I fI remembered my trigonometry . . .

[ritaxis]

If I remembered my high school trigonometry I'd be having a lot easier time figuring out the wall mask cutouts I'm trying to make for the Sims 2. I keep getting numbers for the angles that feel just wrong to me. Also, curves. Damn it.

I think I will break out my mother's triangles and french curves, eventually.

Also: facebook has completely changed its layout, and is no longer useful to me at all. It was already annoying, though I got a laugh out of the offer to switch over to Cestina (Czech language). Please. I probably know a hundred words, if I remember them all at once, which I never do. And the grammar is a nightmare, as Frank will tell you over and over again.

Comments

I never saw Cestina

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

though I did see Hungarian. Kayli's Fire (Sword and Sorceress IV) was bootlegged in many of the East Bloc countries. The Hungarian was interesting, someone scanned a page to send to me. I asked about the basis of the language because it looked strangely familiar and they said it was a Romance language (I've formally taken French and Latin, used to be fairly fluent in French, and can parse out Italian, and am getting better in Spanish every day due to a habit of listening to telenovelas during the day while unemployed. I still speak Spanish with a French overlayer, which is unfortunate. I may take one or two formal Spanish courses to get it down better.

Speaking and understanding French gave me my most embarrassing work moment... the vet vaccine manufacturer I worked for in the 80s was bought by a French company. The first summer they owned us, the President's 19-year-old son came over to intern at our company. One day, while the receptionist/production clerk was out to lunch, he got on her phone and called his girlfriend. Looking back I hope she was here, not there because if she was in France, the bill would have been $$$$$$. After he started getting into it, i started getting embarrassed. He was talking some major nasty on the phone in the front office of a business. I went to him and tapped him on the shoulder. He put his hand over the speaker part of the phone and paid attention. I then told him, in good French, that a) what he was discussing was not appropriate to be talking about while at work or in an office, b) I understood every word he said and was VERYn embarrassed and c) he should remember that many Americans are bilingual. He should not assume ignorance. I was polite and concise about it, not accusatory or anything else. As I was talking, he started blushing from top of head down. He politely ended his conversation with his girlfriend and hung up. And apologized to me.

That DID convince me they were fair employers. At the ad agency I worked at later, doing something like that to the owner's son would have likely gotten me fired on the spot.

Re: I never saw Cestina

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Hungarian is niot a Romance language, it's not even Indo-European: it's Finno-Ugric. When I look at it, I'm always half convinced I should be able to pick out what's going on it, like I can with Germanic and Romance (and now, to a minuscule degree, sometimes, Slavic) languages. But it's not possible. They come from a different language planet.
Romanian is a Romance language that is so heavily overlaid with Slavic and whatever influences that it's hard to even see that it's a Romance language. And Armenian is supposedly an Indo-Eurpean language but I don't see anything in it but umlauts (there is a dance we do called Ooska Gookas, and we asked the Armenian guy who dances with us what it means and he said he had no idea).

Here's (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg) the Indo-European language family in one rendering. I couldn't find a Finno-Ugric one in a timely fashion.


When I have a bad moment with a Spanish word I will sometimes retrieve a French one. Like I'm looking for "tambien" and "aussi" will float to the surface, or something.

Would the owner's son at the other company really have had the gall to say "I was having phone sex and this mere employee gave me guff about it"?