Last edited Tue Dec 1, 2020, 08:14 AM - Edit history (1)
living with us in my childhood. She had some Hungarian friends who knew German and they used to sit on our front porch speaking German although they were all fluent in English. There were older Italians in our neighborhood who had come to the US around the same time as Aunt Emma and her Hungarian friends - late 1800's and early 1900's. They sat on their front porches speaking Italian. Felt like I needed a passport to walk down the street.
My father's mother was mixed, English, Seneca, and Mohawk. She died when I was 2 but my aunts told me about her and showed me Native crafts her grandmother had made and taught her to make. When my grandfather started dating, he had a long term relationship with a Jewish woman who was at all our family gatherings. The first time we met her was at our traditional huge family Christmas party at the farm. She explained Hannukah to us and handed out Hannukah gelt (chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil) to all the grandchildren.
When I learned to read and saw words I didn't understand, my father showed me how to use a dictionary. A few years later, when I asked what the stuff in parentheses after words meant, my mother explained that it told where the word originated. So I read those every time, too, along with the section on language families. Probably the only kid who read dictionaries as a pasttime.
I took German and Latin in high school to have a basis for most European languages, and Spanish in college.
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