A fond memory

[redbird]

This post started in a Making Light thread:

From 63, on French and Spanish:

When I was in Paris, nine years ago, I took a sidetrip to the Museum of French Prehistory (which runs from the Paleolithic to early CE). It's in a suburb, and I carefully looked up the price and worked out the French for "one round-trip ticket to St. Germain en Laye" before walking up to the ticket counter. [I speak little French now, and had less then.] From the rail station, it's a short walk to an old castle (complete with moat, though grassy rather than watery).

I was one of only a few people visiting the museum that day: it's not a big deal tourist destination, and this was on a weekday morning in late November. There isn't a word of English in the place, but plenty of stone points and such, and significant overlap between French and English archeological terminology. When I was basically done and went back to the cloakroom, another visitor was trying to communicate with the staff. When I came along, she looked at me and hopefully asked "Habla usted español?" and, accurately and without thinking, I said "oui."

She understood that much French, or maybe my tone, and I was able to help her a little with my high school Spanish.

[That's as much as I posted on ML.]

I think that was when I realized that I have a spot in my head that is tagged either "non-English" or "Romance language." It defaults to Spanish, but a few days in Paris or Montreal sets it to French, and it stays there for a bit after I'm back in New York.

That museum trip was serendipitous in another way: the town was holding a Christmas market between the museum and the railroad station, and I wandered around, bought I think a handmade blank book and some Swiss chocolates (indifferent, I'm afraid) and then went looking for lunch. I walked into a sandwich shop, and ordered a turkey sandwich on a baguette. By default, it came with lettuce, tomato, and mayonaise. Until that day, I had thought I didn't like mayonaise, because no ordinary American sandwich shop makes it up fresh shortly before serving. It's one thing to be told that there's a difference, another to taste it. I still avoid mayo in most places, because I don't like the jarred version (except on BLT sandwiches, where it seems appropriate).

Comments

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Mine defaults to French. I'll be muddling along in Spanish and without my permission, my brain supplies a French word for a word I don't know in Spanish.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This is a nifty memory, and I would love to visit that museum sometime.

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

Have you tried making mayonnaise at home? I did once, it's really easy. Fresh mayo is very perishable, though; you can add a little boiling water to fix it so it'll keep somewhat longer, but then the texture is closer to the commercial stuff (which I think is just fine for normal purposes).

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

A little learning can be an interesting thing, yes -- as can the Compartments we create for odds and ends of it. My "Romance Languages" one seem to include Japanese (well, it _does_ have Italianate vowels), but I don't use any of it often enough for one language to predominate when I'm trying to communicate in Spanish (which is most often needed), so so when there's a blank in my Jr. College Spanish out pops something from Highschool Latin, Jr. College French, or Occupation Duty Japanese.

Being (functionally) deaf, however, I try strongly to avoid using Spanish when communicating with Hispanic-seeming people, on the grounds that they're very likely to be speaking in English as good as that used by most of the Anglos I know (quite possibly more fluent, though perhaps a tad less elegant, than mine).

I don't quite know where my most recent Problem fits -- trying to puzzle-out the inscriptions on the icons & murals at the Greek Orthodox St. Nectarios Church during the past weekend's Greek Festival. Especially considering that I'm kinda wobbly about some letters of the Classical Greek alphabet. (I have the vague feeling that Ikon Script was devised by St. Kyril in between the times he was working on Russian and Armenian.) And I have much less Greek than I do Latin -- practically nothing beyond the (highly-useful back when I was in Highschool) book "Latin and Greek in Current Use" (if I remember the title correctly -- basically, Greek roots of English words).