LANGUAGE DIFFICULTIES.

Matamata Record, Volume XIII, Issue 1140, 21 July 1930, Page 7

LANGUAGE DIFFICULTIES.

TROUBLE IN PARIS. French people are not always quite at home in their own country. Many of them need interpreters. Those from Alsace and Lorraine who speak a German dialect have no difficulty, for quite a number of policemen are to be seen wearing badges showing that they speak German, Englis... Spanish, or Italian. But a woman who went to a hotel recently, and while making violent gestures spoke a language which no one could understand, presented a singular problem (writes the Paris correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph). She was obviously furious about something; but she could not express herself in any language which the hotel attendants or the police could understand. She was taken to a police station, and an interpreter was summoned from headquarters. He could make nothing of her outburst of eloquence, although he tried her in English, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese. Another expert in languages was summoned, and he addressed the irate woman in Russian and several dialects of Central Europe. Then came forward a man whose ordinary task is to keep the commissariat tidy. He solved the problem at once, for it appears that the woman belonged to a village near Finisterre, his own birthplace, which has a dialect of its own. She had come to Paris in search of a fugitive daughter. Her anger was provoked partly by her thoughts of the daughter, but perhaps more by the fact that in her own. country she needed a swarm of interpreters.