Alison Owing - The Wander Womans Phrasebook: How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages

The Wander Womans Phrasebook: How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages
By Alison Owings Copyright 2013 by Alison Owings
Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
Individual cover art elements courtesy of http://www.vectoropenstock.com
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright, and has granted permission to the publisher to enforce said copyright on their behalf. Previously published in print, 1987. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If youre reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. http://www.untreedreads.com For the five star traveling companions who were there from mountain pass in Kashmir to seacoast in Spain, among other less concise highs and lows:
Annegret Hilsinger-Reinhardt, Kay McNamara Raftery, Hedi Gpfert, Ellen Hoffman, and Jonathan Perdue. The Wander Womans PhrasebookHow to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance LanguagesAlison Owings Contents

Helllllo, fellow voyagers! Since The Wander Womans Phrasebook was first published in 1987 (to enthusiastic nationwide attention, may I modestly say), a few factors have changed in my own travel adventures. I now have a quartercentury more years in my carry-on. Also, I now possess the liberating companionship of a credit card, an ATM card, and a cell phone. With equipment updates comes an update in conversational gambits, as you will see throughout the book.

Readers may now learn to utter such sentiments as I may decide to give you your own ring tone. One factor that has not changed is the issue of safety. The 21st century, so far, seems not measurably safer than the bloody 20th. And as women travelers, in particular solo women travelers, should know, assessing safety is as important as assessing adventure. Caution is always a boon seatmate, especially if you intend to live. In sum: dont travel stupid.

But, yes, The Wander Womans Phrasebook does include phrases for hitchhiking. The activity is a risky one, as I myself experienced, to my terroronce in France, once in Italy. In neither situation was I hitching alone, but with a girlfriend. So if you hitch, please, do not hitch solo. When I hitched in Europe with three other young women, we had no trouble getting rides and no problems. More tips: ask where the driver is headed before you say where you are going.

Pay constant attention to the route, and driver. If possible, accept rides only from a woman, as we did not. And carry some form of defense, as we did not. A factor I am now more aware ofrather, I never considered at allis the enormous ecological cost of travel that involves such machinery as, say, jets. (Jet travel, along with raising meat, is said to cause the most damage to the environment.) Can one justify flying thousands of ozone-depleting miles in order to sightsee? To play a sport? To disport? To check a country off a list? To attend an event? Maybe so. Maybe not.

Just a thought. But along those lines, one reason I am happy Untreed Reads is releasing an e-version of my book is that it makes ecological sense. So to new readers, I say, please travel wisely, safely, and as always, with a sense of humor. Alison Owings * * *

The Wander Womans Phrasebook is supposed to amuse (well, yes, and inform) you to the point that youre not nervous about traveling to places where people have the effrontery to speak their own language. Its meant to help provide you with the best traveling companion possible: peace of mind. Its meant for women traveling alone, together, with a man, or with any configuration of a group.

Let us say you are walking down the street. Let us say further, an unpleasant man should begin disporting himself in an unpleasant manner. Now, it is often difficult enough for a woman to pursue an unharassed stroll in her own country, much less where foreign tongues (or, worse, appendages) give assault. In foreign lands, one does not want to risk world peace initiatives by pummeling the creep into oblivion, nor does one want to be a stupid ninny. A rational middle ground is to say a few things back. The ability to speak even a modicum of a foreign language is handy for more than giving hissers their comeuppance.

There is, for example, the matter of the rest of the day. And it makes an enormous difference if that day is spent in English and/or mute, or if its spent at least partly within the language of the country you spent the time and money to see. I once neglected to take my own advice. I considered myself well-traveled, and developed a false security about travel and foreign languages. I figured I could get around almost anywhere with what I already knew. Then I went to Turkey.

Unable to find a Turkish phrasebook, I reassured myself that Id be fine. On the plane, I met someone who had a phrasebook; she let me borrow it. I turned a few pages and panicked. Not one word resembled any other word or language I knew. Good day was iyi gunler. Yes was evet; no was hayir.

The arrogance of the west had strangled me. Once in Istanbul, I stuck to places where I was sure someone spoke English. It was not the way I liked to wander, but Istanbul did not strike me as a place for a lone American woman to be foolhardy. My one independent venture was to a female world: an ancient, valuted, grey marble bathhouse, where at least three generations of Turkish women could be seen in clusters through the steam, pouring water from long pitchers and having a fine old time. That experience helped me hone a formula: the less I know a language, the less comfortable I feel in a strange culture. Even if I rarely talk, its important that in a pinch.

Im able to. Of course, if I were fluent in the language of every country Ive visited, Id have fewer stories. I would not have expected to see a ballet when I bought tickets in Florence to a ballata, and sat through hours of dialogue, straining to see a tutu, only to learn later that ballata is ballad. (Ballet is balleto.) Nor would I have asked what time the tables began in the cathedral in Seville. (Mass is missas; the word for tables is mesas.) The Wander Womans Phrasebook does try to keep the amusement factor in ascendance while providing you with a wealth of repartee, as well as some ho-hum phrases for ordinary needs such as finding the post office. But its specialty is to help you ask questions of universal importance, such as, What is your rising sign? or Are you interested in poetry? To be able to communicate and to laugh: thats peace of mind.

Alison Owings

YES	Oui
NO	Non
PLEASE	Sil vous plat
THANKS	Merci
HELLO	a va?

The same vowels appear in both French and English, with the use of accents occasionally over a, e, and i.

a	ah as in lah de dah
e	a as in say
i	ee as in teeth
o	oh as in soap
ou	oo as in tool
ue

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