As I mentioned the other day, I'm in France on holiday and vainly attempting to cope with the strange language they speak here. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died a few weeks ago, managed to cross Europe from England to Istanbul picking up the languages on the way. His method was to buy a Bible in every new country that he stumbled into. His idea was that the Bible used all the most basic words of a language, and that he knew the stories so well already that he could work out the sense in another language.
It is thus in imitation of him that I've been staggering through the Evangile Selon Marc, or Gospel According to Mark. Not all of the words in there are actually useful - I haven't been involvend in any baptisms yet and certainly haven't fasted. But I was interested in the word fasting: jeuner.
You see the French word for lunch is dejeuner, and for breakfast it the petit (or little) dejeuner. This means, unless I am more horribly mistaken than usual, that de-jeuner means break-fast, the idea being that you don't eat anything all night and then stop your fasting in the morning. It also means that an English breakfast is just a French lunch, off to which I now am.
What I did on my holidays
Posts
