Posted on 06/10/2011 8:23:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
If the English were so great at the time and were not that influenced by the Romans, why did their civilization go to he** after the Romans pulled out? Years of technology was lost with the Roman withdrawal and education of the masses was non existent after the Romans left.
Where are the toll booths?
The aqueduct?
“There is no such thing as French. Just badly mispronounced peasent Latin with an attitude.”
No kidding. 1976, I was a Civil Air Patrol cadet, down at the Cadet Officers School at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. One girl in our flight had an accent so thick, that some people couldn’t understand her.
Oddly enough, me, the kid from Pennsylvania, was the only one who could reliably “translate” for her. . . .
Was she frin AL?
Case in point, northeastern New Jersey.
:Funny thing - if you didn’t have two code talkers in WWII, put two southern hicks on the radio. It confused the heck out of the germans. GA, MS, LA - another language to them entirely.:
I am from mississippi and have actually done this to discuss something I don’t want anyone who speaks english-second-language nearby to have a chance of understanding. All my family is from the country.... You can, with a little circular talking, make it impossible to understand for anyone who has not been around it or is otherwise not a totally fluent speaker, and even then it is hard.
Well, the high german can be read very easily as "Now is it (to) me clear", so no problem. I guess the low german is "Now it me clear". Same idea. I think "OK, I get it." is going too far in the search for a vernacular equivalent. How about, "I see." ?
The thing that puzzles me is the literal origin of Gauss's famous utterance, when he plopped his chalkboard on his teacher's desk with 5050 written on it ( ... the sum of 1 thru 100 ... ) "ligget se". This is "in his peasant dialect" according to E.T. Bell in MEN OF MATHEMATICS. I researched it, but came to no really satisfactory conclusion. As best I can tell, the "se" is "Sie", i.e. "she" so it would seem to be, "she lies", or to us, "there it lies", or as we would say, "there it is". I don't believe there is any literal meaning of "there" in the expression, however.
Das can ich glauben - I can believe it.
I am from Virginia and I can’t even understand you folks.
And for all the idiots in texas, YES, Virginia was the Capitol of the South.
Richmond and all that. Look it up. If you can read.
(Oh, boy, I have stirred a hornets nest)
No, no, no - Sie, Das. “There it lies.”
The sum of 1 - 100 is (N)*(N+1)/2
In this context, Sie = “the thing.” “it.”
The vernacular - the whole context is
“Zervuss, macht’s gut - etzat, ma klur”
In english, “See you bye, bitch.”
The road goes ever on!
Sure, context and meaning are inescapable, but literally, there is no "there" there. It's just "She lies", or "It lies". Of course, there is a tradition, especially nautical, even in modern english of this generalized notion of "she". "She's a big one" etc. said of almost anything. I can hardly believe I'm wrong to see "she" in "sie" !
Try this:put Jamaican speaker with Indian speaker on conference call for week, I stayed on line to interpret as best I could. Actually one of better conference calls I have ever been on. Made for some funny times, all participants were equally amused.
Or a hillbilly.
After 18 years hubby still doesn’t understand half of what I say and I function as an interpreter between him and my dad.
[I’m bilingual...I also speak Yankee]
LOL
Beats the typical death by webex. ;)
Deer paths became indian trails became dirt roads became the first paved highways in the southern US in a mere three to four centuries time.
Only with the advent of multilane roads and interstates have the old, natural routes been passed over. So, it’s easily observed. The best route is the best route and recognized by animals, Celts or even Romans. Who’d have thunk, lol?
Right off the top, to me it smacks of Black history month type revisionism
The Roman Empire was not a republic or a democracy (the “Roman republic” was just a fascist oligarchy; the addition of a permanent full-time executive branch was a necessity, too bad for them they never worked out a system of orderly succession, Diocletian tried to) — from a political standpoint. But the economic system underlying it was a weird mixture of aristocratic rule over slaves and other subordinates, and wild-eyed, full-bore, whole-hog free marketeering. As a neighboring territory became economically stitched into the Roman markets, it like as not would eventually be added to the empire proper.
This practice ended with the mincing, unrepentant homosexual Hadrian, who hated the Jews, had no clue about business, loved new taxes, and had to be talked out of giving up territories. When his catamite drowned in the Nile, Hadrian was so heartbroken he had the little homo elevated to deity, set up the cult throughout the empire, and built a city named after the butt-buddy, right at the site of the drowning. The crews employed in building a road across mountains and desert to the Red Sea ports, in an attempt to give some kind of economic life to the city, appears to have been used only by those construction crews. The city basically vanished after perhaps twenty years, and apparently never had much of an existence anyway.
Churchill may have indeed made that point (or borrowed it with proper citation); the discovery over ten years ago of the remains of a Roman-era trading post / fort / frontier fort in Ireland suggests the way that Britain was colonized and conquered, which is through trade, cultural influence, and (as in Germany) sponsorship / bribery of local chieftains. Claudius’ invading force grabbed most of the island in a walk. Vespasian (later to be one of the better early emperors, imho, despite some problems) reduced the hillforts using Roman artillery (catapaults, crossbows, etc) and rolled across.
Even the Boudicca revolt wasn’t much, and was utterly destroyed by a very small Roman force. If the Boudicca revolt had never happened, the Romans might have done well to invent it, since there was hardly a peep out of anyone in Britain for over three hundred years thereafter.
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