nice

Thanx!

That looks so much like Elf Quest that it's giving me flashbacks. Stop! Stoooop!

*beaks down weeping.*

Painful memories?

Painful pictures printed on the page. I think one scene sums the comic up for me.

A family of Elves are roughing it in the woods, dressed like gypsy dancers and hair beautifully blow dried. Mommy elf tells one of her children to hold still and flicks a stiletto at the kid's sandal clad foot. It skewers a scorpion just about to sting a toe. A scorpion? In a forrest? Then I noticed that the toe had nail polish...

To me, this was a girlish fantasy about dressing up and playing acting, without the remotest idea what the wilderness or combat or anything else was like.

I see.

And don't forget the cute killer wolves! They were so cuddly they wouldn't scare a six-year-old who had been recently mauled by a pit-bull.

I totally remember what is at stake. Of course I know this comic. I am very fond of him, when he published under the name "Elven history" in our country. So I can not draw ever. I draw on my own.

Well, Elf Quest was very popular, so you aren't alone in liking them. I tend to react like a rabid dog at the sight of anything too upbeat.

An interesting idiom :) My knowledge of English continues to buffet me.

I don't know if English is more idiomatic than most major languages or not. Maybe it is. Or maybe teachers avoid strange, colourful expressions when teaching French or German to English speakers. After all, langauges are tough enough, even strictly by the book. But, English readily adopts foreign words and phrases, and is enriched by new usages that come up from the bottom -- from sports figures, musicians, actors, off-beat professions, writers and any other group that develops an idiom of its own.

I guess I'd have to learn some other languages to decide. But, now and then, I have a glimpse of non-standard French that suggests it can be every bit as odd as English.

For instance, when McDonalds first opened a franchise in Paris, the menu translated the Big Mac into "Le Big Mac." What McDonalds did know was that "Le Mac" (or "Maqueral") was already gutter French for a pimp.

I once had a number of small publications in English that were translated from Russian, about the Soviet space program. I kind of wish I'd kept them, but they weren't much use. What really struck me was that Russian seemed so "personal" when transalted into English. Where a book about the American space program would tend to be written in impersonal, dry style that suited the scientific material, the Russian books said things like, "this is a photo of our own, dear Sputnik." Dear Sputnik? Well, maybe it was just a poor translation, but I've had hints over the years that Russian may actually be used that way, giving everything a more intimate relationship to the speaker than it would in English.

Russian language, as I heard one of the most difficult languages ​​to learn. Maybe that's why, when I translate my thoughts into English, I'm trying to put a bit more than the language allows. Converse is also true - if I translate from English - trying to understand more than he can give. Because with such delighted to meet with unusual turns of phrase.

I know that Russian has more ways to conjugate and parse than I consider at all reaonable... but the develoment of English greatly simplified its grammar centuries ago. As far as cases, declensions, plurals, conjugations, gender and all that rubbish go, English has fewer than other European languages.

The other thing I noticed about Russian is that it's speakers seemed to low to run as many consonants together as they possibly could. An English speaker who is confronted with a sound like "tshdge" that is represented by one letter is apt to throw his hands in the air in despair, and weep.

Also, Cyrillic is a nuisance. I learned the Greek alphabet early in life, and had Russians kept it I would have had no trouble at least reading Russian (even if I didn't know what it said). Unfortunately, about half the letters were changed or given different meanings, so knowing the Greek alphabet is almost no help at all.

It's interesting how the Orthodox/Cyrillic world and Western/Latin world are separated by so many things -- one of them is the alphabet. Why are Poles Western Europeans instead of Eastern Europeans -- because they are Lutherans or Catholic, not Orthodox, and the use the Latin alphabet instead of Cyrillic. Czechoslovakia became the Czech Republic and Slovakia, two separate nations, mainly because one had a Western European outlook and the other looked toward Russia, also reflected in their choice of alphabets.

Of course, I'd rather memorize Cyrillic a hundred times than deal with Hebrew. Not only is the fool alphabet completely different, but its written backwards and leaves all the vowels out! You can't even use a dictionary easily because the order of the letters is different. You'd almost think Yahvey wanted nobody to understand his people!

I think that the Chinese a bit more complicated than the Cyrillic. :). This is the biggest reason why the Russian is one of the most difficult, but not in the first place. English compared with the Russian language, some dry and not emotional. We used to use a bit more personal relationship in the language. As was noted. So sometimes I'm looking for a special board to beat her on the head when trying to make a phrase in English. Constantly think I understand the spirit in some way - "get out there, you're not nice to me"

Chinese has the worst possible system of writing. One symbol for every word -- thousands and thousands of them. For complex ideas there is a way of adding two or more symbols together to create a new word, but that hardly simplifies learning the language at all. On top of that, you've got different tones. A word written "fong" might be spoken four or five ways, to mean at least four or five things, but all of them are still just written "fong."

Russian language in this respect still more phonetic.