Posted by Peter Ceresole on June 23, 2004 at 09:44:17 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Signals-the TAPTAP for DASH posted by Alan Hakim on June 23, 2004 at 00:03:27:
Not just a story from the Korean War. My cousin, having escaped from an Italian Prison in 1944, had exactly the same experience, and told me about it as a reason for learning Latin - several years before Korea.
Not just Latin, either. For many years I was a film editor at the BBC; during the Vietnam war I edited stories sent back by Julian Pettifer. One of them involved an operation by a Korean division. In it, they finished up on a beach with large numbers of the local Vietnamese civilians. They had no language in common, but the local elders squatted down with the Korean officers and drew Chinese ideograms in the sand; neither side could pronounce Chinese, but both knew the meaning of the characters. They achieved a basic mutual understanding that way.
Of course, Chinese language and culture had a similar status in Asia, to that of Latin in Europe.
The story, needless to say, was not a happy one.