Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Not being fluent

I'm not fluent in Italian, which I usually notice when I can't come up with the word for, say, "doorknob", or when I have trouble with a sentence or find myself looking up words to make basic sense of a passage. Tonight I was looking at a recipe which called for cavatappi and I thought, "remove-corks" then "tire-bouchon" then "corkscrew" then "oh, corkscrew pasta". That's what not being fluent really means - even the stuff you know creates little eddies, increasing the impedence or Reynolds number of the language flowing through your brain.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Try Babelfish?

23/11/05 23:39  
Blogger rilkefan said...

"manopola del portello", says babelfish.

Here's some Blake into Italian and back:

And those feet in the ancient time have walked on green of mountains of England? And the Saint lamb of the God on the pleasant pastures of England has been seen?

and some Larkin:

The sexual demands have begun in nineteen sessantatre (that rather they were delayed for me) between the conclusion of the prohibition of Chatterley and LP of the Beatles the first one.

24/11/05 00:01  

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