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Archiver > BANAT > 2000-09 > 0967878669


From:
Subject: Re: [BANAT-L] Spoken Banat German
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 00:11:09
In-Reply-To: <20000902013706.28286.qmail@web214.mail.yahoo.com>


On 09/01/00, lorraine campbell <> wrote:

>(I'd settle for High or Low, now regret studying
>Spanish instead of German in my formative years.

>> I should probably not
>> comment on this at all since I've forgotton most of
>> the German I learned
>> since becomming fluent in Spanish!

You too? :-) I used to be able to read German at about a first grade
level, but when I went to high school, only Spanish and French were
offered. I took Spanish, from a very good teacher (she had been
President Truman's personal interpreter at one time). As it turns out,
it wasn't my needlework that made me marriageable, it was my fluency in
Spanish, at least in the eyes of my husband's grandmother. :-)

My grandmother (born in Batsch) always said her father wouldn't let her
speak the local dialect, which he thought of as trash talk. He insisted
that she speak High German. I don't know enough German to tell you for
sure, but I do know that she had a number of German-speaking friends,
many from Germany, and her German sounded just like theirs.

Sarah Nunez


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