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Lurking Latin
I had a strange experience this morning after listening to another chapter of "The Three Musketeers" in Russian (last night I was already too sleepy to even attempt it). YouTube subsequently showed me a video of a Polish priest conversing in the Vatican with an American via the medium of Latin, and I genuinely could not work out whether I was hearing Russian or not :-p
It was precisely the same sort of 'I am semi-understanding the course of this conversation in a language that is not English' experience, but I couldn't tell what language it *was*; I did know from the video title that there was at least some Latin involved, but I simply couldn't be certain if they were actually speaking Latin at that moment, or Italian to introduce the scenario, or Russian, which was of course what my ear had been tuned into at that moment and so was the instinctive conclusion I'd jumped to, however improbable in that context....
I can only assume that the conversation was deliberately taking place using words that were likely to be in common between Polish and American, i.e. Latin roots with which we are familiar through scientific terms -- because my Latin and Italian are both extremely rudimentary (acquired for singing purposes), and I wouldn't otherwise have expected to be able to understand much or any of it -- and that the Pole was pronouncing his Church Latin with a Slavonic accent, which was confusing a brain that had just been hearing long multisyllabic cadences rolling past in a totally different language :-p But it was extremely odd to half-understand what they were saying and yet to be consciously unable to pin down what language it was being said in!
I found an envelope of spring onion seeds which I evidently harvested last year from the spring onion that flowered, so have tried sowing those, since the two surviving stubs of the old ones are looking pretty sick. It didn't help that something came along and ate the tops off them -- and also ate the flowers off the calendulas, quite deliberately, half a head at a time, coming back every night to finish the job and then moving on to the next plant -- I would be more annoyed about that if they hadn't been flowering all winter so that I was rather bored with them!
The tulips are all blooming heartily, with the exception of the bulb at the end, in between where the two garlics were put in, which is only just showing a bud. Presumably due to competition from the neighbouring bulbs, even though the garlic cloves were much smaller....
It was precisely the same sort of 'I am semi-understanding the course of this conversation in a language that is not English' experience, but I couldn't tell what language it *was*; I did know from the video title that there was at least some Latin involved, but I simply couldn't be certain if they were actually speaking Latin at that moment, or Italian to introduce the scenario, or Russian, which was of course what my ear had been tuned into at that moment and so was the instinctive conclusion I'd jumped to, however improbable in that context....
I can only assume that the conversation was deliberately taking place using words that were likely to be in common between Polish and American, i.e. Latin roots with which we are familiar through scientific terms -- because my Latin and Italian are both extremely rudimentary (acquired for singing purposes), and I wouldn't otherwise have expected to be able to understand much or any of it -- and that the Pole was pronouncing his Church Latin with a Slavonic accent, which was confusing a brain that had just been hearing long multisyllabic cadences rolling past in a totally different language :-p But it was extremely odd to half-understand what they were saying and yet to be consciously unable to pin down what language it was being said in!
I found an envelope of spring onion seeds which I evidently harvested last year from the spring onion that flowered, so have tried sowing those, since the two surviving stubs of the old ones are looking pretty sick. It didn't help that something came along and ate the tops off them -- and also ate the flowers off the calendulas, quite deliberately, half a head at a time, coming back every night to finish the job and then moving on to the next plant -- I would be more annoyed about that if they hadn't been flowering all winter so that I was rather bored with them!
The tulips are all blooming heartily, with the exception of the bulb at the end, in between where the two garlics were put in, which is only just showing a bud. Presumably due to competition from the neighbouring bulbs, even though the garlic cloves were much smaller....