ALPHABET

Yesterday when the grandies came and I was to babysit for a few hours, Kaya (9) and one of the twins (Mitsuki, 6) set immediately to playing with the toys, while the other twin (Miasa, also 6) sat quietly at the kitchen table, hunched over a notebook, drawing-- or so I thought.

When I happened to walk by and glanced at what she was doing, at first it looked like English words... But that couldn't be of course, since she doesn't speak English - though she has expressed a desire to learn English... Besides, she's only 6, and 6-year-olds often say things... But they WERE English words, beautifully printed and she was printing them! Beautifully! Huh?

One of her sisters was jumping rope and the other was rolling around the room on the big red ball, which are essential activities in themselves, but have the addictive quality of being fun. In stark contrast, Miasa had, before coming to visit, made ruled lines in her blank notebook, asked someone to print an English word on the left of each line and was now intently copying each printed word carefully and in surprisingly expert fashion, over and over till she reached the end of the line, when she would start on the next line and word. She wasn't having fun or showing off, she was just doing it, and had started doing it the moment she'd arrived. While her sisters were playing noisily, she was quietly studying English!

I... I... I was speechless. I just stood there. I... I had never seen a 6-year-old focus with that much intensity, for that long, on a real grownup study task. I... I waited till she had finished the whole two pages (without looking up even once!), when she ruled fresh lines on the next two pages and held it up to me, asking me to print some new English words on the left. I... I... I said: This is fantastic! You are amazing! You are ... This is... Wow... and so forth, at which the other two girls looked up to see what all the praise was about, and later after dinner, when they were about to watch the Wizard of Oz they insisted on watching it in English.

Later, when Kasumi came to pick them up and take them home across the Lake, they had fallen asleep... Out in the car Miasa lifted a sleepy hand and said "My notebook..." She'd left it by the warm wood stove, where she'd been ruling in more lines, just before falling asleep...

My English fails me...

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

The drug used in the present study was a micronized type synthesized by the research department of our pharmaceutical division, which is practically insoluble in water.

That great civilizations once flourished and declined in man's history is indicated by the large relics still remaining in desserts.

If yellow turns into orange, the pocket heater will be fired.

We have prepared these programs just mentioned to present you with as many problems as possible, which we assume will help enhance your understanding of Japan.

Of these symptoms, three cases showed only slight scream.

If it is impossible for you to attend the meeting, could you send a dupty?

Assistance will be provided in making arrangements for visits or appointments with people that you desire.

Now, let's insert a thermometer in the first place.

Please meet in the lobby of the hotel to go to the dinner hosted by the deputy mayor. The bus to the site will be served.

Successful voyages made by Europeans during this period proved that the earth is a glove.

CRAZY ENGRISH

Since early times, English-speaking travelers (yours truly included) have made fun of the　"English" signs etc. they find around the world, as though they never did the same thing themselves...

Someone spotted this English road sign in Swansea, with helpful Welsh translation for frequent travelers from Wales...

Looks great to the natives, but Welsh folks driving through laugh their heads off at these linguistically inept Brits when they read the Welsh part that says"I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." A colonial history catches up with you sooner or later...

via

MORE MEMORABLE J > E TRANSLATIONS


Unless otherwise specified, all work shall be done perfectly.

As far as economic consideration goes, the Japanese boats ended up in red ink.

A patient dosed with nifedipine is said to be dead.

The bureau meeting will be free to those not attending.

Ground the DC motor case via the shielding housing or something.

They can be divided into two types: one of them is glucose non-fermenting gram-negative rods and another is the other.

It is only quite recently that we began to speak interminably.

Also, this treatment might diffuse viral particles into surrounding normal cells in intolerable patients such as children.

Local volunteers are throwing their hearts into meals for the aged.

Dear Mayor: I greatly appreciated your visit, along with your wife.

more to come...

MEMORABLE J >E TRANSLATIONS
-- From my large collection, found during editing over the decades--
More to be posted from time to time...

"1. For typing specifications refer to 2. below.
2. No typing necessary."

"If we are to maintain world peace, we must spend more time teaching our children the horrors of war in schools."

"Participants reconfirmed their commitment to the promotion and renewed their hope to win the gold, silver or bonzo prize."

"How long has it been since a recent event?"

"There are vegetables that are related to Japan."

"If the answer is no, give the year you expect to become necessary."

"The symbolic spaces and straight lines added in later days form a kind of passage, at the end of which there is nothing like a sculpture."

"The Federation passes a resolution requesting interpretation to enable the social functioning of people whose auditory sense or speech is impaired every year at its national meeting."

"Check connected joints for leakage using soapy water or else."

"In this ride, passengers can experience totally reverse movements in a round trip while screaming."

THE PLAN WAS SIMPLE, LIKE...

"The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work."

The 25 Funniest Analogies (Collected by High School English Teachers)

From Writing English - The International Language of Business

Well, analogies were like that in high school...

FWIW, IMHO.

Another sign of metamaturity I've noted in myself at my age is the almost reflexive lifting of the nose upon reading English as she is now keyboarded. Noselifting was much easier for my teachers, because the symptoms were simpler back in paleological times, and fewer. Now the act requires nare heights never B4 attempted, to accommodate English as she is, like, spoke, txted, LEETed, rapped and stuff.

In my day, which was closer to Babylonian times, we used to delight in our devilish 'aints' and dropped g's... How mightily our righteous teachers used to try to purge us of those elocutionary travesties! How quaint those times seem now. Those were small battles compared to the Battlestar Galactica kind of struggle that isn't even really being waged these days, when the most shocking and unspeakable words of yore ('yore'... now there’s a dusty term, get my trowel and brush, I think I've uncovered something here) are used on tv and pepper common speech like the schrapnel of distaste. There was no tv in the early inkwell era, when grownups not even in college commonly read thick books and we kids had to imagine a lot, play outdoors all the time, we were much more active, seldom passive, and it showed in our language. I feel we are losing ground, but I ain't really complainin' (Sister James Marie turns in her grave).

In those times - as they appear to me now - English was closer to the original language, the way it ws B4 teh changez. In grade school back then we had inkwells in the tops of the genuine wooden(!) and cast-iron(!) classroom desks at which we studied the Palmer Method, when handwriting and correspondence were still major skills and pigtails could be dipped. That was, like, way before keyboarding. We practiced scrolls and loops and other calligraphic fundamentals several hours a week, using steel-nibbed straight pens pretty much of the type Jefferson used to write out the Declaration of Independence, by hand, with a pen dipped over and over in ink!

Linguistically, not much had changed during the centuries between Jefferson and me. We used to study letter writing too, of the same old snailmail type Jefferson used, when replies could be weeks away. Snailmail used to have salutations, like Dear Sir(s) or Madam, or To Whom it may concern (they used 'whom' back then...). Pretentious sounding greetings now, a far cry from the lower case 'dude,' 'yo' or nothing at all used in email.

Also big at the time were diction and elocution, which you don't hear much of, or about, these days, whose chronic lack makes the Declaration a puzzling read to, like, students today. It was a different world, only just recently released from the reins of horsepower and the flicker of candles, what I've come to think of as the Palmer Method days. It was a slower language in a slower world, where handwriting and rhetoric were essential social skills. More studied, less frenetic, those times felt more like history was happening, in contrast to a txt msg.

And BTW, whenever I myself slip into the slovenly comfort of these shortcuts as into some formally ragged denim cutoffs, I feel traitorous somehow, I can sense the absence of what has been and is being lost: care for eloquence, honoring the past, concern and respect for correspondents, even if only mannered, as in diplomacy.

Also being lost is a general love of the rhythm and visual beauty of handwriting. I know that it's all going away, as things always do, much as horses and oil lamps went away for my grandparents; and with those no-longer essentials went the slow way of life that had trotted along in sync with daylight and nightlight since Babylon. Now that we've morphed to a reality as perceived through the window of an air-conditioned car on a superexpressway, who has time for extended and stately salutations? Road rage is quicker. And what does it matter? Who really cares? Respect is no longer accorded much anyway, except by the surviving metamature.

Now that LEET is here, poetry and good writing are fading away as well, like blacksmiths and buggy whips did; there's no time anymore for slow, elegant things. I read an article the other day that asked, is the novel going to disappear, the way poetry has? The fading of poetry already a given.

To my paleological eye, you'd need a bathyscaphe to plumb the depths to which English has declined. Apostrophes and general punctuation have pretty much gone the way of, like, horseshoes, along with logical capitalization, that/which distinction, linguistic pride and spelling in general (misspellings in the New Yorker!), to say nothing of the semicolon; I'm one of the small coterie who still uses that period-comma. And I remember when TIME magazine was an eloquent touchstone of quality English. Writers now just wnt 2b yr frnd.

I don't mean to sound curmudgeonly, but now that I have time for it, what the hell. These are times when curmudgeoning is called for, pointless though it may be. I know that, in a sense, these are simply the ramblings of a Babylonian, much like those of Sister Marie once were to me, but I also know, from experience, that the young don't have a clue as to the value of time. By the time you get to my age, you do. IMHO, FWIW.