As I said before, you can understand phrases without knowing the meaning of every word or the grammar. There is a difference between understanding, and being able to think in a language. Certainly, the latter is better. but not necessary to be able to say something with meaning. Like I said, how many people know the meaning of individual words in “coup d’etat” or “réspondez s’il vous plaît (RSVP)”? I am willing to bet it is not many people, yet don’t we all understand the meaning and use the phrases with meaning?
Even when I look it up in the dictionary, I never can understand*** vis a vis*** and I don’t know why anybody uses it? Isn’t there an English way to express it?
The other day I watched a program on airline disasters and the part that failed on the plane was something, that phonetically, sounds like “peetow” tube. It’s actually spelled Pitot. I watched an entire program about how a bug which made its nest in the Pitot tube brought down the plane with 129 passengers (none survived).
there’s a good book by Fr. David Vincent Meconi SJ called The One Christ which is expensive to begin with (I bet he requires it in the theology classes he teaches at St. Louis University) but you have to know 4 or 5 languages, because he just switches into German, French, and a couple other languages. If you suffer through most of the book, he switches to all-English in the final summary chapter, so it’s not a total waste, but it’s pretty hard slugging most of the way. When he appeared on EWTN to push his book, he didn’t hint that it was so hard to read, in any way. since he’s writing about St. Augustine, he’s quoting him in Latin, more than a couple times.
Everybody loves St. Theres of Lisieux. But I hate “Lisieux.” I don’t think she was from Lisieux, but I think she went into a convent there, if I’m not mistaken. If I had been in charge of anything in Europe in WWII, I would have lost the war, because I never learned to speak French.
My parish changed its name from St. Stanislaus parish to Our Lady of Czestochowa. In a meeting, a women referred to our parish as Our Lady of Czechoslovakia. Our pastor told us to make out our donation checks to OLC parish – Thank God.
I read a lot of Jewish commentaries on scripture, and some of them go deeply into the underlying Hebrew and Aramaic. I was reading a translation of some of (Jewish) Philo of Alexandria’s commentaries and he used the Greek Septuagint exclusively, so those commentaries frequently cite the underlying Greek word to clarify what he is talking about.
When I was a kid, the Daily Missal had the English on the right-hand page, and the Latin on the left-hand page. So, I could see where a lot of the words came from, except when it came to words like “quodquem.” In Latin, I seem to recall that the subject of the sentence is sometimes assumed, so it is sometimes hard to deal with that.
On the evening news, Nicaragua was in the news for years, and some of the spanish-speaking broadcasters would give us nothing less than the exact Spanish pronunciation, which was something like NEE CAR AGUA and they “roll” the R. “rrrr” – well, that’s the way to pronounce it.
Most native born US Citizens can only speak one language, we’re pathetic. In europe, the kids pick up 4 or 5 languages.
I have a learned aversion to non-english languages, because my mother spoke Polish, just so that I wouldn’t understand her, or the only things she would try to teach me were swear-words. One of them, literally translated, she said, meant “dog’s blood.” I’m not sure what context I would use that in.
