If you are familiar with the Berlitz language books, they will get you through a trip rather conveniently.  I especially like the helpful phrases.  I don’t speak Greek, except for about 25 really poorly pronounced words and phrases, but I can think of a lot of English phrases I would have liked to render in Greek:

• I promise I am not here to start a riot, Officer.
• I assume this is the same city street plan as the time of Pericles.
• There is no way I can eat all that.
• I don’t know what the spicy cheese dip is called in Greek, but it’s the only food I ever need again.
• Right now I would commit low crimes for a toilet that allows you to flush the paper.
• It looks like, long term, you lost the Persian War.  Look at all these barbarians on the Acropolis!
• Never again will I refuse to believe that a tour bus can get through any space.  I bet he could drive this thing through a GI tract without messing up the paint job.
• Please show me to the only ten square feet of Greece that are as flat as Saskatchewan.
• What is the strike about? Oh, wait, I forgot.  It’s Monday.  My bad.
• So when are you going to get a good Viking metal band at Epidauros?
• Okay, I give up.  Is it ‘Patra,’ ‘Patrai,’ or ‘Patras?’ Just someone please clear this up?
• No offense–this Corinth Canal is hella cool to look at, but that’s about all it’s good for.
• I have no idea how even a goat can find anything to graze on out here.  I have half of the country’s non-olive vegetation caught in my socks!
• How many pottery traps does this bus stop at?
• With all these steps and slopes to climb, how does anyone in this country achieve fatness?
• What do you call a Greek female banker who loses her composure? A drachma queen, ar ar.
• Please don’t make me drink ouzo.  Do you have any Nyquil instead?

I now find, as expected, that while my fairly robust constitution fought off the Plagues of Radcon for a few days, the battle is lost.  I have the congestion/throat disease, not the dysentery disease.  It’s probably the same one that turned John into a stationary snore machine for a couple of days, though he didn’t seem to have a lot of muss associated with it.

When this happens, and I identify the early signs, my first action is to pick up the telephone and order some cold medicine.  The only pizza place around here that will put both jalapeños and chopped garlic on a pepperoni pizza is Round Table, and I’m currently boycotting Pizza Hut anyway since they actually dishonored a current coupon in such a stupid way they deserve to keep hearing about it.  I will then consume as much of the pizza as possible over the next few days.  This is my primary early punch in the mouth to any cold.

What does it do?

• Since I do it every time, it is a conditioned signal to my system that we are going to fight, not just suffer and moan and suppress symptoms.  No, we’re gearing up.  We get stronger when we feel we can do something about it.
• Because it tastes good, it improves my morale.  Morale is important.  Morale affects your mind which affects how your body resists.  If my nose and throat cannot be happy, some part of me can be.
• If there is any infection-fighting ability at all in garlic relevant to colds (which are viral, but resulting sinus infections are not), I’m getting a heavy dose.  If it is not relevant at all, I do myself zero harm.
• If nothing else, it will surely clear my sinuses, especially as I put the pepper flakes on.
• It’s a pretty nasty combination of toxic waste to dump on the invading microbes, just on general principle.  “Okay, you little varmints, this isn’t going to be your happy vacationland.  I’m about to ruin your whole trip.  Anyone thirsty? Have a drink!” as I munch and swallow another combination of peppers and garlic.  I can picture the microbes phoning their travel agents demanding refunds.

Does this all cure the disease? Of course not.  When applied as it is just taking hold, does it affect the severity and duration? It seems to.

And if not, it does no harm, and I enjoy the pizza and thus suffer a bit less.

Rolling with my crew:  my bro John (flew in from Bahamas) and good friends Jenn and Marcel from B.C.  For those who do not know, Radcon is the Tri-Cities’ own science fiction convention.  To some it’s essentially the geekfest (and they have a point), but to a lot of us, it’s something not to miss.

Registration at past Radcons has been a disaster.  How disastrous? How about a three hour wait in line for those who failed to pre-register, half and hour to an hour for those who paid in advance? I was certain Radcon would never, ever fix this.  I was wrong.  John, whose pre-registration failed to reach the destination, was in line maybe ten minutes.  He actually got in quicker than did Jenn, Marcel and I, in the nearly non-existent pre-registered line, because the person handling it was on break.  We were badged and ready to rock in fifteen.  I’m still processing the amazement.

I wore my Boer veldkornet outfit:  farmy clothes, bandoliers, sjambok (an African whip), bush hat with purple plume–steampunk without the goggles.  Jenn went Victorian and looked like a figure from a different time in corset, frilly blouse and long dress with knee boots.  Smashing.  Marcel, who is a big dude, went pirate with a big longsword, eyepatch and period shirt.  As strongly as one would never want to aggravate Marcel even under normal conditions, one would really not wish to in that case.

None of the Friday panels were must-go events for me, though everyone else was in panel heaven.  For me it was more a day of exploring and shopping.  Many friends from past cons, howdies and updates swapped, many hugs and smiles:  a feeling of being by now something of a fixture and familiar sight oneself, comforting.  Jenn and Marcel found what John found, and what I found before:  people at Radcon are in the main embracing and open, easy to talk to, with no tendency to try making new people feel like outsiders.

Dinner with Sharon and her friends from Spokane (all delightful ladies; Sharon fairly lights up a room), Jeff and Nyssa (probably the most competent and successful vendors who attend Radcon, year after year), and of course our crew.  Nyssa is a riotous deadpan storyteller and entertained us greatly, as she always does.

We were going to go to the Spocon room party, but it was completely packed.  We were going to head down to Irish Heather’s for a nightcap, but no one was around,  and by universal agreement we were all footsore and zonked from staying up too late the previous night.  We thus made it an early night and came home.

Shortly thereafter, I did one of the more boneheaded things I’ve done in some time.  It speaks well to my comfort with my guests.  I was getting out of my Boer accoutrements in the dining room (where, to Deb’s annoyance, everything I need for Radcon is piled on the dining table).  Without really thinking, I shucked my trousers, leaving me in a short-sleeved shirt and my underwear.  I then remembered the gift necklace I had gotten Deb, and mushed over to show it to her.

That was fine, except that Jenn was still upstairs.  Oops.

In such a circumstance there is nothing to do (after making a hasty retreat to repair one’s insufficient attire) but accept that there will be much hilarity at one’s expense from the women.  And the men, too, when they learn about it, which will occur within seconds of their next meeting with the women.  Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t also ditch the underwear too.

As we relaxed to tell Deb of our day, and hear her comments on our utter geekery, Jen whipped out a bottle of Buckley’s.  This is a Canadian cold remedy not sold in the U.S., and while she had brought it to combat lingering cold effects, it was also a chance for me to sample its legendary nastiness of taste.  If you search on Youtube, you’ll find videos of people suffering through their doses of Buckley’s.  First, of course, I smelled it and got a shock:  imagine Vicks mixed with ammonia.  Seriously!  Now, I’ve had a faceful of ammonia in life, and I didn’t like it much.  Since I didn’t have a cold, I just put a little in a teaspoon and…down the hatch.  No sweetener, no alcohol; it looked and tasted something like an acrid liquid Vicks.  Pretty unpleasant, but nothing as repulsive as Nyquil.

What, you mean you all don’t accidentally drop trou in front of your guests, then taste-test a new Fear Factor cold medicine on your first day of a science fiction convention?

Then You’re Doing It Wrong.

Odd to us native English speakers, anyway.  To non-native speakers, our whole language is odd.  Anyway, I just felt like writing this, so here we go:

Magyar (Hungarian) has almost no relative, only distant ones:  Finnish and Estonian (which are not far apart from each other).

German and Arabic have four cases (meaning the noun changes to show its function in the sentence).  Latin has five, Russian six.  Finnish has, good lord, fifteen.

In Hebrew and Arabic, a ‘conjugation’ doesn’t mean what it means in French or Spanish.  It means actual changes to a root that make it into different verbs.

Irish has arcane rules that require changes to spelling and pronunciation at certain times.  Most of those spare Hs you see are really more like diacritical marks, that somehow affect the preceding letter.  FH, for example, is completely silent.  There are two different methods for this, and only some letters can be modified this way.  And of course, the two groups only have some overlap.  So C can become CH or GC.

French makes its spoken past tense with different helping verbs.  Thus, ‘he is died’ but ‘I have spoken.’

Bad news about Greek:  none of the accented syllables have accents where we intuit they should be.  Good news:  nearly every word incorporates an accent mark, so you’re going to know anyway.

Any word in Spanish over a certain number of syllables (four +, I think) has an accent mark to show the stress.  In French, however, there are no stressed syllables.  The marks you see affect only pronunciation.

Turkish has two Is, one without a dot.  The one without the dot is pronounced more like IH, like in ‘fish.’  All things considered, they adapted their language to the Latin characters pretty well.  It wasn’t even a century ago.

No matter how many Dutch people you ask, you will never properly pronounce ‘Schiphol.’  Do not bother.  Every Dutch word you try and read aloud, you are butchering, unless you actually studied Dutch.  Happily, speaking only three languages is considered borderline mentally challenged for a Dutch person, so they very likely speak another language that you also speak.

Swedish not only has a word for ‘so’ (try to define it sometime for a non-native speaker!), it sounds the same: så.  The ring makes an A a long O sound, so every time you said ‘awng-strom’ for Ångstrom in physics, you were wrong.  ‘oang-stroom, ‘ with vowels like ‘oat broom.’

Russian has no articles.  None.  (Neither does Swahili.)  This explains why Russians learning English find the concept so very challenging, much as we find verb aspect (a different verb for whether the action is completed or ongoing) a challenging aspect of Russian.  (In Spanish and French, this is handled by choice of tense.)

Latin is named for Latium, the part of ancient Italy where Rome was.

Swahili has noun classes based on what the noun represents:  people, objects, abstract concepts, etc.  One differentiates these with prefixes.  Thus, a group of Tutsi are ‘Watutsi’ (yes, that’s where the old dance name comes from).  The language is ‘Kiswahili.’

Afrikaans is essentially an evolved, simplified Dutch.  By the time it was named Afrikaans, it had gotten rather farther from Dutch than Australian from British, or arguably, Québécois French from Parisian French.

A lot of the swear words in Parisian French are scatological.  A surprising number in Québécois French are religious.

If you know swear words in Spanish, don’t use them.  They are taken by native speakers as sullying a beautiful language, and can mark you as a person of the lowest social class.  Also, say ‘mamá’ rather than ‘madre.’  The latter carries overtones that are a short throw from speaking of all Hispanic mothers anywhere, not a group you’d want to slight in even a minor way.

Swedish has two genders:  common and neuter.  They used to have three, but they combined masculine and feminine, as a national decision, about a century ago.  One of the advantages to having a native language spoken nowhere else in numbers:  whatever the Japanese say is Japanese, for example, no one’s in a position to debate with them.

Icelandic is so similar to Old Norse that any literate Icelander can read the ancient sagas without trouble.  Convenient, as there are just about zero illiterate Icelanders.

What makes English so hard for non-native speakers to learn well? It’s not our grammar, which isn’t too bad.  It is the inconsistent spelling, immense vocabulary, and multiple meanings a given word can have.  Proof of the difficulty comes in how atrociously even many native speakers write English–it’s hard even for us.

Arabic has 28 letters.  Most have four forms: initial, medial, final and isolated.  The ‘unfriendly’ letters, have only two forms:  final and isolated, as they cannot join to the next letter.  The dots are part of the letter; many letters can be told apart only by the number and location of dots.  Thus, a TH looks like a B except that TH has three dots above, and a B has one dot below.

Farsi uses the Arabic alphabet written in a slightly different style, and adds four letters not found in Arabic:  P, CH, ZH and a sort of G.

If Spaniards seem to lisp their Spanish (to ears used to LatAm Spanish), they don’t have speech impediments.  Z and soft C are pronounced TH in Castilian.  Una therbaytha, por favor.

Finns find the consonant blends of English terribly difficult to master.  That’s okay.  Everyone else in the world, except Estonians, finds everything about Finnish impossible to master.