History and current events: the economy
Jack took me to task for ignoring history. I, on the other hand, think that if people are still alive who can remember hearing about it firsthand from their parents it is not history, had a reply. It was about the Social Security privatization plans in light of recent developments. You can check it here if you are interested.
Labels: economics, politics, Social Security
posted by Clemens @ 8:58 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Not ignoring history; forgetting it. Perhaps "ignoring" it is less offensive, but I would think that "forgetting" it is.
As for "history": when I studied it in high school & college I had to study & argue about things that had transpired only in the last thirty years or so, the Vietnam War for instance, along with Watergate. I would also hope that students of American History today are studying the end of the Cold War.
A friend of mine is defending his Master's Thesis on heretics in the Middle Ages, so maybe he'll agree with you; if so, I want those hours of my life back dagummit.
I'm with Clemens on this one -- if there aren't any dead languages involved, it's current events, not history.
And old grad school bias, of course!
LOL Does Esperanto count?
Hmm, I was going to say "no," but it is pretty dead isn't it?
Esperanto is a beautiful language, both in sound and conception. As soon as I find someone who actually speaks it, though, I 'll let you know.
Though William Shatner was in an Esperanto movie and he handled the language about as well as he does English.
Mi parolas Esperanton.
Or I did, once. I don't remember much besides that. I just didn't see the point. My father helped once by asking why I'd gone from studying dead languages (Latin, Greek) to a stillborn language.
Jack,
As our resident expert on Esperantology, what do you think of William Shatner's efforts to speak it?
I wasn't going to watch the video, but since you asked...
I agree with the guy who posted the video that Shatner sounds French at times. However, neither of them has the vowels quite right. A comment by ingchjo is good: Mi rigardas min pli-malpli flua esperantisto. sed mi ne komprenas la filmon sen la angla subtitolo. (I consider myself more or less fluent in Esperanto. But I don't understand the film without the English subtitle.)
I confess that I learned Esperanto by reading and writing it, not by speaking it, so the two of us could both be loony. I did frequent the meetings of an Esperanto club while I was a grad student, so I have heard it before, but I think I had better pronunciation than the group leader. There's only so much you can do to get a speaker of American English to approach European vowels. If not for my Italian mother, I'd be a disaster at Italian and Russian.
Post a Comment
<< Home