redbird | "common Romance"

In the course of this afternoon, I've read a few paragraphs of French on alt.poly--in a discussion of the relative advantages of Montreal and Quebec City as alt.polycon sites--and glossed Catalan names in Fred Lerner's fanzine writeup of his trip to Barcelona.

I've never studied either language, but I know Spanish moderately well, which is enough to fake reading Catalan (I've never tried speaking it, and for all I know my guesses on pronunciation--which basically assume that whoever made the spelling rules spoke and wrote Spanish--are completely off, but they do for saying names in my head, and glossing the meanings of building names and such.) and is probably part of what my rudimentary knowledge of French is built on.

Meanwhile, it's cool and damp, as if to try convincing me that Labor Day really is the end of Summer, and the smoke detector is beeping to tell me that its battery is low. It will just have to keep beeping until

cattitude gets home, because I can't reach it. [Update: it wasn't the smoke detector, it was Cattitude's cell phone--high-pitched beeps are very hard to localize.]