How to tell if you are meant to be a linguist and are a bad person

I first realized that I was, for better or worse, born to be a linguist, while listening to NPR one day. A story came on about abusive police practices in Brazil. They played a recording of this poor guy being tortured by the police. With the sound of this guy screaming in the background, I heard the voice of the interrogator asking him questions, and what I thought was: “What beautiful fricatives” (roughly, speech sounds that hiss). At that point, I knew that I was in the right field for me (and suspected that I wasn’t a very good person, but that’s a different issue).

There’s been surprisingly little international news in the newspapers that I read on the way to work in the morning, but the unfortunate events going on the Middle East have gotten a fair amount of coverage. Some of the words that I’ve had to learn in order to read about the murder of the three teenagers and the ensuing violence:

• par: I didn’t actually have to look this up, but I’ve been working on when to use pour (frequently translated as “for”) versus when to use par, which I guess I associate with Spanish para, which looks quite similar and is also translatable as “for.” Most uses of par are translatable as “by:”
  • Naftali Frankel (16 ans), Gilad Shaer (16 ans), et Eyal Yifrah (19 ans) ont été tué par des terroristes du Hamas. Naftali Frankel (aged 16), Gilad Shaer (aged 16), and Eyal Yifrah (aged 19) were killed by Hamas terrorists.
  • Les opérations de recherches avaient été lancées dès le 12 juin par l’armée israélienne. The search operation was launched June 12 by the Israeli army.
• alors que: while, when.
  • L’armée israélienne a intensifié ses frappes contre le Hamas, alors que la tension est au plus haut dans les villages arabes d’Israël.
  • Jerusalem se trouvait hier soir en alerte, alors que plusieurs explosions retentissait dans la ville.