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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Undocumented Features General
Topic ID: 119
Message ID: 6
#6, RE: Sure, I'll make the first comment...
Posted by Laudre on Sep-23-01 at 06:26 PM
In response to message #0
LAST EDITED ON Sep-23-01 AT 06:28 PM (EDT)

Okay, random comments as I'm reading.

>student, as her shirt indicated. She had an English name. Carolyn,
>maybe? No - Kaitlyn.

"Kaitlyn" is a misspelling of an Irish Gaelic name (sort of; it ought to be Caitlyn, unless you're going full-on Gaelic). The English name would be Katherine, or a variant of it. ("Catherine" would be, to Janvier, French.)

> "Most excellent," said Janvier. "Shall I pour your wine
>before I go and give your order to Mama?"
> Juri said she would like that, thank you, but Kaitlyn went a
>little pink and replied, "Um, n-n-no, th-thank y-y-you... I, I'm
>n-n-not o-o-old en-n-nough. M-mayb-b-be Th-Th-Thursd-d-day... "

I don't know where you got your information, but last I knew the drinking age in France is 13, and even then, nobody really cares. It's at most a formality.

>Musicians, she explained, tended to be a somewhat quarrelsome lot when
>gathered together in groups,

Composers, maybe, but whenever I've been around a large number of fellow musicians we've mostly compared notes, techniques, preferences, and war stories. But bassists aren't really contentious anyway.

> In this vein, they sat across the table on the sidewalk by the
>rue de Rivoli for almost two hours and argued. They didn't fight -
>they -argued-, after the ancient Greek fashion, taking opposing
>viewpoints and defending them with wit and courtesy.

Am I the only one who finds this to be a difficult art to sustain? So few people seem to be able to debate aggressively without letting it get personal.

>sort of a gift, she would break his arm. Touga Kiryuu generally
>hadn't taken seriously threats of bodily harm from women, but from
>Juri, he believed.

I find this line inordinately amusing.

>system, hitting shops in no fewer than nine of the city's 20
>arrondissements).

Paris n'a que vingt arrondissements au siecle vingt-cinquieme?

>seemed to strike Parisians as enchantingly exotic rather than
>annoyingly provincial.

As far as I've ever been able to determine, there isn't an accent in the world that would strike a Parisian as anything other than a horrific mangling of the language. At best they concede that a foreigner cannot learn to speak French as elegantly as the language demands.

>perhaps from one of the 'colonies dans les etoiles'.

Colonies inside the stars? Aren't they kind of hot?

Unless my French is even rustier than I realize, it ought to be "colonies aux etoiles", ou peut-etre "colonies des etoiles".

>circles). Still others he had picked up just by whim, because he
>enjoyed languages and collected them like some people collected hats
>or coins - what other reason could anyone have for learning Esperanto?

I don't consider this a jab, because that's the reason I started learning Esperanto. Afterwards I discovered a body of literature in the language and a substantial community of speakers.

>had missed out French. It was very possibly the only Earth language
>he didn't know, but his ignorance of it was profound.

Okay, even assuming that we're down to a selection of national languages, that's still several hundred. I'm impressed. (India alone has something like 140 different languages and over 700 different dialects.)

Out of bizarre curiousity, did Mark Okrand invent a Klingon language for the Trek franchise in the UF universe, and, if so, is it anything like the language typically spoken by Klingons offworld? (Even in the Trek universe, there's a number of languages spoken on Kronos, but Klingonaase is the only one really heard offworld.)

>turtleneck sweater, the other a gray-skinned, white-haired, slim and
>coltish Nebari girl,

Why, I do believe that this is the first Farscape reference in UF.

-- Sean --

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