horsemouth the polyglot

good morning! good morning! horsemouth is up. it looks like a grey dull day (but yesterday turned out pretty decent so who knows). 

horsemouth lay out on the front steps (it's a bit of a sun trap) barefoot in a t-shirt and rolled up trouser legs and read. he was reading fishing in utopia: sweden and the future that disappeared by andy brown. now because this is a fishing book horsemouth picked it up thinking sten might like it, but then because it looked an easy read he thought he might read it himself.

horsemouth has no interest in the fishing. what he is interested in is the background and the languages. brown speaks swedish to the point where in his younger years he thinks several of the areas in his life entirely in it (later when he returns he is flustered by how much facility he has lost). but even then he speaks it well enough to pick up local dialect and to recognise it as non-standard.

'they deregulated everything, and it all went to hell.' says one of the locals of the years while he was away. curiously horsemouth thinks you could write the same book about south wales - the ending of industry, the arrival of neo-liberalism etc. 

horsemouth has always been fascinated by people who can speak more than one language - languages are such complicate things that he is always impressed when people can manage it at all. for this reason he is never rude about people's english because, even at his best, horsemouth sounds like an idiot in french. he once managed a conversation (well - a couple of lines) with the mother of a hotel owner in portuguese, you must be italian she said because the english can't speak portuguese. 

but take modern greek for example - it makes no sense at all to him  when he hears it - and while he is in a good position right now to learn some italian he never seems to make progress with it. 

horsemouth laments not having put more effort into learning foreign languages over the years (his accent is usually decent his grammar non existent). 

he can acquire the vocabulary because these are latin based languages).  we live in the ruins of a giant empire with one vocabulary that has diverged and standardised round habits of speech and spelling so when horsemouth looks at text from france, spain, portugal, italy, rumania, catalunya he can often guess what he is looking at. for some reason he cannot make the same adjustment with gaelic or welsh (but maybe it's just lack of practice lack of texts in different languages about the same or similar topics). 

in the 90ies when he travelled horsemouth would be sitting on the plane with a phrase book trying to learn the phrases to book a hotel room because there was no internet and there was no booking ahead. when he was in czech and poland he managed ok (mostly) people were friendly and helpful.

brits are legendarily lazy about learning languages but they have no excuse really. while one half of the english language is derived from latin or french the other half is derived from german, danish dutch, scandewegian (thank you our esteemed viking friends). but the brits are terrible at learning these also. 

horsemouth sticks out (like a sore thumb as the british say) by being interested in this stuff (but just because he's interested in this stuff it doesn't mean he's any good at it).

he has made various efforts over the years to sing songs in french (je te veux) and spanish (a la luna yo mi voy). this requires him to know the lyrics better in the target language than for english lyrics (because there is no making it up if you forget).  his first attempt to sing a la luna he gets the lyrics wrong (but he'd do a much better job now because enza found the lyrics online he now knows what words he is supposed to be singing and this is a big help). 

before he was sunbathing horsemouth was posting off a musicians of bremen volume four CD to someone who'd purchased the download online and requested a physical CD. horsemouth is happy to do this for UK and europe destinations (just let him know). if you want your musicians of bremen further afield please send them a message beforehand so horsemouth can check the cost. 

today horsemouth is doing interest rate sensitivity calculations - how much more do you have to pay for every 1% the interest rates go up.