When I was a kid, it was expected that the school-day began with the whole class standing to recite the pledge of allegiance. It was nearer the McCarthy era, and the Cold War was still a thing. One effect of doing this in greater Los Angeles is that when Spanish class was first period (the start of the day), obviously we recited the pledge in Spanish.

After Latin, dead French, and other dead languages with only intermittent use of diacritics, my sense of modern Spanish orthography is a bit impressionistic; I'm not checking where the acute accents would go. But my inner 12yo holds the sounds:

Juro fidelidad a la bandera de los estados unidos de américa y a la república que symboliza---una nación, dios mediante, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.

We landed hard on the first word, such that it sounded like juró, "one swore"; and dios mediante is for "under god" in English, but they aren't quite the same, are they. Anyway, para todos: sí.

hmm 12 (to pick up from post 4/?) I had a vague sense in grade school that word problems and I didn't get on. ( Read more... )

13 I've chosen to take an additional class from each of two instructors, and to avoid an additional class from a third instructor---a novelty compared to the chronic overenrollment of my original undergrad classes, whereby one did not choose so much as roll dice against the enrollment slot, one's requirements, and unseen forces (which I realized in grad school were partly administrative, such as who was on leave during a given term). Anyway, the instructor to avoid for the fall had a synchronous lecture via Zoom for spring and advertised several times for his fall class. I see why, now---only 15% of its seats have been filled.