Veering off topic, "In Flanders Fields" has special memories for me. In the 1990s and early 2000s I was Senior Linguist for Dragon Systems (heh!). When it was bought by Lernout & Hauspie I was sent for a week to their HQ in Ypres. I had enough free time to visit the memorial at the Menin Gate, where I walked the stairs, scanning the names of the Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Salient but whose bodies have never been identified or found, and saying Kaddish for the occasional Jewish name.
I like walking, and I walked each day between my hotel and the company offices. Once a passing car stopped and the people in it asked for directions, in French. By then I'd been around enough to direct them to the city center (or wherever it was that they wanted), besides explaining «Je suis américain». I don't remember if I gave directions in my passable French or if they switched to workable English, though.
And as I half dictate, half Swype this into my smartphone, the occasional mistaken stroke brings up a reminder that the input interface I'm using is "Swype + Dragon": the Swype keyboard (drag your fingertip across the letters instead of tapping them one by one) with a "microphone" key that turns on automatic speech recognition based on Dragon technology, now owned by Nuance since they bought it after the collapse of the Lernout & Hauspie* scam. (This and this and much more.)
* Recipient of the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics "for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world"
Memories
I like walking, and I walked each day between my hotel and the company offices. Once a passing car stopped and the people in it asked for directions, in French. By then I'd been around enough to direct them to the city center (or wherever it was that they wanted), besides explaining «Je suis américain». I don't remember if I gave directions in my passable French or if they switched to workable English, though.
And as I half dictate, half Swype this into my smartphone, the occasional mistaken stroke brings up a reminder that the input interface I'm using is "Swype + Dragon": the Swype keyboard (drag your fingertip across the letters instead of tapping them one by one) with a "microphone" key that turns on automatic speech recognition based on Dragon technology, now owned by Nuance since they bought it after the collapse of the Lernout & Hauspie* scam. (This and this and much more.)
* Recipient of the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics "for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world"