Jews Saved in Assissi in WW2 and Catholic Resistance To euthanasia

When I went to Umbria, the part of Italy associated with Francis of Assisi, I could see interesting stories about Francis of Assisi everywhere. We saw paintings, murals, stained glass windows. statues of Francis with birds. And the stone bed where he slept. 

This was all in a trip around Perugia, the capital of Umbria, to show us the less well known parts of Umbria.

Assisi was already well known, with its giant basilica.

Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Assisi. Wiki.

Yes Umbria has a few surprises. Perugia, the capital, at least the capital for students learning the Italian language at the university, is a classic hilltop city. The cathedral is at the top. Seen from afar.

but come closer. Enter the city.

Etruscan Entrance

Even more striking and unusual is the giant Etruscan gateway, the entrance to the city, built into the sheer cliffside. 

You can see how large it is compared to the people. The angle of this photo shows the sky above. However, when you are near it, you can see the sheer cliff face behind it on the left.

Underground City

Plus the underground tunnels of the old underground Etruscan city, now an underground market place.

 There the delights of modern Italy cannot erase the awe you feel at going underground to the hidden city of people who lived so long ago that we have only little statues to tell us who they were and what they did. 

(Along came the Romans. As we all know, the Romans were the winners, with straight roads, efficiency and ruthlessness later associated with Germans.) The association of Rome with Romance came later.

Meanwhile, what of the kindly caring ascetic Francis who talked to the birds and lived simply and founded the order of Franciscans, Yes, it is easy to find plenty online and in person about St Francis the birthplace and burial place of St Francis of Assisi in the main centre of Assisi.

What I didn't know was the Assisi's secret stories, that Assisi also had a Jewish connection in WWII. Hiding Jews in far off monasteries and convents to save them.

Useful website
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisi_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_resistance_to_Nazi_Germany
http://www.visit-assisi.it/en/
umbriatourism.it
http://www.montesubasio.it/en/assisi-christmas-nativity/
http://www.italia.it/en/home.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi

Author
Angela Lansbury, Travel Writer and Photographer, author and speaker. Please save and share links to your favourite posts.
About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a travel writer and photographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a language evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other Wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).
Please share links to your favourite posts.

Webex - what is it? Another online meeting system?

Yes, Webex is another online meeting system. i was invited to join a Webex meeting today. I am used to Zoom and learncool. I did not have to download anything, just sign in on my little lap top lnked to a larger screen.

Luckily my husband was able to help with Webex. He said he used it at work twenty or thirty years ago. It predated Zoom which has zoomed up.

Mute
It is amazing how much I have learned in the three months March to May from online meetings. I was immediately looking for the mute icon. I could signal to everybody, shrug - I'm lost

Chat
The word chat is confusing. Usually you mean the Webbex Chat or the Learncool Chat or the Zoom chat but you could mean the WhatsApp Chat.

Useful Websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts

Facebook polyglots
https://www.facebook.com/groups/polygotcommunity/
translate google

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL

Time Zones
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).
Please share links to your favourite posts.

How to censor online speeches, such as Patton's WWII speeches

My mentee wrote to everyone in an online toastmasters group asking whether there were any taboos regarding language used in speeches. he wanted to quote from the famous, some would say infamous, speeches by Patton in WWII.

The memorable and important gist of the opening of one of his series of speeches is that you do not win a war by dying for your country, but by making sure the soldiers on the other side die for their country.

I read the speech in Wikipedia. Apparently Patton was famous for his down to earth language. However, many of the speeches were reconstructed by combining the accounts of various soldiers who wrote them down afterwards.

Even if Patton used particular swearwords of indelicate terms or ideas, what is apporpriate for a lot of soldiers may not be suitable if it can be heard by a woman with a child on her lap.

Imagine that you are giving the speech to a primary school. Or that your speech is being broadcast in 50 living rooms - which is likely on Zoom with everybody on lockdown.

You can see spouses and children wandering in and out.

As a speechwriter, you should be able to eliminate a word or phrase or find a substitute.

When I was a sub-editor on Woman magazine, I would have had to reword the speech, or abbreviate it, of cut out specific words.

I later wrote articles on WW2 for a Marshall Cavendish partwork encyclopaedia. A partwork is an encyclopedia published in parts, weekly magzines which can be collected and collated in a binder to form an enclopaedia.

The one I worked on longest was translated from an English encyclopadia in English into German and simplified from an adult magazine into one for a reading age of teens from 10 to 16, and had to be understood by those of the youngest age.



Since the articles were from pieces written for an English audience, but now to be read by a German audience, you can imagine that the wording as well as the viewpoint had to be entirely different. Changing the wording was a challenge.

Allies, enemies, and so on - are seen differently and named differently. It was a challenge. But I had to do it. I did it. So I know it can be done.

Useful Websites

Facebook polyglots
https://www.facebook.com/groups/polygotcommunity/
translate google


About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).
Please share links to your favourite posts.

How to cook eggs for breakfast and drink fresh coffee in a hotel room

I read about a woman who returned to Australia and was quarantined in a five star hotel but without a microwave oven.

An Iron As Hotplate
She made herself apple crumble and other foods heated up on an upturned iron, which acted as a hotplate, secured between two heavy books.

She chopped up an apple with a penknife. (Any hotel can send you a knife. A five star hotel has 24 hour room service.)

Her cooking utensil was an aluminium tray you get with takeway food. I presume the crumble was a ready mix. But you can mix flour and water with fat such as butter to make crumble. the advantage is crumble is it is just flour rolled up into balls, no need for a rolling pin to roll it out into pastry. A hotel usually has sugar sachets.If you have flown overseas or on a long flight within a country, you might have meal service inclding a sachet of salt.

Most fast food places have condiments which seem unnecessary at the time but can be just the ticket later. For example, most take away piza comes with extra sachets of cheese and pepper or spicy sprinkles.

You can also buy packets of individual portions of cheese. If you save bread from your brakfast, ideally with a butter or margarine sachet,  you can add a cheese portion, or the cheese sachet and sprinkles left over from the pizza, and you have a mid-morning snack.

I was wondering whether she could have demanded a microwave, or bought herself one (if she was getting free food for a fortnight, she could afford a cheap microwave.

Some hotels don't like you cooking in the room. Why? consdier their point of view. It uses their electricity. It is a fire risk. You are making crumbs which attract rats and cockroaches and flies. You are deprivin them of sales of over-priced food from their kitchen.

On the other hand, they might be short-staffed and keen to keep you happy or just flexible.

Do a health and safety assessment first. What could go wrong? How can you prevent it going wrong?

Can you leave the room as you found it?



Simple solution - Suites
A simpler solution was one we adoped as a family of three in the USA. If you are staying longer than a week, go to an all suites hotel. There you have a larger living room, often a bigger dining table where you can eat or work, and a microwave.

You need to buy in food to bring with, or have it delivered.


UK flag

Eggs
Years ago we were in a UK hotel room which had nothing but a kettle and we needed breakfast. I said, What I would like is an egg.

The corner shop across the road had eggs.

No chance of making scrambled eggs. But what about boiled eggs? We had hot , boiled water, from the kettle. Just pour the water over the egg in a cup.

We did consider putting the egg inside the kettle. If the egg breaks, you get an awful mess.

Coddled Egg
You could bring your own kettle from home, a small one, ideally one with a flat base inside and not an exposed element, so it is easier to clean and empty.

My husband used to do this as a student at Aberdeen university in Scotland. He had an egg pricker to make a hole in the egg so it would not burst. He added vinegar to the water to coagulate whites if the egg splits or leaks through the hole.

Coffee Pods
One year we were on holiday in Wales and my husband was not happy with the quality of the coffee. he drove to the nearest city and bought the cheapest coffee pod machine which came with a set of coffee pods. We were on holiday for a long weekend. He had his breakfast coffee and mid monring coffee and lnch time coffee and mid afternoon coffee and after dinner coffee for 2 days.  Some for me too.

He drinks black coffee. A pint of milk was available from the nearby Tesco supermarket and stayed cold on the windowsill.  He reckoned the price was not much more than the cost of bying all those coffees in the restaurant or bar.

With planning and ingenuity, or asking what is available, you can often find a solution.

Interesting Websites
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8356091/Woman-makes-apple-crumble-homemade-TimTam-IRON-hotel-quarantine.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ico=taboola_feed

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and phtographer, author and speaker.
Please share links to your favourite posts.

How to learn to say mother in many langagues

Some words are the same in several languages. If you can identify a few simple words in another language it gets you started and you are encouraged to continue, even in a language which seems difficult.

On the Facebook Polyglots page you often gets asked, what is such and such a word in your language.

Lets look at Mother or Mum.

You have to be careful with translate google because sometimes it translates the word mum as in the verb to keep mum. So you see the translation include silent.

To prevent this mis-translation, I tried translating Mom or mummy.  These are the results for mother, starting with those I remembered, amplified by adding others from frequently used languages.

1 Ma (Chinese) 

Mum

mom

or

mom

It is the same sound in Urdu. Although I cannot read the writing, I played the sound in Google translate.

ماں

2 Ima (Hebrew) 
(The middle letter in the Hebrew lettering is M. The vowels are not shown but would be written in handwriting under or over the placeholder letter.)

mother

3 Mama (Italian) 
Also mama in Maori
Also mama in Serbian
Also mama in Solvenian
Also mama in Swahili
also Mama in Ukrainian

Spanish

Mother
If you go to google translate and click on the sound symbol you will hear that the accent is on the second syllable.



4 Mum / Mummy (UK) 

5 Mom (USA), 

6 mater in Latin and 

7 mother in German 

8 Mamma in Dutch
mamma in Norwegian
mamma in Swedish

9 Mom in Filipino

10 Scottish Gaelic Mam

11 Tamil

Mother

Am'mā

12

In Thai

mother

Mae

it sounds like mare elongated or meh-er

13 Welsh for Mum or Mummy is Mam.

14 yiddish
Mummy

Mummy

mami

Reading from the right to the left, even with only an elementary knowledge of Russian/Bulgarian/Cyrrillic derived from Greek derived from Hebrew, you see the letter M a bit like a McDonalds arch, the vowel Uh is a line under the placeholder, and the ee is just an apostrophe in the air on its own like the dot over an i,
 .


and so on.

If there is any question you want to ask about languages, you can ask on the Facebook polyglot page.

To translate individual words or sections, use Google translate.
You can also read Wikiedia in another language. 

Or try a tourist board page. Many of them have tiny flags to click on which turn the page's text into another language.

To learn a language, try Duolingo.
Or Memrise.

Useful Websites

Facebook polyglots
https://www.facebook.com/groups/polygotcommunity/
translate google

About the Author
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).

Please share links to your favourite posts.

Your mother tongue and the word mother in many languages

On the Facebook Polyglots page somebody asked why the mother language is called the mother language and not the father language.

In fact it is often called the native language.

We also refer to motherland in some languages and fatherland in other languages.

I started thinking about the word mother and wrote this piece of speculation.

Because a breastfeeding baby's first attempt to get food is to suck and demand food and attention by saying m m which is mother in many languages such as 

1 Ma (Chinese) 

Mum

妈妈

or

妈妈


Māmā

Māmā

2 Ima (Hebrew) 
(The middle letter in the Hebrew lettering is M. The vowels are not shown but would be written in handwriting under or over the placeholder letter.)

אמא

3 Mama (Italian) 
Also mama in Maori
Also mama in Serbian
Also mama in Solvenian
Also mam in Swahili

Spanish

Mamá
If you go to google translate and click on the sound symbol you will hear that the accent is on the second syllable.



4 Mum / Mummy (UK) 

5 Mom (USA), 

6 mater in Latin and 

7 mutter in German 

8 Mamma in Dutch
mamma in Norwegian

9 Mom in Filipino

10 Scottish Gaelic Mam

and so on.

If there is any question you want to ask about languages, you can ask on the Facebook polyglot page.

To translate individual words or sections, use Google translate.
You can also read Wikiedia in another language. 

Or try a tourist board page. Many of them have tiny flags to cick on which turn the page into another language.

To learn a language, try Duolingo.
Or Memrise.

Useful Websites

Facebook polyglots
https://www.facebook.com/groups/polygotcommunity/
translate google

About the Author
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).

Please share links to your favourite posts.

The Worst Tragedy Can Be Turned Into Comedy

Roman mosaic, Italy, from the Baths, Rome. for more details see photo in Wikipedia under comedy.

I often struggle to tell funny stories. But when I tell tragic stories people fall about laughing.

I sat at an empty desk in the USA. When I reached for a mug, somebody said, 'Don't use that.'
"Why not.'
'Our colleague died.'
'Of what?'
'HIV.'

Surely you can't make anything funny out of death? Yes, you can. Especially if nobody knows it is true.

I wrote a story for my writers' circle in London. The plot was based on something I had read in a newspaper.

I won the prize for best story.

My fellow writers were rolling, roaring with laughter.

They said, 'it was the story of the night.'
'The funniest thing you've ever written.'

I was pleased. But slightly surprised.

I had been afraid somebody would recognize the story. Would they accuse me of plagiarism?

The plot was that a bomb went off and a woman survived under a desk. She held onto the hand of her friend all night. That kept her going and consoled her.

In the morning the rescuers pulled her out. There was nobody attached to the hand.

My English listeners in London thought it was hilariously funny. They laughed when I read it. They laughed afterwards talking about it. They went home laughing.

Nobody remembered the source.

It was a dreadful, harrowing story, a witness survivor's account of a woman who survived a notorious bombing in the USA.

Retold without the circumstances, transferred out of the time, into another country, with a different narrator, the tragedy had turned into a comedy.

If I wanted to re-use that true story a second time, I would make the twist ending that she had held onto the hand of a shop mannequin all night. Maybe thinking it was her deaf friend.

The lessons learned are:

1 You can use reports of tragedies in foreign countries and foreign newspapers for comic stories, written stories, or as stand up comedy or anecdotes.

2 By writing a story, and extending it to another, you can cope with an unsettling event by ensuring that every time you recall it your mind moves on to another, story, from a sad story to a happy or funny story.

Author
Angela Lansbury
travel writer and photographer.

Please come to Braddell Heights Advanced toastmasters on Wednesdays. Singapore time 7 pm to 9.30 pm. Workshop with Faith on Writing is Rewriting Online.
tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
Please share links to your favourite posts.