dialects and languages
George Thompson
george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Tue Feb 26 16:08:43 UTC 2008
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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