Small Talk: Killing Time

[Meredith Quill]

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[legaleagle53]

The current discussion in the "Stranded" episode thread about language and the difficulties that non-native speaking time travelers would have in dealing with earlier stages/dialects of the languages they encounter in other eras reminded me of a very funny incident that happened to my during my second trip to Rome almost ten years ago.

My flight had gotten in far too early for me to check into my hotel room, so with the concierge's permission, I left my luggage in the lobby and went off to walk around the city for a bit until my room was ready.  I was tired and extremely jet-lagged, so as I was sitting in the small piazza near my hotel to rest, an Italian woman came up to me and started talking to me.  Now, I'm fluent in Italian, but I was so out of it that morning that it was all I could do to keep up with her, much less converse with her.  Mainly, I just wanted her to go away so that I could nap a little before going back to my hotel to check in.

After a few minutes of mostly her talking, she finally noticed that I was having trouble responding to her, so she then said (in Italian, of course), "Oh, right -- Italian isn't your native language, and here I am chattering away at 120 kilometers an hour!"  Who says the natives don't have sympathy for us foreigners?  LOL

So, does anyone else have any funny stories of close encounters with natives while trying to break the language barrier?  :)

Edited November 23, 2016 by legaleagle53

[shapeshifter]

I posted this on the "Literally" thread awhile ago, so you might recall it, @legaleagle53:

I work at a college. Several years ago a couple of international students were conversing outside my office door. One asked the other a question, the answer to which the other didn't know. Having worked there for over ten years, I easily answered their question. This is where the story gets interesting:
They both looked at me with surprise. Finally one asked me if I spoke Arabic. I said no (I can read a little French and Spanish, but that's it). "But we were talking in Arabic," he then replied. Evidently I had correctly answered their Arabic question in English. I regret that I do not recall the question or the answer. This has never happened again. Weird, huh?

Edited November 24, 2016 by shapeshifter
typo

[Bort]

On 11/23/2016 at 0:40 PM, legaleagle53 said:

So, does anyone else have any funny stories of close encounters with natives while trying to break the language barrier?  :)

I've been having to go to Scotland for work occasionally (and, in fact, leave this Sunday for another trip) and I have a hell of a time understanding the Scots and that's when we're both speaking the same language. I can't tell you how many times I've had one of them say something to me and I'm all, "What? WHAT?!" I do admit that I can understand them better than I used to be able to. Those are some heavy accents.

[Shanna Marie]

I'm not fluent in any language other than English, but I lived in Germany as a kid when my dad was in the military and had what they called "host nation" classes in which we learned survival German. Then I studied Spanish in high school and college. I never really knew grammar in German, just useful phrases, but I learned Spanish grammar and can actually form my own sentences and understand a lot more. The two languages are almost nothing alike, but I have this weird habit of only being able to think of the wrong one for the occasion. I live in Texas, so there are a lot of Spanish speakers. Someone once approached me and asked me for directions in Spanish. I understood him. I knew I knew how to respond, but all that would come to mind was German. I had to stop and speak to come up with how to say it in Spanish. I figured at the time that it was because I'd seldom used Spanish outside a classroom, and in a real-world situation that was exactly the kind of thing I'd learned to handle in German, German came out. But then years later I was visiting Germany and went into an ice cream shop. I knew how to order and handle the transaction in German. I formed the sentence in my head in German. When I spoke, Spanish came out. I have no idea why. But it turned out that the guy I was dealing with was a university student studying Spanish, and he was excited to get to speak Spanish to someone, so we handled the whole transaction in Spanish.

Strangely enough, I've had people ask me for directions in Spanish when I've been traveling. I'm about as white as you can get, have auburn hair and green eyes. I look like I should be a cast member of Riverdance. But I can be in a busy New York subway station, and I'm the one people will come to, speaking Spanish, for help. Then there was the time I was at a train station in Dallas and a young Deaf woman approached asking for help. I don't know ASL beyond children's Sunday school songs, but I do know the finger alphabet pretty fluently, thanks to an obsession with Helen Keller during childhood. It was strange that she picked the person at the station who could communicate with her in some way and at least spell out the name of the station she needed. I guess I look approachable, but it's odd that people also guess correctly that I can communicate with them. I can just imagine the trouble I'd get into as a time traveler. Or else it would come in handy that everyone would just assume I was local, no matter when/where I was.

[KaveDweller]

I was in France several years back and while I took French in school and can read some, I can't really engage in full conversations. But I was really proud of myself that I had learned how to say key phrases, like "where's the bathroom?" So I asked a waitress that and apparently said it really well, because she starts talking really fast giving me directions and had no idea what she was saying. And of course it turned out she spoke perfect English anyway.

On 11/23/2016 at 5:55 PM, shapeshifter said:

I posted this on the "Literally" thread awhile ago, so you might recall it, @legaleagle53:

I work at a college. Several years ago a couple of international students were conversing outside my office door. One asked the other a question, the answer to which the other didn't know. Having worked there for over ten years, I easily answered their question. This is where the story gets interesting:
They both looked at me with surprise. Finally one asked me if I spoke Arabic. I said no (I can read a little French and Spanish, but that's it). "But we were talking in Arabic," he then replied. Evidently I had correctly answered their Arabic question in English. I regret that I do not recall the question or the answer. This has never happened again. Weird, huh?

That's really weird. I know you don't remember the question, but maybe it was something where one word sounded like a word you knew in English or another language? Or you have some psychic abilities or something.

[legaleagle53]

16 minutes ago, KaveDweller said:

That's really weird. I know you don't remember the question, but maybe it was something where one word sounded like a word you knew in English or another language? Or you have some psychic abilities or something.

It may well have to do with the fact that Spanish absorbed a lot of Arabic vocabulary during the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula which lasted from the 8th to the 15th century CE.  That's also why Spanish often sounds so much harsher than Italian or Romanian, for example -- Arabic influence on Spanish pronunciation as well as vocabulary.

[Bort]

One of the neat things about Spanish and French is that, while they don't sound anything alike, on paper they look very similar. So my French classes came in handy for the times I've gone to Mexico. I've been able to read Spanish well enough to at least figure out the signage that's around. 

[legaleagle53]

French will also help with Romanian and Italian because it's more closely related to those two languages than it is to Spanish and Portuguese, especially in terms of vocabulary and grammar.  In fact, Romanian and Old French are so similar because they both have case (which the other Romance languages -- including Modern French -- do not have) that my scant knowledge of Old French, together with my Italian, helped make learning Romanian a snap for me.

[Shanna Marie]

The combination of studying Spanish in school and being in a choir and singing a lot of Latin means I can generally read both French and Italian in spite of never having studied either language, beyond ballet French and opera Italian. I can fake Italian well enough (thanks to having to learn to sing arias) that I've had native Italian waiters in Italian restaurants think I actually spoke Italian when I ordered. French is a little iffier -- I could pretty much understand Lucy in the latest episode without the captions, and I can figure out a lot from reading it, but I can't fake speaking it. I guess I haven't sung as much in French, just a bit of Faure. Italian is really similar to the kind of church Latin you get in classical choral music, like the Mozart Requiem.

A serious opera student or someone with a voice degree would come in handy on time travel missions because they have to study Latin, French, Italian, German, and Russian at least enough to pronounce it, and they have to learn to make it sound good, so they could probably sell phonetic phrases. They might not know grammar well enough to come up with new sentences, but they could be convincing with stock phrases as long as they didn't have to carry on a conversation.

[legaleagle53]

39 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

A serious opera student or someone with a voice degree would come in handy on time travel missions because they have to study Latin, French, Italian, German, and Russian at least enough to pronounce it, and they have to learn to make it sound good, so they could probably sell phonetic phrases. They might not know grammar well enough to come up with new sentences, but they could be convincing with stock phrases as long as they didn't have to carry on a conversation.

True.   A Latin speaker who only knew the ecclesiastical pronunciation could probably get away with using that, since there is some belief among Latin scholars that that is what the everyday, or Vulgar, speech of the Romans sounded like.  And I think it was Dante who said that Italian was Latin without the rules of grammar (one of his arguments for using his native Florentine dialect as the basis for the everyday language and the language of his writings) rather than Latin, so even someone who only knew Italian could get by in Ancient Rome or Medieval Italy; the ancient Romans in particular would just think he or she was a bit uneducated.

Similarly, while I am familiar with Ancient and Koine (New Testament) Greek, I really only speak, read, and write Modern Greek.  But I could probably get by in Ancient Greece because while my modern pronunciation and oversimplified (by their standards) grammar might surprise the ancients, they'd at least recognize and understand my Greek as their language.  They'd just consider me a little odd, that's all.

Edited November 26, 2016 by legaleagle53

[shapeshifter]

1 hour ago, KaveDweller said:

...That's really weird. I know you don't remember the question, but maybe it was something where one word sounded like a word you knew in English or another language? Or you have some psychic abilities or something.

I talked to my daughter about this right after posting here, and we decided that the Arabic-speaking students must've used some English terms that matched another question that I had answered earlier (I'm a reference librarian).

[Driad]

Maybe each of the travelers should wear one of these shirts under their costume, just in case. Instructions for making antibiotics, airplanes, etc. Time Traveler Essentials Shirt

[CooperTV]

Some Team Eyeball centered fanfiction recs in honor of the season 2:

Fight or Flight, Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus travel to Kitty Hawk in 1901 and meet the Wright brothers.

Wyatt and Jiya's Fairly Excellent Adventure, Jiya and Wyatt travel together to save the day while Jiya has her seeing-the-alternate-future "episodes".

Unmade, Flynn decides to kill a Rittenhouse-adjacent person when they're a child via exploiting Wyatt's family history.

[legaleagle53]

Hmm -- those all sound pretty good.  In fact, I just finished reading the first one, and it's more than good; it's excellent.  I thnk it's time for a Fanfic thread!

Edited March 11, 2018 by legaleagle53

[Wayward Son]

Does anyone know why Kripke and Ryan’s haven’t written any episodes since the Season One Pilot? I’m also a Supernatural fan and remember how hands on Kripke was so I found that surprising! 

[Glambert123]

Soooo............something kind of cool happened on Sunday night. I was on Twitter - joining Matt in his Twitter party - when he made a comment on how he liked the scene with young agent Christopher looking at the photos on the computer. I replied that it was just like in the JFK episode - and it was really well done. He didn't respond - but I DID get a LIKE from one Sakina Jaffrey. I can't believe she actually saw that and responded. Really made my night. Just had to share :)

[Ron Stewart]

I recently replaced our house's 25-year-old doorbell ringer, and I was amused to see this. We've been infiltrated all this time, and we never even suspected. :-)

If I see Lucy, Wyatt, or especially Rufus around, I'll make sure to report back.

Ron

 

Edited October 24, 2018 by Ron Stewart