{"id":10806,"date":"2015-01-05T16:13:02","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=10806"},"modified":"2015-01-05T16:13:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:13:02","slug":"pretending-to-speak-a-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=10806","title":{"rendered":"Pretending to speak a language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In E. F. Benson&#8217;s book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1603863621\/omniglot-20\"><em>Queen Lucia<\/em><\/a>, two of the characters, Lucia and Georgie, speak bits of Italian to each other, which leads their friends to believe that they speak the language fluently, and impresses them, which is the point. When an Italian gentleman visits their village it soon emerges that Lucia and Georgie are unable to engage in conversation in Italian beyond a few phrases. <\/p>\n<p>A similar story appears in the recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b04wtkb5\">TV adaptation on the BBC<\/a> &#8211; in this version Lucia pretends to be ill, and Georgie spends a few days away from the village in order to avoid meeting the visiting Italian speaker, the English wife of an Italian who admits that her knowledge of Italian is also limited, even though she has lived in Italy for 10 years. So Lucia and Georgie&#8217;s secret remains undiscovered.<\/p>\n<p>Have you ever pretended to be able to speak a language, or exaggerated your knowledge of a language? Has you subterfuge been revealed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In E. F. Benson&#8217;s book, Queen Lucia, two of the characters, Lucia and Georgie, speak bits of Italian to each other, which leads their friends to believe that they speak the language fluently, and impresses them, which is the point. When an Italian gentleman visits their village it soon emerges that Lucia and Georgie are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,128,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-italian","category-language","category-language-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10806\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}