All questions are to be answered “true” or “false.” No partial credit.
1. True/False: The guy who was being interviewed on the radio when I came across these words was an Immortal.
2. True/False: I will have nightmares about these rabbits.
3. True/False: I need to start leaving less geeky magazines on the coffee table, or no one is going to want to visit me.
Answers:
1. True, although to be honest, phagocyter came from an email about what a nice guy I am–none of your goddamned business what the context was.
2. True–you probably didn’t even have to think about this one, right?
3. False–no one is ever going to want to visit me, so why not have cool journals like Natural Language Engineering lying around the house?
Zipf's Law 
I see, nightmares for childish reasons, no friendship abilities, and do you still chat with a rooster ? There is a room for you in a pleasant rural domain I know, calm and quiet . Don’t worry I did the reservation for you .
Oh, all the words you wrote in n°1 are known and used by any French who only achieved secondary school . Maybe arborescence and phagocyter a bit less but nowadays they became rather commonly heard .
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Oh dear, everytime I read something like this I utterly despair at my own level of French….though I did guess arborescence was tree-related.
One thing that does assist my language learning is my school girl Latin knowledge,
controversially I am of the opinion that Latin should STILL be taught in schools, it’s so damn useful (medecine, languages, botany etc etc),
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I agree but to be frank it’s only worthy for those engaged in a kind of intellectual study or work . And for learning a handful of languages Latin is useful but only for vocabulary . It is not nothing though, in this important domain it really helped my first weeks in Brazil, then Mexico .
Arborescence comes from arbre but we drove it far from nature indeed . You’re too hard with yourself, I don’t either know words of this level in English ( except a mass of English “intellectual” terms are French-related :wink:)
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One of the (many) current controversies in the French national educational system is a plan to dumb down the teaching of Latin and Greek, spending less time on the languages and more on culture and history. On the one side, it’s felt that the current level of difficulty of the courses is creating an internal segregation, with kids of some groups under-represented in the Latin and Greek classes. On the other side, it’s felt that dumbing down the national educational system is not the way to deal with crappy performance of students, versus teaching them more/better.
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Well, Latin has not been taught in UK state schools for over forty years. I agree that culture and history is important but surely, in this small world we have now, languages are critical?
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Dumbing down the educational system started in 69, after May 68 . As usually the financial masters wanted to downsize public expenses, reduce the people’s intelligence and critical sense, and as often their evil intentions used the childish good intentions of the stupid “gauchistes”, a more natural and freer teaching etc… . In short this dumbing has -and it still does- damaged all fields, not only languages .
I remember that parents who wanted their child to be in a good level class, even if their future projects were a scientific cursus, chose Latin/Greek, or German, because mostly smart pupils learnt these languages . This language choice made a sort of unsaid selection . I live close from Spain, so pupils not very motivated in learning chose Spanish, thinking wrongly that it would be easier .
I studied Latin and old Greek for years . I am very happy with this for each time I make a time travel I can communicate with the Natives .
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