The Central Pro/Pre/Per Scriptivisor

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: <vze422fs at verizon.net>
To: "Otto" <ottosell at yahoo.de>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 7:00 AM
Subject: Re: The Central Pro/Pre/Per Scriptivisor


> on 3/12/03 10:02 AM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:
>
> >> Joe:
> >> My advice is usually "You are not in
> >> Cork. There are 270 million of us. We are heavily armed. Adapt."
> >>
> >
> > Ok, I surrender: "nucular."
> >
> > Otto
> >
>
> Hey Otto,
>
> When I get into your cab, I will attempt to give you the proper address in
> German. I will not expect you to do things my way in your own country.
>

Foreign customers always like being greeted in their language. To me they
are customers first. The fact that they're foreigners isn't that important
to me. So I speak to them in English, French or Dutch, say "nastarowje" when
a Russian or Polish lady has a cold or "gülle gülle" when a friendly Turk
leaves my cab.

Language is for communication, a dynamic ever-changing system, pre-scriptive
strict rules are shit. Nevertheless they're important for learning a
language properly. But they only reflect the grammar-, syntax- and
semantics- system of a language at a given point in time. I've always loved
the historical side of languages:

"The political disintegration of the post-Carlovingian  period was on the
whole not very  conducive to literary production. Western Europe was in
constant turmoil, and the internal unrest and uncertainty were aggravated by
frequent invasions of the Norsemen. Much of what was written must have been
destroyed under these circumstances. The only text we have left of this
period is extremely short, little more than one full sentence. It is to be
found on the last page of a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and
was discovered in 1932. On that page someone must have been trying out a new
pen by writing 'probatio pennae si bona sit' ('test to see whether the pen
is good', an early version of the 'quick brown fox'). To this he added a
Latin Sentence with a version of the same sentence in what philologists call
Old West Lower Frankish, the oldest known stage of Dutch. This sentence
reads: hebban olla vogalas nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu wat unbidan
we nu (all birds have begun their nests except me and you; what are we
waiting for now). It dates probably from the middle of the eleventh century
and stands therefore at the beginning of Dutch literature."
(R.P. Meijer, "Literature of the Low Countries," Martinus Nijhoff, The
Hague, Boston 1978, p. 2)

It's spring:
http://www.beepworld.de/members6/badgirl15/flirten.htm

Otto

__________________________________________________________________

Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
Bis zu 100 MB Speicher bei http://premiummail.yahoo.de