G: Mitä kieliä osaatte puhua?

Kyllä mä tätä lukioenglannillani pystyin ymmärtämään, joskin cosmogony on vähän hämärä. Olis se sama hämärää varmasti kyllä suomeksikin.



"My suffering left me sad and gloomy.



Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly brought me back to life. I have kept up what some people would consider my strange religious practices. After one year of high school, I attented the University of Toronto and took a double-major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious studies and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour - calm, quite and introspective - did something to soothe my shattered self.



There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes filled with water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the water of the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in the most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough of a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at a speed of roughly 400 metres an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at a rate of 250 metres an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers four to five metres in an hour.

It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news. Don't even try to guess who stood all Tuesday night in the road. Clue: snotty ole Mrs Lechuga. Hard to tell if she quivered, or if moths and porchlight through the willows ruffled her skin like funeral satin in a gale. Either way, dawn showed a puddle between her feet. It tells you normal times just ran howling from town. Probably forever. God knows I tried my best to learn the ways of this world, even had inklings we could be glorious; but after all that's happened, the inkles ain't easy anymore. I mean - what kind of fucken life is this?



Now it's Friday at the sheriff's office. Feels like a Friday at school or something. School - don't even fucken mention it.



I sit waiting between shafts of light from a row of doorways, naked except for my shoes and Thursday's underwear. Looks like I'm the first one they rounded up so far. I ain't in trouble, don't get me worng. I didn't have anything to do with Tuesday. Still, you wouldn't want to be here today. You's remember Clarence Somebody, some ole black guy who was on the news last winter. He was the psycho who dozed in this same wooden hall, right on camera. The news said that's how little he cared about the effects of his crimes. By 'effects' I think they meant axe-wounds. Ole Clarence Whoever was shaved clean like an animal, and dressed in the kind of hospital suit that psychos get, with jelly-jar glasses and all, the type of glasses worn by people with mostly gums and no teeth. They built him a zoo cage in court. Then they sentenced him to death.

Vaikka koulun kävisikin englanniksi niin ei se tee ihmisestä kaksikielistä.

Vikram Seth ja Salman Rushdie kuitenkin ovat oppineet kirjoittamaan hyvää englantia, miten voit olla varma siitä, että sinulle tuntemattomat muut ihmiset eivät voisi puhua ihan hyvää englantia hekin? Kun se kerran on mahdollista?

Intilaisena hän on kaksikielinen.

Hänen palkittu kirjansa alkaa näin:



First Paragraph:



I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more...On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, firewords and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesised me, newpapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.

vaikka arvaamalla nyt tietysti pääsee aika pitkälle.



Mikä on esim. benighted ja Piece-of-the-Moon?



Enkä kyllä tajua myöskään kohtaa



"had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement."

Suomi tietenkin.



Englantia sujuvasti.



Ruotsia ja Japania niin että ko kielellä pärjää ko maissa.



Latinaa sen verran että ymmärrän Nuntii Latini -uutisia.

kahta kieltä sujuvasti: englantia erittäin hyvin, viroa aika hyvin. Ruotsia puhun vähän, samoin saksaa. Osaan paria muutakin kieltä, mutta jos listaan ne tässä, mut onkin jo aika helppo tunnista, jos sattuu olemaan joku tuttu paikalla, joten antaa olla ;)

Mutta laittakaa lisää kivoja tekstipätkiä! Harvoinpa av:lla saa nauttia kirjallisuudesta.