Rosio Pavoris

This is a Livejournal meme, but I don’t use Livejournal, so I’m posting this here.
Premise:

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You WILL update your LJ blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions. Yeah, no.

Anyway. Questions by Taz, who I’m not convinced likes people linking to her Livejournal, so I won’t.

1. Do you have a favourite fruit?

Not particularly. I enjoy bananas and lychees, but I’m generally fine with any fruit except raspberries.
And figs are interesting because of fig wasps, but not so much as food.

2. Why Rosio Pavoris?

Because it sounds clever and I needed a name for my blog. It’s archaic Latin, so the words wouldn’t even be in most school dictionaries, so it’s nice and mysterious. The meaning is completely irrelevant, really, and I’ve forgotten it.
I think “pavoris” means “of fear”.

3. Have you ever read any Shakespeare?

I bought the collected works of Shakespeare four or five years ago but I’ve read less of it than I intended, mostly because most of it is seriously unreadable.
I’ve read Macbeth, Hamlet, and Much Ado About Nothing, but I think that’s it. I couldn’t even read Hamlet until after I’d seen it and had enough of a notion of the story to skip over the boring bits.

Plays aren’t meant to be read, anyway; I do enjoy seeing Shakespeare performed, though all I’ve ever seen live was a crap post-modern molestation of Romeo and Juliet.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is awesome. We watched the 1999 movie adaptation during Latin class when we were translating Ovid’s Pyramus et Thisbe, and that was probably the first time I really paid any attention to Shakespeare. Pity it was considered “too advanced” for our English classes.

4. How many languages do you have some ability in, and what are they?

“Some ability” is pretty relative. I speak English and Dutch fluently, French and Latin adequately, German and Japanese more-or-lessly, and I can generally understand, but not speak, Spanish and Italian. Given some time, I can probably make sense of most texts written in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish.
But really, four or five. I hesitate to even count Japanese.

I’ve been meaning to learn Yiddish, because I think it’s adorable. Well, what I actually want to do is learn Hebrew, because I don’t know any Semitic languages and Hebrew squiggles are pretty, but Yiddish is probably the most realistic way of building a basic vocabulary which I could then use to slowly edge my way into Hebrew, since Yiddish is a Germanic language and very similar to German anyway.
However, local bookstores suck at carrying Yiddish grammars and dictionaries, and after days of looking all I could find was a modern Hebrew dictionary and a Mishnaic Hebrew grammar, which is less than optimal. So yeah, probably not going to happen.

(In terms of programming languages, I’m fluent in PHP and Java, and know enough C/C++, Scheme, Common Lisp, COBOL, Perl, x86 Assembly, and Bash (which doesn’t count) to write a working application that does more than just print “Hello World”. And SQL, but that’s different.)

5. Do you want to always live in Belgium?

I was planning on moving to Canada at some point, but then that stopped happening.
I’ve considered moving to somewhere in Scandinavia if the political situation in Belgium keeps retardening (specifically, if Flanders secedes, but really also just if Vlaams Belang keeps growing), but I don’t think I have the energy anymore.