[PRCo] Re: Trolleys

[Fred Schneider]

Jabs now and then can be fun ... it lets you know who is listening or reading.  I've been told that
Mexican Spanish is different from Puerto Rican Spanish and considerably different from Castillian Spanish.

And the Canadians and most of us in the United States  don't speak English, nor do they speak the same
dialect of it.

That does not strike me as being at all strange.  Most European languages have many dialects.  I think I
was once told there were 35 different versions of French.  Dick Lloyd used to kibitz me about the night in
a home near Munich where I looked at him and asked, "What are they saying?"  While I've lost a lot of my
German since then, I could understand a lot of what was being said in the Hannover area.  But I could not
understand southen Bavarian German.  The Swiss German is so far out there that it is hard to even
recognize as being German.

Of course none of this has anything to do with Boris's original commentary about colored destination
signs.  And we did a lot of that too over the years.  Baltimore, for example, colored clerestory glass to
correspond with different routes to enable immigrants to find the right car.  And those problems have not
gone away nor will they ... I live in a county that is trilingual.

AProchek at aol.com wrote:

> The Mexicans don't understand Spanish either?
>
> Oh I am terrible!  Please accept my apologies, I just couldn't resist!  No permanent offense intended.