Friday, February 11, 2005

Not a disclaimer

This is a little late in coming.

If you can read Latin or have enough interest to go muddling around in a dictionary and the accompanying paradigms till you figure out that linguarum perita is the feminine form of 'linguist', let me just assure you that I'm not a linguist. I was forced into some interest in this field upon nearly stumbling headlong into the awful, sickening truth: no one can learn all the languages on earth. For me, linguistics is just an excuse to study any language without having to master it. Linguarum perita literally means 'girl skilled in languages', and parvissima is the superlative form of parvus, 'small', 'little', which could mean 'the littlest girl skilled in languages' or 'the girl rather least skilled in languages'. All that is just a roundabout way of saying that I love languages, and I realize my skill is little compared to many other people, or, if you prefer, I may be short.

I decided to skip out the 'Sites of the Month' feature because this entails the generally boring job of looking for stuff that may interest other people. Frankly, who cares? "Write about what you know," Mommy and Ardith used to tell me, and the same thing applies to links on blog sidebars. By the way, if you're trying to improve your comprehension of a language, do listen to foreign language radio. It helps.

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