dialects and languages

[George Thompson]

I had a comrade at my library job who was born and raised in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium.

There was a project that some benefactor of the human race had undertaken, to publish translations of P. G. Wodehouse's story, "The Great Sermon Handicap" in all the languages of the world.  Volume 1 gave the story in 6 or 8 Romance languages.  Of course I ordered it for the library.  I showed Kurt the volume for the Germanic languages, with a translation into Flemish, and he became furious.  Flemish isn't a language, it's a dialect; I spoke Flemish when I was a little boy, with my parents, but then I went to school and learned to speak proper Dutch; I wouldn't know how to translate something into Flemish myself; &c.

I believe that this effort was abandoned after 6 volumes, but it is available in better libraries everywhere.

I was at the reference desk with Kurt one day when a girl said to him "I have to write a paper on Vincent Van Go"  He said, "You mean Vincent Van" and here he made a sound such as I have not otherwise heard, except when my cat was producing a hairball.  Then he helped her to research her paper.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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