My mother-tongue is Dutch, and even though I have lived in Canada for almost 37 years, I am still fluent in Dutch. However, until fairly recently, you'd better not ask me to explain lacemaking in the Dutch language, as it is a skill a acquired here, and never even knew the Dutch words for.
Same here -- I'm fluent in Polish (though need a day or so to get back the "melody" of it when I go back to Poland) but not in *lacemaking* Polish; I began to learn lacemaking -- in English -- 16 yrs after I'd left Poland. And, until a friend found a Polish book for me some 6 yrs into my lacemaking adventure, I didn't even know the proper term for "bobbin"... :) Of course, BL "tradition" in Poland being only about a 100yrs and limited to a single village (Bobowa), nobody could help much, either, since they didn't know what I was talking about.
When I was teaching myself Flanders (from a Dutch book), Lexington's two "resident Dutch" women were no help at all, and neither were their dictionaries -- it was Arachne which unscrambled the text for me. With much amusement, I may add; all those "peas" and those "beans" (and no hambone! how come? <g>)...
Coene's dictionary is good, but good only to fill the gaps -- in terminology. If you don't know the language, you're still up a creek without a paddle. English is the only language I've ever encountered which has no gender-specific endings (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and almost no cases. With any other language, half the time, you can't even *find* a word in the dictionary -- the dictionary gives you the "stripped" form of the word (nominative case, male or first person singular, present tense), and the text doesn't.
Marcie Greer wrote:
If we are taking nominations for translation to English, I nominate "Parijse Kant" by Jan Geelen.
That would be a nice one... But *my* nomination would go -- hands down :) -- to: "Kloeppeln; Handbuch mit 400 Tricks und Kniffen" by Ulrike Loehr. The dratted book has *just enough* material not covered in The Cook Book to make it tantalising. My knowledge of German -- never good to begin with and not used in almost 40 yrs -- makes it that much harder; I can understand just enough to realise that I'd profit *if only*... I'm forever the kitchen helper's child -- I can *smell* the food, but never taste it... <g>
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OT. Yesterday afternoon, I was reading and smoking on my bed upstairs (am keeping the downstairs smoke-free, and it's been too cold to sit outside), when I felt a "funny" tremor and heard a "funny" noise. A bit as if the heater in the basement had exploded (for feel), but without the preceding bang. A bit like squirrels chasing one another on the carport roof (for sound) but that couldn't have accounted for the bed shaking... DH was a floor down but, as I could hear him go outside to check and come back without loud objections, I went back to my reading and forgot all about it. Today, I learnt we'd been on the edges of an earthquake! Goodness gracious me <g> 4.5 on the Richter's scale, with the epicentre 45 miles from Richmond (the capital of Virginia). Richmond is about 150 miles from here, and I don't know in which direction the 45 miles had been (ie, total of 200 or total of 100)... Our local weekly, which appeared today, mentioned -- naturally <g> -- only that there'd been no damage done *locally*, but the "belly button of the world" attitude tells me nothing about the rest of the state of VA. All in all, a pleasurable "frisson"; I can now say "been there, done that"... Need to get a T-shirt, though <g>
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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