there's no homework?

(Teknote: If you're a Windows computer, go to www.mirc.com for the shareware,
called mIRC, to get you onto IRC. And if you become an addicted Chat Monkey
like me, don't forget to send the nice brilliant London boy who invented it
his lousy U$20. I admire him even more than the Napster lad.)

Elmer

"Jacqueline P. Colombier" wrote:

> I read all the words Birgitte !  In fact, what interested me most was at
> the end (as I am not able to get connected to mp3 and Napster ... I have
> nothing to say about it and so have no moral perplexity ! ) = I also think
> there is an historical opportunity to change cultural places and it's very
> exciting... I think architects should work with musicians and music lovers
> in order to invent new listening places...
> A multilingual list is a marvellous project : do you know how many
> languages are spoken or understood by the F minor's members ?
>                                 Au revoir !
>                                              Jacqueline