In E. F. Benson’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 unable to engage in conversation in Italian beyond a few phrases.
A similar story appears in the recent TV adaptation on the BBC – 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’s secret remains undiscovered.
Have you ever pretended to be able to speak a language, or exaggerated your knowledge of a language? Has you subterfuge been revealed?
Not exactly. I did help someone pretend though.
A relative once asked me to speak to her in Spanish ~ wanting to impress a group of Spanish speakers sitting nearby. I was to say a series of things to which she would answer, “Sí.” And that’s just what happened ~ I talked and she “understood” by agreeing to everything I said.
If only I could wrap up this story by saying she later rethought the episode and decided to really learn Spanish ~ but not so!
Brings to mind the marvelous scene in the otherwise silent “City Lights,” where Charlie Chaplin, as a singing waiter, loses the lyrics to his song and has to improvise a phony foreign language on the spot.
You can “pretend to speak” any language and sound quite credible as long as you don’t violate the syllable structure of that language and preserve the “typical” intonation. We had a few phrases of that sort when I was a kid and we were “speaking” Japanese, Hungarian or Gypsy language without saying a single word in that language. Of course, that was before internet…