I EAT CANNIBALS!

Saturday afternoon, monshu and I dropped in to a publication party at a small press on Hubbard. We left none the wiser as to why they thought there was a market for a $3,000 volume of our friend Lee's biography of his Russian father-in-law, but at least we had under our belts a couple glasses of decent wine, a few bites of tasty hors d'œuvres (though poor monshu missed out on a truly fantastic tarte aux oignons), and two hours of mostly worthwhile chat with a whirlwind of interesting people.

On the way over, I'd spotted a used bookstore where I'd forgotten one existed and begged monshu to let me stop in. He agreed to 15 minutes on the way back to the bus to our next engagement, which was really more than sufficient given their disappointing selection. I spent $10 on three books, but the only real discovery among them was $1.50 Dover reprint of a slim volume on Plains Indian Sign Language available online in its entirety (but with the illustrations poorly reproduced).

What tickled me most about it is that it's apparently the work that inspired Baden-Powell to incorporate Indian Sign Language into scouting and, thus, the direct predecessor of those cheesy glossaries included in my Official Boy Scout Handbook back when I was a child. As you can see, there's actually a suggested Sign Language playlet for Scout troupes in the book itself.

So Sunday, when I couldn't fire myself to do much of anything, I spent a little while in bed teaching myself a few signs. I need more practice, though, if I'm going to avoid pitfalls like making the sign for "Indian" (left hand flat, palm down; two swipes with the right fingertips from wrist to knuckles) when I want to say "bacon" (left hand flat, palm up; two swipes with thumb and forefinger of right hand from knuckles to wrist). Could be embarrassing!

A dilettante in all things, but especially languages

This is my response to franzeska in linguaphiles regarding my command of languages. Since it's something I get asked a lot and generally hate trying to answer, I thought I'd reproduce it here for easy reference.

It's still a bit hard to answer these questions because, as you know, active command of a language degrades rapidly with disuse, so it's hard to predict accurately whether you can still do something you haven't done in a while. I'll give it my best shot, though:

How many languages can you have a casual conversation in? Short answer: Probably about six (Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Spanish.) Long answer: I might be able to manage French with a sufficiently patient interlocutor. Last time I tried chatting in Welsh, it was disastrous, but perhaps with a chance to cram ahead of time it would turn out better.

How many languages can you write an academic paper in? I haven't had to write an academic paper in any language for more than fifteen years, so it's difficult to say. Definitely English and German, and probably Catalan and Spanish as well without too much trouble.

How many languages can you read literature in? Short answer: About a dozen. Long answer: I've read short stories and/or novels in all the languages listed above plus Irish, Italian, Asturian, and Low Saxon. Portuguese and Occitan should be no problem, but Romansh is a different story; as I mentioned before, I've got a novel in Rumantsch Grischun that I've never been able to hack through more than a few pages with in the absence of a decent dictionary. I've read short Korean texts before, but nothing of tremendous literary quality. (I have short stories from Hwang Sun-wŏn and Yi Mun-yŏl that I've never been able to get through.) I also studied Old English in college, but I'm not confident in my ability to get the gist of texts I'm not already familiar with (e.g. Biblical ones). Oh, and I can probably read Yiddish--I know the orthography and some of the most vital Hebrew borrowings. (Enough to understand popular songs, at least.)

How many languages do you speak/write on a more or less native level? Only English, I would say. Most Germans figure out I'm not a native speaker after less than fifteen minutes.

How many languages have you studied for the equivalent of a year of high school language (i.e. more than picking up a bad phrasebook, but way less than any of the above)? Armenian, Cantonese, Czech, Modern Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Latin, Osage, Persian, Panjabi, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Swahili, Tibetan, Turkish. A tier below even these I would rank Alemannic, Arabic, Basque, Breton, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Romanian, Romany, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese--as you can see, it's a fairly wide penumbra. What is that, about 30 in addition to the 12-15 already tabulated?