Quote:
Originally Posted by covingtoncat73
I'd love to learn a language. I had some Spanish in high school and that stuck better than the French I had in college, but that isn't saying much. My Swiss and French Creole great-grandmother spent a lot of time in Switzerland with her Swiss grandmother and an uncle and aunt before coming back to New Orleans as a young woman, so she knew five languages. Sadly, I am a typically unilingual American because I know too little Spanish for that to count.
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In between reading books and learning to play Imagine on my electric piano, I'm trying my hand at learning the language in which the Ramayana is written. The version of the book that concerns me is written not in Sanskrit, but in a more regional language called Awadhi.
I have a copy of the book and in it the stanzas are also written in the roman letter. I have a vague aim of being fluent enough to do the arath. The arath is the act of translating, (in a gathering where people sing the verses) and explaining the stanzas. If I succeed, I might be the best one at it, since the other translators do only the strict minimum and offer no embellishment. I intend to use my knowledge of quotes and of western history in my repertoire. It's a dying "art", and it's likelier I'd get fed up halfway.
I know a version of French Creole that is unique to my country (Mauritius), and is, in fact, my mother tongue. I also know hindi (I'm of Indian stock) and French. English is the only language in which I read, however.