Page Eight, website outline
Foreign languages were an enormous interest in my life from 4th grade (when they started us on French lessons) to age 55, when my own life was obliterated. And in all those years between age 9 and age 55, I studied, both formally and informally, ten or more languages. When I tell this to people, they immediately want to know do I speak all those languages. No, I don’t. And that wasn’t my intent, except in the case of German, which I do speak. All of the others were studied mainly because I was a grammar nut. I liked to learn enough about a language to have a good idea of how its grammar functions, how its sound system works, and learn a certain amount of vocabulary. So that I could read a bit, learn songs in that language and understand them, things like that. Not so that I could take a plane to whatever country and start babbling away.
Prior to the eviction two years ago, I had it in mind that before I was dead or senile I’d like to learn something about Finnish and the Greenlandic languages. I didn’t move fast enough on this, and the eviction happened, and with it the end of most of my interest in anything at all. While I was living outdoors for two months in 2008, I did get a Finnish book from the library and took what was my first look ever at that language and how it works. The verb system was terrifying. I must be getting more chicken in terms of grammar as I get older because I’ve certainly met cantankerous verb systems before (the Irish one is a good example), but that Finnish one made me say: well my life as I knew it is over anyway, and my interests have pretty much been beaten out of me, so I don’t ever have to make myself look at this verb system again. And so far I haven’t.
So there’s a hodge-podge of languages sprinkled about in my blogs. I don’t know anything about translating with a computer, whether one needs to know what the language is before translating, or what. And it doesn’t matter to me. The languages are there on the page for me, because of their significance to the life that’s gone. Because sometimes I want a phrase, when I read it, to sound and to look a certain way.
I have indeed acquired several books in recent months for languages that I only just started to learn years ago (Dutch, Danish, Norwegian), and thought I might now go further. No use. It’s as doomed as reading is, as doomed as listening to music, as ripped into thin shreds that blow around in the wind as so many other parts of me are since three women let loose their fierce mental illnesses on me and my poor animals. 
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If you’re a bit of a language-nut too:
French 1. ~~ Flemish/Dutch 1. ~~ Latin 1.
German 1., 2. ~~ Greek ~~ Irish 1. Irish 2. ~~ Welsh
Or you can go to an English post that has little wanderings in some other tongues, right here.
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read… Being toward death… Sehnen…
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