A fair argument for Esperanto
Finally, three months into it, Adam has begun meeting some of his many aunts & uncles & cousins. Magda’s sister Ivona and her family arrived from Dortmund last evening, and our small apartment was suddenly transformed into a great big family gathering venue. One benefit of living in a small place is that it takes only a small amount of family to feel like a wonderful whole hell of a lot of family. And one dog.
The linguistic alphabet soup effect of this visit is a bit surreal. They are Poles living in Germany, so they are bilingual, the kids completely so. Patrick, who is 13, speaks English pretty well and Paula, 9, is taking Spanish lessons. Iwona also speaks Spanish, and rattles away at me in it rather than asking Magda to interpret from Polish to English. I can reply more or less, but my vestigial-isoglossal Italian tends to interfere with the rusty Spanish. The strangest part came when I took them winding through the Vipava Valley last night to their agro-tourism accomodations and we met the owner Marijo, who had earlier been reported to speak “a little German” but didn’t seem to. As Marijo explained the workings of the place to me in Slovene, I would translate it from Slovene into Spanish (via mental English) for Iwona, who would then render my fractured Spanish into Polish for the rest of the family. It should also be interesting next week when we visit Venice (which is sinking, FYI) and I try to alternate between Spanish and Italian. I don’t see it working.
