therese

Thanks so much for taking all these pictures and sharing them with us.

We ate (out of desperation) in a Chinese restaurant one night in a small village somewhere outside Stuttgart many years ago. Unpleasant, though it was quite popular among locals.

Yep, that's it. Delicious.

Well, the boeuf part seems to be---"bo" sounds a whole lot like "boeuf" when you pronounce it so that it rhymes with "pho" (which I've heard is related to "feu", as in "pot au feu"). Upmarket Vietnamese places here in Atlanta (Nam and RiceSticks) make this dish with premium cuts, Nam going so far as to offer a Kobe beef version.

Some that we drink that I don't see too often: Vov, an Italian egg liqueur. Bailoni, an Austrian apricot liqueur. Cynar, an Italian artichoke liqueur. Discussed upthread, and indeed bitter alone, but nice over ice with sparkling water, an orange slice, and an olive or two (sounds very odd, but nice).

Another very cool site, esvoboda. The diagrams are helpful, as are the sounds (still difficult to distinguish unless ones particular language uses that particular sound). Thanks for the link.

Great site that illustrate the physical modifications required to accurately generate certain sounds in other languages.

My grandmother also said that eating raw potatoes would give you a stomach ache. Hasn't happened yet.

Re my grandmother, eating fresh cucumbers without salt will give you the hiccups. I tempted fate routinely.

A waiter's description of a pasta dish made with gemelli had me momentarily stumped (as it's pronounced j(e)-MEHL-lee, and not with a hard "g" at the beginning). I don't usually order pasta in restaurants anyway.

At a cocktail reception a few months ago I was offered a salmon Mussolini by a passing server. I declined it.

I think somebody mentioned this one upthread, but it's still funny: I was offered a mescaline salad the other evening. But I turned it down, as I had an early morning the next day.

I've got a good friend and colleague in Lisbon who'd invited me to speak there at a meeting later this year, and I was really looking forward to the food (particularly as she's supposed to be a wizard cook herself and I'd get to stay in her guest house). But the meeting's been moved to Athens, so I guess I'll just have to content myself with Greek food. Absolutely no clue what's being said in Greek, of course, and even figuring out the names of shops can be daunting. But I manage nonetheles.

I'd say, yes, that there's a difference in Brazilian and Portuguese Portuguese. I've both Portuguese and Brazilian friends, and listening to them speak sounds at least as different as Spanish and Latin American friends speaking Spanish (and of course there are subsets within both Spain and Latin America, etc.). I can follow pretty much all Spanish, and do reasonably well with Portuguese Portuguese, but find myself about as lost in Brazilian Portuguese as I am in German. Transparent Language is a web site that sells educational materials for foreign languages. One of their freebies is a "word of the day" that you can listen to (alone and in a sentence), and for Portuguese they specify that the speaker is Brazilian. They don't specify for Spanish, presumably because it's so much more likely that a U.S. customer will be interested in the Latin American version. Anyway, have fun on your trip, touaregsand, it sounds fantastic! What are these items, anyway?

Looks absolutely great, arbuclo. I hope the tomatoes were as great as they appear.

Please don't, you are indeed very helpful. Let's all move on ... ? ← Not a problem. The field is now entirely open.

Nous sommes, en fin, du même avis.

Surely you can come up with something more difficult than this? ← Or did you perhaps mean "rouillure"?

Surely you can come up with something more difficult than this?

He speaks French with an American accent. More nasal neededl, otherwise it's okay. ← He may well speak with an accent, but it's altogether unlikely that his accent is of U.S provenance. You must have missed this earlier post upthread... If he's American he's remarkably good, and has either lived in a francophone environment, or been very specifically trained to make certain sounds (like "b" at the beginning of a word), and remarkably polyglot at that: as per the web site his name is Eddie Maamry. You can view some biographical information on him by visiting the National Center for Hospitality Studies site and clicking on the Hospitality/Restaurant Management drop-down, where you can then click on his name (which is actually Abdeljalil, Eddie apparently being a nickname). My son's French teacher, Madame Okou, speaks French with a strong accent, but she would be chagrined to hear her French described as non-native. Not native to France, but French is her maternal language nonetheless. A nice site, by the way, particularly the syllable by syllable pronunciations. ←

Even having an eGullet audio feature would not be of much help. Anglophones have trouble hearing very basic francophone sounds, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Ideally you've got somebody sitting right there in front of you. Remember Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady"? That's what it takes. The very fact that so many people (who very clearly know exactly how to say the whatever word's at issue) have difficulty rendering a phonetic spelling that's understandable to somebody who is anglophone speaks to the fact that these sounds simply do not exist in English. That said, it's not really all that difficult to generate an approximate sound that will be understood by both anglophone and francophone. Gourmande's "vei(n)" does yield a pretty good approximation for "vin". True, the speaker sounds vaguely like a Marseillais cab driver (and if you happen to be or be related to a Marseillais cab driver I mean no slight, I think highly of cab drivers everywhere), but it's better than a lot of other approximations.

Yes, German's both much easier for the anglophone to hear and much easier to reproduce, as the various vowels and consonants sounds are so close to English. Words also have inherent accents on specific syllables, as opposed to languages like French where the emphasis on a word or syllable depends on its position with the the sentence. Since you've already got French as a second language (and as a child, all the better) you could easily improve on-line, not necessarily with French instruction sites specifically, but instead by reading things like Le Monde. Reading them out loud forces you to listen to yourself, and see which sounds don't ring true. Italian and Spanish are both much easier than French to pronounce (from an anglophone perspective), but with very nearly identical grammars. I've had exactly zero instruction in Spanish, but can read it reasonably well, understand most of what's said to me (or overheard, not that I would eavesdrop on purpose), and can make myself understood in a thoroughly primitive way.

first and last syllable equally accented? thanks! ← Is the "n" pronounced? Or is it just there to indicate that the vowel is nasal?

guanciale = gwahn-CHAH-lay (I'm assuming that Behemoth is anglophone here) There are consistent rules for pronunication in French, and they're very helpful. But they tend to break down in two instances: proper names of things like towns, (particularly if they're in parts of France that once belonged to another country) and wines and so forth, and words that have been imported from other languages. And even words that have been imported from other languages will eventually be pronounced according to French rules once they've wholeheartedly joined the lexicon. Usually. Overall French (like Italian and Spanish) follows very straightforward rules of pronunciation. A problematic language for non-natives because to sound convincing requires re-training of both ones ear and ones mouth. Re-training your mouth means doing things like being aware of where your tongue hits the roof of your mouth when you say "t" or when you open your lips when you say "b". This issue devils native French speakers when they speak English, of course, and so they rarely lose their accents unless they've been in an anglophone environment as children.

Fantastic pics, arbuclo. Keep 'em coming. And an aside re life for ex-pats living in the Mid East---have you read "Women of Sand and Myrrh"?