Ruminations

I won’t do this often, I swear, but last night I wrote a post on Vox in answer to their QoTD, and have been thinking about it ever since (I think I even dreamed about it), so I am going to write about it, again, here.

(QoTD stands for Question of The Day - a nice Vox feature where they pose a daily question that all Voxers are free to answer by blog if they feel like it.)

Yesterday’s question was: Play any instrument or speak any language, which do you choose?

Well, you may know by now how much I LOVE languages, so there was no question which way I would answer - I’d choose to be able to speak any language. If only there were some sort of implant or something you could have installed that would miraculously give you the ability to understand and speak any language.

I wrote the following list last night, but thought up a few more reasons why I’d love to be able to speak these languages…

German

• Rilke
• I had a German boyfriend years ago so I have very rudimentary German

Spanish

• Almodovar movies without having to rely on subtitles
• swearing sounds cool
• Cien Años de Soledad in the original
• ordering tapas like a native

Japanese

• manga
• Kurosawa movies
• Haruki Murakami
• The Tale of Genji

Dutch

• half my family speaks this language
• being able to say Van Gogh correctly
• being able to order a serve of oliebollen at a roadside vendor in Amsterdam

Russian

• Tolstoy
• Chekhov

Finnish

• coolness factor. I mean, how cool is this sentence? Näkyy tulevan sade. Ilma tuntuu kylmenevän. (”It looks like rain. The weather seems to be getting colder.”)

Shanghainese

• coolness factor.
• actually I’d love to able to speak better Cantonese, and Hokkien, Hakka, Teochiu… all the Chinese dialects!

Tamil

• sounds intriguing
• love the look of the alphabet

Korean

• Hangeul is cool

Vietnamese

• amazing sounds

French

• ooh la la!

Xhosa

• amazing click consonants

Italian

• I’d always know what all the different pastas were: orecchiette, manicotti, capellini, farfalle, cavatappi…

Swedish

• Henning Mankell

Arabic

• alphabet is beautiful

And then there’s Greek, Hindi, Basque, Thai, Welsh, Yoruba, Inuit, Turkish, Javanese, Maori, Pitjantjara, Auslan… yep, I’d love to be able to speak them all!

What about you - would you want to play any instrument or speak any language?

Categories: language

Sitting and staring out the window yesterday afternoon at the rain and wind, I mused at the sad fact that the one thing in the world that I would love to have right now is a banana. Yes, you read right, a banana.

I haven’t eaten a banana since the end of March this year, when Tropical Cyclone Larry devastated Northern Queensland and wiped out most of the banana crop. According to the Australian Banana Growers’ Council, 90%, $300 million worth, of our commercial banana crop was destroyed.

As a result, banana prices have been amazingly high - I’ve noted bananas for $12 a kilo for the last few weeks, and colleague JW who was musing with me yesterday said she’s seen them as high as $16! Neither of us has been prepared to pay $2 or $3 dollars for a single banana, but I think I might crack soon. Banana chips and banana yogurt aren’t doing it for me. Things are meant to go back to normal by December; they’re definitely not normal at the moment, not when you have two grown women dreaming out loud about the bananas they haven’t eaten for the last four months. Can I wait that long?

Picture by Bryn Donaldson
Categories: bananas, navel-gazing