Friday, August 31, 2007

Does this ever happen to you?
Disclaimer: The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps.

I'm the first to admitt it. I have not been working on my Romanian language like I should be. Every time I say to myself "today I'm going to study Romanian" something in English comes along to distract me.

However, I do have one friend whom I speak to mostly in her language although she knows a good deal of English. We use both languages, but the fact that I can communicate with her at least somewhat effectively most of the time in Romanian does make me proud.

Then she called me today because she couldn't remember the name of a website I told her about. She asked me to spell it for her over the phone. And I realized, we don't have a common alphabet.

I struggled to remember the Romanian pronounciations of the vowels - something I haven't thought about for at least four months. All I could think was that "i" is called "e" but that's not helping me here.

She was saying it's "F" as in "Philip?" and I was struggling with "No, 'f' as in....frog, brosca? Damn!
As though she could hear my thoughts she said "Laura, use names. F as in Philip...?

"A" as in Anca, "N" as in Nico, "P" as in Popescu, "O" as in Otilia (her name, thankfully or I would have been stuck for an "O") and "P" as in Popescu incodata. Punct COM.

Funny how I can translate "dot" into Romanian but there's no need to for the COM.

1 comment:

Nicki said...

Spoken language is meant to be flexible and creative...so it's okay if you have to get creative every now and then. :)