Thanks: 
Likes: Wayne! Did Dieter teach you German, or were there Texas-Germans around Alice?!
Originally Posted by Master Oil Racing Team
Wayne! Did Dieter teach you German, or were there Texas-Germans around Alice?!
Hei Sam, jeg er meget imponert av oversettelsen din! Beste hilsen, Joe
Og du er og'!
Du är en smart kille Sam!
You got me on all that Joe. I don't even know how to use a translator machine to figure that out.
No on both counts Joe. There are a lot of Texas Germans from the old days in Orange Grove but I never talked to many. And while Dieter did not "teach" me, I picked up some things around him. I learned a lot of boat racing terms from the racers, and also from Bernard Bayerisch at Dieter's shop and Sigfriend Senf who pitted for Kurt Mischke. Basically I bought a couple of German English books to get down the basics then listened in the pits, read the programs and menus and newspapers. Some things are kind of natural like unterwasserteil being lower unit. If you can pronounce the words, you are saying under water thing. And a hydroplane is a flunder. The old conventionals did kind of resemble a "flounder". I always liked to try to pick up something of the language wherever I was.
You and I have a lot in common, I don't like to be around people speaking another language and not be able to speak too. I'll bet you can speak Spanish like a Mexican! I wouldn't trust a machine translation, word combinations have different meanings so a machine can't handle street language. Cornelia knows a lot about Tx-Germans from Sealy to Lagrange, she wrote a masters thesis on the 19th century migration 16 years ago.
So you were at Dieter's shop in Berlin? Senf is mustard, Bayerisch (maybe you guessed) is Bavarian.I didn't know that hydro is 'flunder', but it makes sense, thanks! Louis told me his experience of having to listen to bids in French, Norwegian, generally in the original language of the item, at Christy's in Zürich in earlier days.
I don't speak Spanish at all Joe. My cousins who lived on a ranch do, but I guess I was too close to it at a young age and never was interested. Down here in South Texas they don't speak true Spanish, but what's called Tex-Mex. I probably know more than I think I do, and on rare occasions have to pull some up to get info from a gate guard. Several years ago I had a post about one of my pit men who spoke fluent Spanish and I had just completed two years of Russian in high school. While we were rigging up in the pits at the NOA World's in Forest Lake, Minnesota we decided to have a little joke with the locals. Spectators were meandering through the pits and Bud and I were talking to one another, except we weren't using English....or even the same language. He was talking Spanish and I was talking Russian. We didn't understand one another, but we bounced our discussion back and forth as though we did. The people walking through the pits picked up on the fact that it was a foreign language, but it was funny to see when they realized there was a difference. We thought someone would say something, but none ever did. They just walked away.
I picked up a little Hausa in Nigeria and one of my all time favorite phrases is "Na tafi....sai wada rana". It means "I am gone....til we meet again".
I took 2 yrs. Russian in the university, but I'd have been hard put to say anything more complicated than 'do you have a cigarette'? We learned from the U.S. Army text, and it wasn't all that accurate. However, we read Lermontov, so I knew something about Chechnyans (Islamic Caucasians) before I met them as refugees in our Austrian village. We know a guy who was a bodyguard, has 3 fingers on one hand, he sat in on a meeting with the infamous Basayev. Interesting mountain people, like the Afghans they don't forget it or quit when you cross them, but are fast friends if you treat them right. My dad had advised Russian or Chinese, said 'German and French are dead". So what do I do, I end up with a German wife. I'm surprised that you had Russian in high school in S. Texas!
Here's an attempt at your Hausa phrase in Norwegian:
Jeg maa dra, til senere!
(aa or å is pronounced more like 'oa')
It was just a fluke. We had a large class and by the time I got to pick my classes as a sophomore Spanish was full so I took leatherworking and photography. You had to have two years of language to graduate so I had to sign up for something in my junior year. I didn't want to be in class with a bunch of sophomores and I found out there were only six students in Russian class. Russian I and II were all together with two sophomores, three juniors and a senior. Our instructor was a genius with common sense, drove a VW microbus and sold SWIPE on the side. He was tall, a little bulky, had a crew cut,wore a string tie and cowboy boots. He was one of a kind. He taught Russian, Latin, calculus, and advanced physics.
I never heard of Lermontov. What other languages do you speak or dabble in? When I was a kid we shot skeet and one of the guys that shot with us one weekend was a Norwegian ship captain. Him and my Dad got along real well and Friday or Saturday night he took us up to the wheelhouse of his ship tied along the docks at Corpus Christi. That's the only time I've ever been on a ship and it really impressed us kids. He let us look at the green images on his radar scope.
Maybe you could post a few shots of your village. Debbie and I spent a couple of days in Austria on our honeymoon, and I got a real scenic look driving down from Berlin with Dieter on the way to Linz in 1979. A really beautiful country.
Interesting tale, but what's SWIPE? My physics teacher was a fisherman (Johnson 10 or worse), when I tried to tell him about sound waves in the context of tuned exhaust he could only respond, 'Yeah, you only want to make noise and irritate the fishermen.' I did want to make noise, and I wasn't interested in what the fishermen thought in those days. I know Norwegian and German well enough to read novels nearly as well as in English, although sometimes I have to guess some words. I've struggled through two Swedish novels but it was too hard, not much fun. I can manage enough Italian, Spanish or French to get around, not more. I can manage with Norwegian in Sweden and Denmark, but there are 28 major dialects in Norway, some are archaic and I don't understand them. Impressive that you traveled with Dieter!
Here are some Ehrwald photos from summer.
1.View from guest room (you and Debbie, e.g.)
2. Behind the townhouses where we live, the Zugspitze. I see it from my computer right now.
3. another view from the guest room.
4. Hans in 2008 with a colleague from UH. Hans (trumpet) had just
played with the village band in an outdoor concert. English tourists used to want to photograph him in lederhosen when he was small, not knowing that he's German-American, not Tiroler. Few men here are blond.
5. A view from the guest room in late June (first cut).
6. Hans as Krampala, Nikolaustag, 5 Dec.
7. More Krampalas in the parade.
What a spectacular location Joe.Swipe was a liquid all purpose cleaner. What is a krampala? Was Nikolaus day when the krampalas burn stuff on Dec. 5, or what's it all about? Seems like a pretty good fire going on that float.
ADD: After taking another look, the fire must be in the background and the float pass by. Still....looks pretty amazing.
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