Army tells gay translators: don't tell, or don't translate

[Kevin Birge]

I'm not sure what happened there. Never seen that before. I'll switch
it over to plain text. I can't promise that this will have much more
of a point though.

Here's what I sent:

I used to be a Thai linguist when I was in the Air Force. Learning the
alphabet for Thai really wasn't that hard really. The first few weeks
of classes involved using  a kind of phonetic spelling until the
student was able to easily read the Thai alphabet.  Since Thai is a
phonetic alphabet with about 80 characters (it's been over 20 years, I
can't remember the exact number and don't want to look it up,) it
wasn't that difficult to learn and was definitely  needed in order to
fully understand the language.  The only thing that I noticed after
learning Thai and using it every day for three years was that my
English spelling skills suffered horribly.  Fortunately, spell check
was just a couple of years away, and all was right with the world
again!

I knew a couple of Farsi linguists at the time, and from what I
remember, learning the alphabet wasn't the difficult part there
either.  They'd already taken tests to show that they had a talent for
learning languages so learning however many symbols they needed to
learn the language came easy. Not so much for the Chinese linguists,
but for languages with an alphabet, not a big issue.

Like Wilson said though, given the investment that the government has
to put into these soldiers, it seems foolish to kick out a herd of
them just because they choose a lifestyle that can no longer be used
as a tool in blackmail. I do remember that once you got on the job,
the linguist were punished more severely for things that might have
been either overlooked or handled verbally.  I don't know for sure why
that is, but I suspect that they don't do enough stupid things that
start out with the phrase "Hey. watch this!" to get them into trouble
that they early 80's standard airman might do. I could be wrong
though. It's just a theory.

Kevin



On 5/28/07, Scot LaFaive <spiderrmonkey at hotmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Scot LaFaive <spiderrmonkey at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Army tells gay translators: don't tell, or don't translate
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I'm not sure I see your point...
>
> Scot LaFaive
>
>
> >From: Kevin Birge <kevin at FRONTSTRETCH.COM>
> >Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> >Subject: Re: Army tells gay translators: don't tell, or don't translate
> >Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 14:41:04 -0400
> >
> >---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >-----------------------
> >Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >Poster:       Kevin Birge <kevin at FRONTSTRETCH.COM>
> >Subject:      Re: Army tells gay translators: don't tell, or don't
> >translate
> >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> snip giberrish

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