Q. Will you translate any more of Meyer's fechtbuch?
A. Probably not.
Q. Will you translate treatises regarding other weapons?
A. Yes. Here's the priority list: longsword, messer, shortened (half) sword, dagger, and grappling. The primary source is Danzig's fechtbuch.
Q. Why did you abandon Meyer?
A. Earlier treatises, particularly the ones in the Peter von Danzig fechtbuch and copied elsewhere, are closer to Liechtenauer and therefore authoritative. Enough of Meyer has been translated to provide useful supplementary descriptions of various techniques, but that's as far as we will be using it. Other people are running with Meyer and I'll leave it to them.
A. Have you checked out Döbringer?
Q. I've given it a quick lookover and it looks very interesting, although the language is difficult. Its main attraction is its age, 1389 as a year of origin makes it the oldest fechtbuch in the Liechtenauer tradition. A translation is unlikely.
Q. Which is your favourite fechtbuch?
A. Danzig. I think Goliath's longsword is close enough to Danzig to work with and now I'm working a couple of the other treatises.
Q. Were you ever a member of the SCA?
A. No.
Q. Is this German curriculum development an AEMMA project?
A. It was, it is now an independent project.
Q. Why are you doing this in the open? Don't you want to make some money from your work?
A. Most of the base material I use is freely available so I feel an obligation to contribute something back to the information commons. The translations are open, the interpreted course development is an offline project.
Q. Why do you include the original German in your translations?
A. That way you have the original "source code" - in the spirit of the GPL - and can detect and correct any mistakes I have made if you have the ability. Not including the source code would make this sort of error detection much more difficult.
Q. How and where did you learn and study the German language?
A. Originally as a kid in the streets, neighbourhoods, and trees of Rust am Rhein, a (traditionally) fishing and farming village in the Rhine valley just north of the Kaiserstuhl region, Baden-Württemberg. My education was in English, I went to a Canadian school on the base at Lahr but my after school friends were almost all German. I basically learned the local dialect by ear.
In fact, I didn't study German formally until my 20's, evening classes at the University of Toronto.
Q. Are you fluent in the German language?
A. I used to be near-fluent but not any more. I can converse in German and can read it without much difficulty, but I'm not fluent.
Q. What does that coat of arms, the one with the panther, signify? Is it a family coat of arms?
A. That would be the Scanian Griffin. This was the regional coat of arms of the Skåneland, also known as Scania (Skåne, Blekinge and Halland) the formerly Danish region of southern Sweden and my paternal ancestors homeland. Info on the griffin and general info on the Skåneland, including a short recap of several centuries of Danish-Swedish wars, can be found on the SSF web site.
Q. Where are you located?
A. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: a big city on the north shore of Lake Ontario that most Canadians love to hate, even though most of them have never been here.
Just for the record, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, names Toronto as the world's most ethnically and culturally diverse city, and you probably thought it was New York! :-)