Naming of things

Everything has its own name, but – in Yrp – no more than two or three. Knowing two or three names for a thing – church, kirk from Britain, église from France – gives kirch in Germany; kirk in Denmark, Sweden and Norway; iglesio in Italy and Spain. After learning a few it seems we Yrpeens don’t have languages, but dialects. No doubt it once seemed so in England, before the south-eastern dialect absorbed Mercian and the others. Will Yrp do something similar?

On previous trips here Miki has been uncharacteristically quiet, preferring to rely on my home-made Italian. This time she took a week of classes in Montepulciano while I was mooting in San Quirico, and has since been hoovering up vocabulary as voraciously as she does in English. Soon she’ll be teaching me.