[rollei_list] Re: OT - Santoku envy and lousy German (was: "NIH Syndrome" (was: Liquid Lenses))
- From: Ardeshir Mehta <ardeshir@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:22:25 -0500
On Wednesday, January 26, 2005, at 04:16 PM, Marc James Small wrote:
> I was not aware that Jerry knew any Russian.
He once wrote on the old Rollei list that Russian was his first
language.
> Do you?
Nyemnoshka. Really, next to none, except being able to read Russian
words written in Cyrillic, with some difficulty.
> I do. And German. And French. And I can even speak some Yiddish, on
> occasion. (And I hold a Master's Degree in Classical Languages.) In
> addition, I have a working ability to deal with Scots and Irish Gaelic
> and Welsh. (I know very little Arabic and even less Hebrew but I hope
> to study both at some point: I can read the New Testament of the
> Christian Bible in the original Koine Greek but I must learn Hebrew to
> deal with the Old Testament and the Apocrypha.)
Nice!
I grew up speaking four languages - Gujarati (my mother tongue),
Marathi, Hindi and English. I also learned French at school in India.
Then after the age of 21, I lived in Italy for three years, which made
me fluent in Italian and almost fluent in Spanish and French. Then I
lived in Israel for nine years, and did my university degree at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which entailed my learning Hebrew (that
being the medium of instruction there). When I returned to India I
studied Sanskrit, and lived in the Punjab for a while, which made me
familiar with Punjabi as well. Of course Pali is not too different from
Sanskrit. Besides, I can get by (like: read comics, or the Gospels) in
Catalan, German and Flemish/Dutch/Afrikaans. I also studied Japanese
for a while when I came to Canada. Besides, I can read the Qr'an,
albeit with considerable difficulty, in Arabic, and likewise, some of
the poetry of Hafez, Omar Khayyam and Rumi in Farsi.
Cheers.
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