For me English is my second language and when I came to Canada I promise myself to preserve my cultural and moral values. Everything was very good except for one small word that I am using in my language very often. Spelling is different but the pronunciation is the same. We don’t use this English word in our house.
I did not realize the big implication in our life until next week when my daughter came home with spelling test from school. She is in grade 2 and every week she is learning to spell 10 new words. At the end of the week she has a test from them and also they can make their words with a suffix given by the teacher.
She is excellent in spelling but this week I had a big surprise when I read last word on the test. Not only that was a bad word (spelled correctly) but the teacher gave her a good mark for that word. This word was made by my daughter as a result of her interpretation of a Romanian word. The suffix was “uck” so my daughter wrote” fuck” because of the Romanian word “fac”. This Romanian word “fac” means I do in English and we pronounce it like ”fuck” in English.
She found out from another student that is a bad word because her teacher said nothing to her . We try to explain her why she done it and it’s not her fault. It’s only my Romanian ego that made my daughter to feel embarrass in front of her teacher. I apologize to her and now I must have a talk with her teacher and explain everything.
Do we really need so many languages in the world? It is my ego or we have a Crazy world!!!
Adrian B 