a scientific proposal

[sergebroom]

"There is no time for love in Science!"
- Pierre Curie as he proposes to Marie in 1943's movie Madame Curie.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Ze French, zey are so romantic!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Well, you know, mon ami, anything is made automatically more romantique by involving French.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Bueno, a mi parecer, la verdad es que las cosas son más románticas expresadas en lengua castellana.

[(Anonymous)]

Amar mote Bangla ganer moto deho, prakriti o shrastra bhalaboshar gan ar kono bhashai pawa jabe na.

[sajia.livejournal.com]

oops, that was me.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I wonder how bad my accent would be if I read that back to you.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I rather figured that. The moment I saw the word "Bangla".

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Sez who?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Said I. Note that "a mi parecer" (= it seems to me). No es cosa para pleito (= don't make a federal case out of it). I'll take it up with my mother, next time I phone her at her home in Spain.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I blam my Spanish classes being 40 years old.

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

It's not that the classes are forty years old (heck, it's probably still "ALM Spanish: Level One" in use); it's that your memory is forty years older.

My French and Russian are about that far back, too. I can still read the Cyrillic alphabet, but as for understanding either language? Zut alors!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

My memory feels more than 40 years old this morning, thanks to my being on call. There's nothing like having one's sleep interrupted by a cell phone after consecutive nights where there was little of that sleep already. Sacrebleu!

(That might explain why I lay the blam and not the blame on 40-year-old teachings.)

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

"blam" v. "blame"

I heard echoes of Emeril there, modified to avoid possible copyright infringements.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

My Arab Spain class included a text that was erotic poetry of some specific era, translated into Spanish (because of course no one who doesn't speak Spanish wants to learn about Spain), which meant we lost a lot of meaning. There was one form that usually included a vulgar-in-both-senses couplet at the end, and how do you translate it to make it clear it's in a different but comprehensible language?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I took that Spanish class in high-school's 10th grade, so erotic poetry definitely wasn't part of the curriculum - even in 1970. What a shame. All I remember is the phrase "Estamos buscando Pension La Pepa", which isn't very naughty unless the pension really was a house of ill repute.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

La Pepa, in some places, is a part of the female anatomy.

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds like an interesting exercise.

I recall, not long after I started high school, finding a copy of the Lazarillo de Tormes on the library shelves, and bringing it home. One or two words gave me trouble, and I asked my mother about them. One was hideputa ("sonofawhore"). My mother blushed, but explained it to me.

(It comes early in the novel. Lázaro's father has died in a military expedition -- to Las Gelves, Djerba, near Tunis -- and his mother takes up with a black man. When the man comes to their home, Lázaro is frightened and hides behind his mother's skirts crying "¡Mamá! ¡Coco!" -- Mummy! A bogeyman! To which the black man responds "Hideputa!")

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

That anonym is me, btw.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

One of the better Spanish language classes I took was the one where the textbook went through and defined similar words-- here's the word for border, boundary, frontier; garden gate vs cemetery gate; regional variations and ways to inadvertently offend. The profa told a story of saying, "Let's put this bird/beast in the oven!" and using a bird-beast word that also meant 'penis' to some of the guests.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Bird-beast, eh? I'll have to keep that one in mind.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I don't remember the exact word, but it meant something like 'beast' and was applied to a turkey.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

If ever you remember it, let me know.