[BITList] Franglais

[HUGH MCINTYRE]

Tom,

I had 3.5 years of French and 3.0 of Latin at school.  What little I 
recalled of Latin served me to some extent when faced with ancient documents 
unearthed in pursuit of family history, but only as far as getting a vague 
notion of what they were about - the rest had to be done with a 
Latin/English dictionary. The fact that legal documents run more or less to 
a template helped a lot.  My French proved more useful, though only in 
Denmark, talking to a Milanese (I'm not Italian, I'm Milanese - he was fond 
of saying).  Giancarlo Suerz spoke only a smidgin of broken English, even 
less German, and schoolboy French that matched mine, but we got along OK 
with that plus gesticulation.  Lothar Assmann, a German at the board behind 
me, spoke flawless English, knew a lot of Czech, and god knows what other 
languages.  I had studied German for a bit after my brother bought a 
Linguaphone course, and I could order 3/16 open jaw spanners in Hindustani. 
A true Babel, though never a divergence upon morals.  One day I wheeled 
myself and my seat over to Henning Jensen and asked if he would oblige by 
speaking Danish to me at least some of the time. He thought it a daft 
request.  "Why would you want to learn Danish?" he asked, and puffed away at 
his pipe, "Nobody wants to learn Danish."  Assmann did all the text of his 
drawings in English, and nobody minded.  I asked him why he did that.  "Why 
not? They all read English in the yard", he said. One of the yard labourers 
spoke 5 languages (incidentally, he owned and lived in an enormous detached 
villa on Windelsvej, next door to the Mayor, not far from where we lived). 
A big farmer-looking chap who hailed from the north of Jutland spoke a mix 
of standard Danish and a local Jysk dialect in a sing song accent that often 
defeated his fellow Danes. To us he sounded as if he came from a mixture of 
Aberdeen and Fife.  And the Odense locals professed not to understand 
Copenhagen Danish- the local Danish is far less guttural.  They didn't think 
much of Copenhagen at all and swore only tourists went there.  I did 
translation from Danish and Norwegian while with Scotts, until they started 
to take it for granted. I did it once from Spanish - it's not rocket 
science, they could have done it themselves - my Spanish stopped at gracias 
and manana.

A couple of weeks after the 11/9 - 9/11 (delete as applicable) atrocity we 
flew to Canada via Air Canada, and I was amused to hear every announcement 
was in English (spoken at normal speed) and French (rushed at top speed).

A common picture of the Brit abroad is of someone in a bar shouting at a 
Dutch barman, "You-o give-o me-o two-o beer-o, por favor." We lot in Odense 
more or less got by and picked up a modicum of the language, with the 
exception of two extremes.  At one end there was Dennis, whose first move 
was to get digs in a farm bothy out of town where almost no English was 
spoken by his fellow lodgers.  He mastered the language well in a short 
time.  At the other end was his fellow Lancastrian, Norman, totally dim as 
far as other languages and cultures were concerned.  His worst critics were 
his fellow Englishmen, who were forever trying to convince the rest of us 
that the North of England was not populated by clones of Norman. Perhaps his 
most famous gaffe was when he hailed Henning Jensen one day, apropos nothing 
at all. "Jensen," he said, and pointed, "You foreign, me English."  Henning 
nearly bit the end off his pipe stem.  He came over to me after he'd 
recovered his composure.  "That idiot thinks I'm a bloody Red Indian."

Hugh.


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