europeadventure.ca

On Saturday night, my four Guatemalan friends and I ordered a few pizzas and had ourselves a bit of a subdued little party in Sissi's room/apartment. It was a lot of fun, and the pizza we ordered from Romea Pizza was better than expected. In the pizza department we hadn't been very impressed so far with the various offerings around the city. I also managed to witness some of the downright worst parking I'd ever seen. Cars and trucks strewn about anywhere where there was just enough space for them.

As usual when I get together with any of my friends in a social setting, the conversation turned toward language. Primarily because I'm trying to learn spanish and secondarily because english is my first language and therefore know the 'proper' way to say certain things — and am especially helpful with the idiomatic parts of the language. It is sobering when someone asks you something about your native language and you really have no idea — be it an expression, or simply why something is said the way it is. It also makes me realize how little formal grammar I know — at least in english. My french grammar is better than my english grammar. I will say I'm re?-learning some of my grammar while learning spanish with the fact that they often drop the subject pronoun and the object pronoun precedes the verb in a sentence. Things like this keep me on my toes.

That brings me to the title of my post, “The Great of Taste” — it was written on the pizza boxes we received. I used it as an example of something that makes no sense in english. Translated literally into spanish I was told that it would make sense and I suspect that is also the case with greek. Maybe Ion can shed some light on that fact. In fairness, even though it makes no literal and syntactic sense, most people would know what the message was: The Great Taste?, The Taste of Greatness? I'm not sure if I'd go that far, but it was at least the taste of goodness. ;)