Friday Five

[ysabetwordsmith]

These questions come from thefridayfive.


1. If you could live in any city in the world, where would you live and why?

I do not want to live in any city. That is not suitable habitat for me.  I require nature.


2. If you could speak any language fluently, what would it be?

Gosh, I couldn't pick just one. Cherokee, Lakota, Navajo, Irish, Esperanto? Whatever the Rongorongo tablets are in so I could translate them? One of the currently most endangered languages to keep it going? This. This is why I tend to drink myself under the table every time there is a language-chugging opportunity whether it is potions or wetware downloads.


3. When was the last time you rode a ferry and where did you go?

When we visited the Pacific Northwest and there were ferries everywhere, so mostly we just used them to cross the water in the middle of all the roads.


4. What was the longest plane ride you've ever taken?

To Russia and back. I think the overwater portion was 9 hours but there were shorter flights involved too.


5. If you discovered a country, what would you name it?

Fernweh.
 

Comments

[kareina]

1. I so agree with you!

2. Great list. Mine is shorter, I would start with Swedish--I am "reasonably fluent", but it would be fabulous to understand everything, and be able to say anything without having to look up how.

3. My last ferry trip was heading over to Lofoten this summer, though when I read the question, the first "last ferry trip" I remembered was heading over to Finland in January of 2020 for Drachenwald Coronation, which was the last SCA event I attended before the pandemic started canceling them. Never mind that I also took a ferry home from Crown Tourney in Finland a year ago, the pre-pandemic one is still engraved in my mind as "the last one", for obvious reasons.

4. I have absolutely no idea, I have flown back and forth around the planet so often, I couldn't begin to guess which trip would have been longest. Possibly one of the flights in the 1960's? Were planes slower then? I don't recall the flight itself, but flying to the states from Japan when I was 3 years old and had the chickenpox and only wanted to sit in mom's lap, but she was 8 months pregnant with my sister, and so didn't really have a lap probably felt like an eternity to me.

5. If I discovered a country, it would probably already have a name from the people who lived there, so I would ask them what it is, and respect them enough to use it. If no one lives there, it isn't a country.

[see_also_friend]

At the moment I think my answer to the language question would be Protactile Sign... mostly because it is a rare modality, and is likely very hard to learn from video/written description.

Of course, that's if I'm limited to human languages. If nonhuman ones are available, I'd at least like to see a list...but I don't spend enough time around nonhuman sophonts* to have interesting conversations. (And if I /did/ it would probably be depressing...since most of the ones I can see often would be in captivity.)

*And then I wonder if AI are developed enough to have their own languages...and if I'd have enough in common with one to make a conversation appealing to either of us. (I'll bet my wetware has more in common with most biowetware, rather than machine life...and many people have a hard enough time with non-standard human wetware.)