The Mote Archive - Language and Culture

Pak Hashke

You are angry with me. You should be. I have no excuses. Here is my peace offerering. There you can hear wildly different kinds of spoken Swedish. Find the line "Södermanland Uppland". Those two dialects are closest to standard Swedish. Choose "Skåne" to get an idea how sto^3 sounds.

When you select a dialect, the text appears. Then click on the blue link at the top right.

Concerning the Slavic versions of the Edda. Your post has now been wiped out by the Powers. I remember my first thought: the Serbo-Croat version look more compact and powerful.

16. Hashke - 9/12/1999 1:18:59 PM

pelle:

No, in no way am I angry with you. In fact, I made a very complimentary remark to you in your Maputo thread.

Thanks very much for this link. I haven't tried it out yet. My wife needs to use the computer at this very moment.

Mais mais tarde!

17. pellenilsson - 9/12/1999 1:22:44 PM

Hashke

It was in jest. I thank you for the nice compliment in the Maputo thread. And please excuse the errors in my previous. In this thread of all places!

What do you think of the two Edda versions.

18. marjoribanks - 9/12/1999 1:25:38 PM

Pelle, I'll have your edda on a platter if you don't comment on suckling pigs and other things in your Maputo thread.

19. pellenilsson - 9/12/1999 1:28:10 PM

Coming up soon, marj.

20. Hashke - 9/12/1999 9:18:09 PM

pelle:

Tack för den underbar länken! Jag har bokmärkte den för framtids sinnesexercis. Menar du den slavisk jämförelserner? Efter min mening, er det som Navajo-Apache.

Or Spanish-Portugues, where Portuguese has some of the terseness and compactness of Serbo-Croatian in comparison with Russian.

Do you speak the Uppland dialect, or the Södermanland?

21. pellenilsson - 9/13/1999 2:10:55 AM

Hashke

Jag är född i Göteborg på västkusten och bodde där till 1978, så det är den dialekten jag talar. Jag tror inte den finns på länken.

22. pellenilsson - 9/13/1999 4:04:21 AM

Hashke

There are several dialects on that site which I understand very little of, for example the three from Dalarna and the two from Jämtland. Gotland is also a case in point. If you listen to it you will here a completely different "melody" than in the examples I gave.

23. pellenilsson - 9/13/1999 4:05:36 AM

Corrigendum:

If you listen to that one, you will hear ....

24. Hashke - 9/13/1999 3:46:13 PM

pelle:

I'll listen to all of them. I find them fascinating.

It is hard to believe that there are dialects in Sweden which you cannot understand. In the U.S. there are dialects that might be somewhat puzzling, but even those can be readily understood, generally speaking.

25. marjoribanks - 9/13/1999 3:58:41 PM

Pak Hashke,

There are several English dialects I find close to, if not completely, incomprehensible. However, it is rather startling that a small country of, what, seven million people would feature dialects of Swedish incomprehensible for our Maputo diarist.

26. Hashke - 9/13/1999 5:02:18 PM

Pak marrj:

What dialects are difficult for you?

27. ycmeehan - 9/13/1999 5:25:25 PM

Salut, Hashke!
Please, help me. What is the method of taxing in France when a tax is placed on every exchange between buyer and seller. Thank you.

28. Hashke - 9/13/1999 9:16:14 PM

Bon soir, ycmeehan:

I know nothing of the French tax system, but it sounds like a general excise tax of some sort, divinely subsidized to sever one's purse from one's person.

29. Hashke - 9/13/1999 9:17:28 PM

Where is the Host for this thread -- or lacking that, at least the Eucharist?

30. alistairconnor - 9/13/1999 9:23:55 PM

yc - tu parles de la TVA. Taxe sur la Valeur Ajoutee (pardon my French, I don't have the right keyboard driver here)

Ici en Nouvelle-Zelande, c'est la GST (Goods and Services tax, also known as the Gods and Surfaces tax because it is levied on everything under God and everything on a surface).

I was reading a Chinese restaurant menu the other day, it said "All prices include GST". On first glance I misread it as "All prices include MSG".

31. Hashke - 9/13/1999 9:29:25 PM

Et Dan Dillon, oû es tu allé? Tu écris en françcais, je réponds, tu fais chibis. En voilà des façons!

32. Hashke - 9/13/1999 9:31:16 PM

Merde! ...où...

33. alistairconnor - 9/13/1999 9:31:52 PM

Merci Hashké, de me fournir tous ces accents que je peux couper-coller.

34. marjoribanks - 9/13/1999 9:34:07 PM

Pak Hashke,

Sorry, silliness has occupied me.

I'm not sure if they're dialects but I've met many Scots who speak English in a way which makes me have to listen very hard for the meaning, also Trinidadians and Guyanese.

35. Hashke - 9/13/1999 9:43:13 PM

DanDillon:

RaHti fein, ya akhi? Inta katabt bil `arabi, ana gawabt, wa mafish 'agaab. Wallahi, iddunya shaiTani!

36. Hashke - 9/13/1999 9:49:22 PM

marj:

You are absolutely correct! I was thinking of only US dialects.

I saw a Scottish film recently (can't offhand remember the name), done in a kind of subterranean Glascow-speak, which was mud in my ear -- as a matter of fact, it had subtitles here and there!

37. marjoribanks - 9/13/1999 9:53:34 PM

Trainspotting?

Pak Hashke, though it doesn't count there are other examples from island countries, like Mauritius and even Sri Lanka. Once on a bus in Mauritius, I heard two people speaking at length, thought it was some form of Creole, or perhaps even an African language. When I asked them at the end what tongue it was they were taken aback. English!

38. SnowOwl - 9/13/1999 9:58:17 PM

The film you're referring to may have been My Name is Joe which was billed here as being done in Glaswegian English with English subtitles.

39. Hashke - 9/13/1999 10:03:13 PM

alistair:

Moi, je suis bien sûr que tu peux mener à bien l'affaire! Et maintenant un exemple, s'il te plaît.

40. Hashke - 9/13/1999 10:10:49 PM

Snow Owl (Tecolote de Nieve):

That's it!!! Thanks!

41. pellenilsson - 9/14/1999 2:55:20 AM

A word on the Swedish dialects. Most of these recordings were made in the 60's and the people speaking are old. We hear people who aqcuired their dialects at the turn of the century. They are dying now (the dialects) in the sense that the original vocabulary and quirks of grammar are replaced by standard Swedish. But the intonations live on. It is a hobby of mine of trying to place people by their language. I'm quite good at the areas south and north-west of Stockholm, but uncertain at northern dialects.

42. DanDillon - 9/14/1999 8:19:35 AM

Hashke,
Je suis toujours là, mais parfois je me tire pour vivre ma vie non-electronique, tu vois?

Wakha fasheeshk'l, wellakeen shehaja khuSni'n dir!

43. pellenilsson - 9/14/1999 9:57:01 AM

Since nothing much happens here I'd like to hear if anybody has some comments on the word 'just'. I can be used in four senses that I know of:

1. I just have five dollars.

2. I just got five dollars.

3. The sentence was just.

4. That was just about right

My problem is that each of these senses is represented by a different Swedish word, which sometimes confuses me. To anticipate the inevitable request from Hashke I give them here:

1. Bara.
2. Just. (Yes, indeed)
3. Rättvis.
4. Ganska.

2 can also be used as an emphatic affirmative. 'Just det' = 'exactly right'.

Any ideas about why 'just' has so many meanings?

44. stostosto - 9/14/1999 10:01:04 AM

Pelle

Inte just.

45. pellenilsson - 9/14/1999 10:13:56 AM

Good one, sto.

Sto remind me that 'just' has a third use in Swedish (Danish too?), but then the 'j' is pronounced as in French 'juste'. 'En just tackling' means a tackle which is within the rules of the game.

46. pellenilsson - 9/14/1999 10:14:29 AM

Sto reminds me ....

47. Hashke - 9/14/1999 12:02:06 PM

pelle:

There is a subtle difference between 'since not much happens here' and 'not much is happening here'.

What is an example of where something is happening? ;-)

48. Hashke - 9/14/1999 12:09:10 PM

Not so subtle, really.

Ein Gewitter ist im Anzug. Muss mal abhauen.

49. ElliottRW - 9/14/1999 5:04:09 PM

Three cheers!

Angel-Five successfully used "amphibolous" in the censorship thread, message 548.

50. ycmeehan - 9/14/1999 5:13:03 PM

Alistair,
C'est tout à fait ça, la TVA. Merci beaucoup.

Hashke,
Le fisc est trés fort à taxer les citoyens.
A part cela, ça va le boulot? Je viens de commander un de vos livres.

51. Hashke - 9/14/1999 7:13:27 PM

ycmeehan:

On boulonne toujours, et vous?

Quel livre?

52. marjoribanks - 9/14/1999 7:32:46 PM

Pak Hashke,

You haven't been around very much, and you are missed. Hows about a nice story, perhaps a travel piece in the Sanctum?

53. Hashke - 9/14/1999 8:09:14 PM

Thanks marj! A story? I've forgotten how.

I check in a bit now and then, am amazed at the endless discussions about monikers in two (only two?) threads, make little puns and comments, am ignored, not surprisingly --otherwise hastily read here and there, and generally enjoy.

I am proofing and refining the Navajo diacrital marks in 200 pages of copy, a job I hate, but someone has to do it. So, that's where I am these days. I am going to try to get this book out by the end of the year.

54. Hashke - 9/14/1999 8:10:31 PM

...diacritical...

55. ProfEmeritus - 9/14/1999 8:16:00 PM

Pak hashke

I was wondering where you were. I will figure out something to drag you away from diacritical marks, and she won't be one of those nude dancers who sat on my lap in Quezon City.

56. marjoribanks - 9/14/1999 8:18:26 PM

Story! story!

Hello Pak Gurubesar.

Pak Hashke, I don't want to overaccentuate the problem, but you are needed here if this place is to be enjoyable.

57. ScottLoar - 9/14/1999 9:14:20 PM

Hashke, I cannot appreciate the melodrama which seems the very life's blood of so many people here. Reams of chatter on monikers and identities.

58. marjoribanks - 9/14/1999 9:19:04 PM

Some real ugliness too, Loar.

59. ScottLoar - 9/14/1999 9:25:30 PM

Just as I suspected, the etymology of ugly is Anglo-Saxon (Old Norse). "Ugly" is quite an ugly word but powerful by its very sound and brevity. No pretensions about that word. Ugly.

60. Hashke - 9/14/1999 9:42:58 PM

They seem to have been vaccinated with anti-tedium venom.

61. Hashke - 9/14/1999 9:51:20 PM

Scott:

Hässlich, gräslig, ful, feo, vilain, etc. 'Ugly' does have a certain princely heft to it.

62. Hashke - 9/14/1999 9:55:17 PM

Pak Gurubesar:

Come to think of it, we have not seen a lot of you lately, either. Still consulting?

Ah, the lady from Quezon, as light on your lap as heather! Can you expand on that story?

63. marjoribanks - 9/14/1999 9:58:53 PM

Pak Hashke,

Another ugly word, though very expressive especially in architecture, is 'squat'. Squat. even Diddly-Squat. It has a certain heft when spoken aloud.

64. ProfEmeritus - 9/14/1999 11:08:07 PM

Pak hashke

I did tell that whole story on the Economics thread to demonstate that economists and economics can occasionally focus on something interesting. I will see if I can find the reference for you.

65. ProfEmeritus - 9/14/1999 11:20:00 PM

Pak hashke

The story is at post #67 in the Economics thread. There was some amusing following discussion. For example, sto offered to become my assistant in such forays in nightclubs with nude hostesses.

My consulting is on hold while Indonesia sorts out this East Timor business.

66. ProfEmeritus - 9/14/1999 11:41:59 PM

Pak hashke

Now that you have described her as "the lady from Quezon," how about a limerick beginning "There was a lady from Quezon?" Do you think I will be sent to the Playpen for this deviance, or, even worse, will our efforts be sent to Poetry?

67. marjoribanks - 9/14/1999 11:56:22 PM

There was a young lady from Quezon
Who preferred to spend time with no clothes on
Along came Prof E
Who dandled a knee
Video available, under 'soft porn'.

68. cmboyce - 9/15/1999 12:09:31 AM

Nice.

69. cmboyce - 9/15/1999 12:12:21 AM

BTW, the Old Norse word "ugly" derives from (uggr, origin obscure, per AHD) meant "fear".

70. Hashke - 9/15/1999 12:19:39 AM

there was a lady from quezon
who sat about nude as a bone
when she saw profE
she spilled her coffee
and for him she jilted Capone

71. Hashke - 9/15/1999 12:31:54 AM

Pak Gurubesar:

I just read your great story over in Economics.

In the interest of economics, eh?

72. cmboyce - 9/15/1999 12:40:23 AM

And about "just", while I'm at it (it being posting rather than either working (too drunk, anyway) or going to bed (not drunk enough; I believe I'll have a beer):

"Just" derives (again per AHD), via Fr and Latin, from a PIE root meaning "law", and all the uses exampled in Pelle's post can be associated with that realm of human affairs. (Ahem.)

" 1. I just have five dollars.

2. I just got five dollars.

3. The sentence was just.

4. That was just about right "

The third is obviously unadulterated by variant strains of meaning (taking the original meaning, or import, of "law" to be justice). (And this is also the same as stostosto's football usage.)

By extension from the sense "valid", the word also is used to mean "exactly, precisely" (as in "That's just what I mean"), and further extended "at the precise moment" (as in "It is just four o'clock") But note that this phrase might also mean "It's early yet--not even 4:30", which relates to the next extension, by ironic mistatement I guess, in which the word means "by a narrow margin; barely" and thus (I think--all of this is unclear in AHD) "almost; very nearly" or "on the point of" (Pelle's #4; also "I just missed the boat"), and, similarly "only a brief time ago" ("He just left", & Pelle's #2, etc.) or "only a small distance" ("just down the road"). This idea of extremely small variances yields also the meaning "merely", as in Pelle's #1 and such as "I just meant so-and-so".

"Right" has a similar set a variations, I guess. All of this reflects an historical and doubtless abiding inclination to (ironically?) play fast and loose with the idea of justice, perhaps reflecting its evanescent quality in human affairs.

73. Hashke - 9/15/1999 12:43:23 AM

there was a lady from Quezon
who sat about nude as a bone
when she saw profE
she fed him some ghee
which sent him off into the ozone

74. cmboyce - 9/15/1999 12:46:16 AM

Hoo-WHEE! Yer cookin', Hashke!

75. Hashke - 9/15/1999 1:09:53 AM

A justly good tract above cm, seemingly unadulterated by variant strains of brew!

76. Angel-Five - 9/15/1999 1:53:43 AM

There's another Marj story in Web's thread spinning of his limerick, but I didn't want to post it here.

77. Angel-Five - 9/15/1999 1:59:08 AM

Off his limerick.

78. ScottLoar - 9/15/1999 7:56:55 AM

From Quezon she did hail
Lithe, nubile, but oh so frail,
So saw the Prof
as his clothes he did doff
to discover, alas, "she" was a male.

79. ScottLoar - 9/15/1999 7:57:18 AM

From Quezon she did hail
Lithe, nubile, but oh so frail,
So saw the Prof
as his clothes he did doff
to discover, alas, "she" was a male.

80. ScottLoar - 9/15/1999 7:59:00 AM

He thought it so nice
The Prof did it twice
but t'was over
and over and over
that "she" rolled him thrice

81. ScottLoar - 9/15/1999 8:08:14 AM

Though a bit rustled and torn
ProfE was far from forlorn
he'd taken a peep
it made them both squeak
and so of his wallet was the good Prof shorn

82. ScottLoar - 9/15/1999 8:09:14 AM

No offense intended, eh? I blame it all on the perverse inspiration of Hashke.

83. Uzmakk - 9/15/1999 8:35:42 AM

It is a bit ironic that the most powerful hurricane of the century has the appelation of Floyd because a bunch of confused and obsessive feminists wanted to change a tradition that spoke to the power and force that women are capable of exerting. Mother Nature may be unhappy with this development also. Floyd my ass.

84. DanDillon - 9/15/1999 9:22:59 AM

I'd rather not floyd your ass just now, Uzi. Thanks, though.

85. ProfEmeritus - 9/15/1999 9:27:57 AM

It is pronounced "kay'son'.

There was a nude lady from Quezon
Who jumped on my lap for no raison
She whispered in my ear
Saying, darling, have no fear
For you economists seldom stay on.

86. ProfEmeritus - 9/15/1999 9:29:01 AM

It is pronounced "kay'son'.

There was a nude lady from Quezon
Who jumped on my lap for no raison
She whispered in my ear
Saying, darling, have no fear
For you economists seldom stay on.

87. ProfEmeritus - 9/15/1999 9:42:39 AM

After all those excellent attempts by you amateur poets, I felt I had to put my hand to a salacious task, one I never attemped before.

88. Uzmakk - 9/15/1999 9:43:03 AM

Good thing, Dillon.

89. Uzmakk - 9/15/1999 9:57:10 AM

There was a young maid from Madras

Who had a magnificent ass;

.....not rounded and pink,
.....As you probably think--

It was grey, had long ears, and ate grass.

90. DanDillon - 9/15/1999 9:59:12 AM

Now there's an ass I'd like to floyd!

91. ScottLoar - 9/15/1999 10:00:38 AM

Quoth the Prof "I've no experience"
as he dabbled in dalliance
and rather than smirk
he'd rather use ink
and toss off another limerick.

92. Hashke - 9/15/1999 10:27:12 AM

Mein Gott ('gott'? -- German uses upper case for nouns, but someone said he/she is a verb) but those are funny! Great work!

there was a lady from Quezon
who though naked as a stone
sat on Pak GB's lap
Pak, a very smart chap
told his wife the girl was on loan.

93. ProfEmeritus - 9/15/1999 12:53:11 PM

I have just changed my password for my wife's benefit. She was convinced that all my meanderings of the types described were in the interest of scientific research. This reaction is posted in the 10 minutes between my morning bike ride and tennis.

94. Hashke - 9/15/1999 1:21:38 PM

Pak Gurubesar:

Hahaha!!! That is really funny. You didn't...did you?

O that fabled night in Quezon City
where bare tittie made Pak giddy
it turned him quite salacious
and unto his wife fallacious,
saying the tittie was only iddy bittie

I find that these little exercises clear the mind for the more honest work of the day.

95. ycmeehan - 9/15/1999 5:45:17 PM

Hashke,
J'enseigne le français, la première fois que je le fais sans enseigner l'espagnol aussi, dans un lycée.
Le titre du livre est: Navajo Place Names: An observer's Guide.

96. God - 9/15/1999 5:46:16 PM

Isn't that 'and unto his wife felatious'?

97. God - 9/15/1999 5:46:37 PM

Oops, meant fellatious

98. Hashke - 9/15/1999 6:59:15 PM

That would not work, Fella.

99. Hashke - 9/15/1999 7:05:05 PM

ycmeehan:

El enseñar varios idiomas a la misma vez es muy divertido, verdad?

Ojalá que le guste el libro!

100. tmachine - 9/16/1999 12:40:11 PM

could a non-British English speaker tell me if he/she understands what is meant by the word "bovver"? all opinions appreciated

101. ScottLoar - 9/16/1999 12:47:25 PM

Can you give the context, please?

102. tmachine - 9/16/1999 12:50:33 PM

"bovver boy"; or, for instance, "we got into a bit of bovver at the pub"

103. ScottLoar - 9/16/1999 1:04:01 PM

You got me. Definitely not Cockney rhyming.

104. Hashke - 9/16/1999 1:05:45 PM

In Aussie slang, something like a skinhead. Also, a large tough boot. Cockney pronunciation of 'bother'.

105. tmachine - 9/16/1999 1:06:08 PM

no, it isn't rhyming slang. in case it's not clear, i know what it means myself--i was just curious to see if americans had encountered it in any way. so far i'm striking out, i see.

106. marjoribanks - 9/16/1999 1:07:36 PM

Bother, it probably is the transliteration of bother. Way too abstruse for an American magazine, I'd guess.

107. ScottLoar - 9/16/1999 1:07:48 PM

Tmachine, I haven't a clue but am now dying to know. And is it English or a West Indian import?

108. Hashke - 9/16/1999 1:13:33 PM

The definition from the Macquarie Book of Aussie Slang is clear. But why on earth bovver.

109. tmachine - 9/16/1999 1:13:43 PM

oh, it's english and hashke and marj are both right. a bovver boy is basically a football hooligan/skinhead type who likes getting into some "bovver" (i.e., bother, a very mild word for what bovver actually consists of), with a bit of "aggro" and "putting the boot in" thrown in. it is basically a cockney pronunciation--or general uneducated south-of-england. "bovver boots" are those big Dr. Martens that quite mild youngsters all wear nowadays, but originally they were the instrument for "putting the boot in."

110. ScottLoar - 9/16/1999 1:17:44 PM

Ah, "bovver" as in Paki-bashing.

111. Hashke - 9/16/1999 1:22:04 PM

hooligan n. an owl that comes back too often.

112. Hashke - 9/16/1999 1:25:08 PM

Scott:

Which Pak?

113. tmachine - 9/16/1999 1:53:54 PM

yes, Paki-bashing was (don't know if it still is) a favorite pastime of bovver boys

114. Hashke - 9/16/1999 8:09:57 PM

Pak Gurubesar, Loar, Pincher, Irv,

Have you seen this: zhongwen.com

115. ProfEmeritus - 9/16/1999 8:54:10 PM

Pak hashke

What zhongwen.com?

116. Hashke - 9/16/1999 9:30:43 PM

http://zhongwen.com/

117. Hashke - 9/16/1999 9:32:56 PM

Pak Gurubesar:

It will actually stroke by stroke do Chinese characters.

118. ProfEmeritus - 9/16/1999 10:41:34 PM

Pak hashke

Thanks. I finally made the connection. It's a great site; many fun things to do. Their chat room is cute. I wish I knew pinyin well, but I can follow most of their romanization. I would think that this is a good place to learn, as well as refresh, Chinese.

119. Hashke - 9/16/1999 11:00:14 PM

Pak Gurubesar:

Well, I followed instructions on linking to the URL, but no dice. Must have left out some detail or other.

Did you check out the animated strokes of ideographs? Pretty clever, I thought.

This will compliment Heilig's book on kanji. I also see Harbraugh or somesuch has a book on Chinese characters available at amazon.

120. profemeritus - 9/16/1999 11:16:53 PM

Pak hashke

Not yet, but I will investigate it thoroughly. I was negligent and forgot to bookmark the site, but no problem.

121. RustlerPike - 9/17/1999 12:58:27 AM

Hashke msg num=117: what does 'stroke by stroke do' mean? Is it anything like 'monkey say monkey do'?

122. RustlerPike - 9/17/1999 1:19:09 AM

There was a young gal from Quezon
whose mere sight made full-grown men moan
She sat once, bare assed
on a tenured iconoclast
and induced some additional growin'

123. Hashke - 9/17/1999 1:37:29 AM

Pike:

Ma`aseh oman!

124. Hashke - 9/17/1999 1:42:16 AM

Ristler:

For every ideograph there is a prescribed order of stroke from beginning to end, left to right, to progress through the writing of the character.

I'll let the experts refine that description. It's late.

125. Hashke - 9/17/1999 1:58:03 AM

There was a young tenured iconoclast
Who at the nude's charm was fully aghast
When she tousled his hair
He fell off his chair
And resolved to become an ecclesiast.

126. RustlerPike - 9/17/1999 2:02:51 AM

Hash #124:

I was just joshing you about the grammatical construction of that sentence, as you probably realize.

127. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:13:04 AM

In reading back in this thread I was surprised no one had taken the perfect opportunity to play with fonts in a manner suited to this thread. Let's see if this works.

ei gar oi monoglwttoi kai oi poluglwttoi euquV tou polemon pausainto kai h eirhnh polun cronon diateloih.

128. CalGal - 9/17/1999 3:16:00 AM

Well, there you are. It's been worrying, what with the news from the front.

129. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:16:51 AM

Hey, this is cool! At least on my Netscape the Symbol font (Greek lettering) has appeared successfully. Hellas, no aspiration marks.

It would therefore seem, as long as one had the right fonts installed on the system, one could easily compose and read Mote messages in the thousands of non-Roman fonts available both gratis and commercially. For which purpose, I will be creating --some time next month -- a webpage called "Pseudoerasmus's Guide to Non-Roman Computing", where my fabulous treasure of links to countless download sites for non-Roman fonts will be made available. (I also plan to post information on word-processing, Web-browsing and Web page creation in non-Roman scripts for both Windows and Mac platforms. Note that I'll be stressing the non-Roman scripts I know or am interested in: Greek, Hebrew, Kana, Kanji, the varieties of Cyrillic, and the varieties of Arabic. But using my links any of you could find free fonts in Devanagari, Georgian, Amharic, Tamil, Cherokee, etc.)

In the meantime, let's see what else is possible. Since I doubt any of you have a non-Roman font installed other than Symbol (the standard on Mac and Windows platforms for scientific & mathematical notation), I will compose various messages using a text editor, capture them as graphic images and then load them onto the Mote page.

130. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:21:34 AM

In #12 I see that Dillon is showing off. Well, if so, then he ought to do it with more panache:

But instead of resorting to the inadequate expedient of calling you "Hashki", one could simply import the appropriate terminal vowel from Urdu:

Actually, the Arabic letters haa' and Haa' are modified a bit in Urdu (muddled, if you ask me), but I don't feel like fishing for the right bloody symbol on this benighted keyboard.

131. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:27:41 AM

A Hebrew readaptation of a verse adapted from Genesis by Alexander Pope for his famous epitaph on Isaac Newton:

A while ago I committed to memory the first six verses of the Bible. But since I never quite figured out how the infernal system of vowels and miscellaneous markers works in this lunatic language, I must leave out all but the easy ones from the above.

132. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:32:30 AM

And some Japanese, regarding the Mote:

133. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:34:54 AM

Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible -- without some bravura modifications to the Mote code by Alistair Connor -- to input two-byte ASCII characters like kanji directy through the Mote user interface. Nonetheless, it requires very small effort to write kanji on your computer or see Japanese or Chinese pages on the Web.

By the way, I leave it as an exercise for Hashke to translate the bits above.

134. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:39:18 AM

Where the hell did the post number of the last message go?

135. CalGal - 9/17/1999 3:40:12 AM

It's above your moniker, for some reason. Did you use any font tags and not close them? If not, it might just be a bug.

136. CalGal - 9/17/1999 3:40:33 AM

HTML tags, not font tags.

137. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:42:00 AM

Hashke should know that Japanese teems with shameless punning opportunities. For example, one of the words in the kanji above, seiko (with a long O), could be written in any of the following ways:

(I put the translations in Russian to highlight the widely used Cyrillic font, and I'll let Hashke translate the translations. Imagine, Hashke, no more miserable trans-fucking-literation if you installed Cyrillic fonts.)

In Japanese, the words represented by these seven pairs of characters are pure homophones, i.e., pronounced identically, not even with any variation in stress or pitch among the words. Yet they have totally different meanings. I know there are several other character pairs which also read "seiko", but I hit the wall with these seven.

Loar or PincherMartin can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Chinese takes homophony to such radical lengths. For there are variations in tone for the sound value of characters in Chinese, yes?

138. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 3:47:22 AM

Hashke, here is a Japanese riddle the answer to which turns on a pun

Agetemo agetemo takaku agaranai mono wa nan desuka?
=
What thing, no matter how high you lift it up, doesn't rise high?

(It's too cumbersome to keep loading images of Japanese text. In a couple of weeks, I will make kana fonts available for you to download, then we can input kana right here in the Mote.)

If you answer this correctly, I will be dumbfounded and will have to worship a graven image of Hashke. I'll be much more impressed than with your ability to improvise in a mere Indo-European language like Swedish.

139. Uzmakk - 9/17/1999 3:47:50 AM

Good Lord. Floyd has passed, I can't sleep, I get up in the middle of the night to see if there are any world wide Moties in the cafe, and who do I run into but pseudoerasmus and CalGal doing some amazing stuff on the Language thread. Welcome back,PE. I thought you had been kidnapped.

140. CalGal - 9/17/1999 3:49:03 AM

pseudoerasmus and CalGal doing some amazing stuff

Hmm. Surely not.

141. Uzmakk - 9/17/1999 4:05:55 AM

Sure, seemed amazing, Cal Gal. Middle of the night, all them foreign letters.

142. pellenilsson - 9/17/1999 4:28:09 AM

Welcome back Pseudo. I hope you will parcel out some juicy travel stories over the next couple of months.

143. DanDillon - 9/17/1999 8:59:20 AM

If I was showing off in my 12, you're chunking pseudosemen in your 130's.

Nice uploads, all the same.

144. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 9:06:55 AM

I think Pseudoerasmus' first message means "This discussion forum's success is blessed (ordained) by the ancestors".

145. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 9:14:38 AM

Those seven sets of kanji recounted by Pseudoerasmus if pronounced in Mandarin are not homophonic at all. For example, that for "success" is chung2-gung1, that for "sexual relations" is hsing4-jiao4.

146. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 9:15:51 AM

Or, "this discussion forum's success is ordained by its ancestor".

147. tmachine - 9/17/1999 10:14:10 AM

pseudo! how great to see you around again. VERY eager to hear about your travels, especially Moscow. meanwhile, what is "polovaya svyaz"? don't have dictionary here at work, know meaning of both words separately but can't for the life of me figure out what they are together.

148. Hashke - 9/17/1999 10:58:36 AM

tmachine:

'polovaya svyaz''= sexual connection, lit.

Privet tebe, pseudo. What an avalanche of languages. I'll work on the Japanese conundrum and furnish one for you.

Back soon.

149. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:07:14 AM

Well, how then does one say "sexual congress" (or it's variant "sexual relations") in Russian?

150. Hashke - 9/17/1999 11:26:39 AM

Pseudo:

The task is to put this into Jicarilla Apache. If you can do this I shall elevate you into the pantheon of great linguistic gods. Of course the solution depends on your acquiring all six of my books, hehe.

Sâ'â naagháí bik'eh hózhô bik'ehgo tádíshááh

Btw, I see that you drew even Quelle Gueule into Language, a not lightly dismissed feat.

151. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 11:28:43 AM

#142. Thanks Pelle. I have so many stories from the last four months, I don't know where to begin. The trouble is how to overcome my reluctance in telling any of the stories. You see, I just got through reading the archived backposts that I had missed during the summer from the Fray's travel and reminiscences threads. Our glorious Hashke has set such a high standard for visual description and lyrical narrative that I feel discouraged and intimidated! Besides, where to post the stories?

Loar, you got everything right about #132 except the verb. The last kanji character of that sentence is "prayer". Isn't it the same in Chinese? The sentence is less optimistic than hopeful: "I pray to the ancestors for the great sucess of this discussion forum".

#145. I'm surprised. "Seiko" is pure "on-yomi", or Chinese reading (or what the Japanese call Chinese reading), meaning that the sound is a Japanese adaptation of the original Chinese sound. I would have expected more similarity, in the same way "chu-goku" and "jung gwo" are cognate.

Hashke, are you going to translate the playful sentences about you, esp. those in Greek and Hebrew, for the crowed here?

152. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 11:29:24 AM

#149

"polovaya svyaz".

153. Hashke - 9/17/1999 11:32:54 AM

Scott:

The same thing, or sexual intercourse.

Did you perchance have a look at the zhongwen site?

154. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:34:23 AM

Just as I thought, given the two characters, and thus my puzzlement that one could understand the Russian words separately but not together.

155. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 11:37:36 AM

Tmachine, it's a high-falutin word for fucking. As for Russia, yes, I have two months' worth of stories from Russia and lots from Moscow.

I'm surprised and a bit turned off by the fact that in skimming through backposts in the international thread, I saw no reference whatever (except for a quick one some 12 hours ago) to what's happening in Russia and instead found only four topics discussed: Indonesia, Hindooooostan, Indonesia and Hindoooostan. Those countries merit discussion, but surely the import of the goings-on in Russia eclipses even the flashily newsworthy events in East Timor. From the Mote's international thread, you'd never know the Russian state is now probably facing the gravest political threat in its short history. Yet what has Marzipranks just asked me to do in his thread? Expatiate on Pakistan! Who cares?! That crisis is pretty much over and done with. And I thought Pakis were obsessed with Hindoooostan, not the other way around.

The aforementioned threat comes not from the bombings themselves, but from the anti-Caucasian hysteria of a populace virgin to urban terrorism. That's all you need in Russia: indiscriminate political violence foisted upon a people already starved for order and stability. Train stations in European Russia are beginning to ape the precautions of Tel Aviv airport; the Moscow milita, hitherto never particularly fussy about their methods, seem to be stopping anybody on the street with dark hair; and there is even talk of martial law and cancellation of elections. My fiancée and I even got a visit at her apartment from the Moscow militia demanding to see "papers" and "rental contract", the visit having been instigated no doubt by those zealous to inform on suspicious folks (like foreigners). Wasn't there a movie with Bruce Willis about all this?

156. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:38:00 AM

Yes, Hashke, I have. I have a software program called Twin Bridge on cd that allows you to write Chinese characters in a variety of calligraphic styles in both simplified and traditional characters, and locates those characters through a number of romanizations or by radical and stroke order. Yet, for ordinary correspondence characters on paper then faxed work fastest.

157. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:39:23 AM

And so rather than complaint your insight and experience of recent travel in Russia are needed in International.

158. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 11:40:57 AM

...in its short post-Soviet history...

CMBoyce's prognosis for Russia in the international thread is hyperbolic and overimaginative. The Russian state will do everything to survive, and it will survive. (The Russian Federation is now already a patchwork of quasi-private fiefdoms, with Moscow holding the edges together by a combination of cronyism and helping the local machine thugs rig provincial elections.) The real casualty is the country that will be returned to a Soviet-style authoritarianism but in the context of the kleoptocratic pseudo-capitalism they have got now.

159. marjoribanks - 9/17/1999 11:42:39 AM

Pseuder,

I am eager to hear more about what you began talking about, wrt Russia. But why are you talking about it here? Stop flirting with us and get into it in the Sanctum already.

160. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:43:03 AM

Yes, the last character is indeed chi2, to pray, to beseech, to request.

161. Hashke - 9/17/1999 11:46:26 AM

Pseudo:

cvyaz' -- s myagkim znakom

Yeah, 'twould be great to do it all in cyrillic or whatever. My Japanese, as I have repeatedly said, is practically non-existent.
And my Hebrew and Greek are woefully marginal. Pike can attest to the Hebrew, but I'll give it a shot when I get back from dog hike.

162. Hashke - 9/17/1999 11:48:43 AM

What are you going to do about the Navajo>Apache?

163. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:48:51 AM

Please remember that Mandarin only came about 400 or more years ago, and so the Japanese on-yomi may be that of Ming, Sung, or even Tang dynasty pronunciation. Or so I'm guessing, for although I can identify many characters through Japanese pronunciation some defy any shrewd deduction.

164. Hashke - 9/17/1999 11:50:05 AM

We can't be too tied down to these easily manipulable European and Asian languages, you know.

165. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:50:14 AM

I should say Mandarin only came about 400 or less years ago.

166. Hashke - 9/17/1999 11:51:40 AM

Our glorious Hashke...

Do I sense here a certain gelid condescension?

167. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 11:54:24 AM

#161, Hashke, in the impending Mote era of non-transliteration, why bother with a silly myagki znak in transliteration? As long as you have it in Cyrillic!

I have less Hebrew than you do, surely. In fact, I have none at all other than the ability to sound the symbols without comprehension.

168. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:57:39 AM

Please, switch off the italics.

169. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 11:58:13 AM

#166 --

???

170. theDiva - 9/17/1999 11:59:09 AM

171. ScottLoar - 9/17/1999 11:59:17 AM

Hashke, that means you.

172. theDiva - 9/17/1999 11:59:26 AM

God almighty!

173. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 12:16:25 PM

Hashke, it seems I may have somehow caused offence. On the contrary, I have nothing but awe for your abilities, as the Hebrew sentence will bear out. And in further proof of which, I amplify something mentioned earlier about your travelsnaps and reminiscences:

Your prose skills are unmatched by anybody else in the Fray. The best compliment I could pay you. Your prose reminds me of Flaubert's response to George Sand(?) when she complained that his stories were heartless. He responded by writing that strange, masterly fusion of scientific precision and human warmth, the short story "Un coeur simple".

174. Bubbaette - 9/17/1999 12:19:22 PM

P.E.

Would you really like Diva better in a frog mask?

175. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 12:20:41 PM

Hello, Diva!

176. theDiva - 9/17/1999 12:34:04 PM

swoon!

Dearest PE, I have missed you terribly. I can't tell you what your 'kleoptocratic pseudo-capitalism' has done for me.

177. KuligintheHooligan - 9/17/1999 1:27:36 PM

PE, I asked about that earlier. In the States I had a Greek font with my printer, but here in Namibia I can't find it! I wanted to do the same, post in Greek.

You beat me to it!

178. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 2:11:00 PM

Hashke, I understand what got you miffed. It must have been that "mere Indo-European language" bit. Sorry if the locution was offensive, but it was not so meant in the least. When I realised that the Mote had HTML capability, the first thing I thought of was to amuse you with language samples right here in this thread. Anyway, you've got three non-IE languages (Navajo, Indonesian and Arabic), I have but one.

179. Hashke - 9/17/1999 2:12:16 PM

Over an hour ago when I was moting here with pseudo my dog wrote with his wet nose on the back window the Chinese ideograph for 'let it go, abandon it, Massa' ('fàng', I believe it was), so we took a great hike.

No hawk, no crows -- just a high flying military plane refueling another, a strange sight.

180. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 2:12:57 PM

By the way, it's final: my fiancée and I are moving to Ankara in March 2001 (if it's still standing). We'll be staying for four years. (Her current assignment in Moscow ends October 2000.) Now I'll have to find myself something to do in that city for so long. In the meanwhile I'm thinking of studying Turkish.

Which is good. Having stayed with or met Uighurs, Turkmans, Tatars and Dolgans this summer, I realised that I know nothing at all about Turkic languages, despite my great interest in Altaic peoples in general.

Moreover, I understand that all the Turkic languages are so close to one another that the knowledge of Turkish would give one access to the likes of Azeri or Uzbek in much the same way that the knowledge of Russian enables a modicum of competence in other Slavic languages.

Snirv, any idea how the Turkic peoples spread so far and wide? I mean, we're talking about as far south as the Persian Gulf, as far north as the Arctic Circle, as far west as the Danube, and as far east as Manchuria. In fact, has there been much work on the expansion of the Altaic peoples, comparable to the work on the expansion of Indo-Europeans and Austronesians?

181. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 2:15:42 PM

And how is it that the Tatars and the Bashkirs look Turkish, dine Turkish, look upon Turkey rather than Mongolia as their big brother, and speak a language closer to Turkish than to Mongolian, if they are descended from the Golden Horde Mongols that ruled medieval Russia???

The Kalmyks are also allegedly descended from the Golden Horde. Yet they look Mongoloid, speak a Mongolian language, practise Buddhism, and look to fellow Mongol peoples for fraternity.

Another related question: why is it that the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Siberia (Turkmens, Kazaks, Uighurs, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Khakass, Tuvans, Altai, Dolgans, etc.) look either Mongoloid or mixed Mongoloid-Caucasoid, while the western Turkic peoples (Turks, Tatars, Azeris) look Middle Eastern/Caucasoid? Is intermarriage with different peoples to account for the difference, just as the physical differences of Iranians and northern Indians from other Indo-Europeans are to be explained by intermarriage with Dravidians? But then presumably the Anatolian Turks must have at some point looked more like the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, correct? But how can their appearance have been so thoroughly transformed in less than half a millennium?

I asked these very questions to a Polish Altaicist whom I met on the train this summer, but he, a Chuvash specialist, looked at me and thundered, "Those are some of the basic questions Altaicists have been trying to answer for decades!"

182. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 2:17:59 PM

Hashke, why don't you start learning Turkish with me? It will be a great pleasure and honour if you will join me. Then we could compare progress in Arbeit Macht Fray and correct any egregious mistakes either one of us might make.

183. Hashke - 9/17/1999 2:18:00 PM

Pseudo #151:

...for the crowed here...

If I translate all that sTuff it will make us both look like eagle maniacs.

184. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 2:24:07 PM

Have any of you heard about this? The First Americans were Australians.

185. IrvingSnodgrass - 9/17/1999 2:27:01 PM

PE:
The Turkish expansion is a fascinating topic, and one I must admit to little knowledge of. As far as I know, there has been little written on it. I have acquired the Grousset book you recommended a few months back, and look forward to beginning to fill in this gaping hole in my knowledge.

I am enjoying your posts immensely, and would be interested in any speculation you might have concerning the Turkish expansion. I have a feeling that some of the popularly-held beliefs about Turkic groups may be in error, as we discovered not long ago regarding the Azars.

186. Hashke - 9/17/1999 2:29:35 PM

pseudo:

Thank you very much for those very warm remarks! My gosh! And not a single 'idiot'. No, I felt no offence. Just playing around, as usual.

The Hebrew:

And God said, 'Let there be light, let there be hashke', all perfectly pointed. Jeez, pseudo, I am indeed humbled.

You are right. We would be better off with romanized Hebrew. It is extremely difficult to read.

I'll check back on the Greek, and if you want, the Russian. Gotta eat. Ich sterbe vor Hunger.

A Navajo friend just left my house. She said, in English, 'We are going to Albuquerque tomorrow. I'll see you until Wednesday.'

187. IrvingSnodgrass - 9/17/1999 2:32:19 PM

PE:
The close relationship of the Turkic tongues is of course due to their relatively recent expansion. It makes Turkish a very useful tool for communicating with diverse groups in Central Asia. Turkish is a very interesting language, morphologically. If you're interested, I could dig up some information on it. I find it very exciting that you will be learning the language, and look forward to your reports.

188. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 2:34:00 PM

Hashke, in his epitaph on Newton, Pope wrote: "Nature and Nature's laws hid in night:/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light."

I would translate my Hebrew bit as "God said, let there be light, and there was Hashke".

189. marjoribanks - 9/17/1999 2:47:03 PM

Pseuder,

Have you progressed with Devanagiri at all? And do you have a Devanagiri font in your bag of tricks?

190. RustlerPike - 9/17/1999 3:04:35 PM

Haha! Nice, pseuder. But you'd have to write 'hashke' heh-shin-kof-yod. What you wrote is unpronounceable, as the final 'khaf' is either silent or takes an 'a' sound, and is pronounced 'kh' in any case, never 'k'.

191. RustlerPike - 9/17/1999 3:15:24 PM

Or maybe heh-shin-kof-heh. Like the imperative form of 'water' (water those plants - now!!!).

192. Hashke - 9/17/1999 3:30:33 PM

pseudo:

You wrote in Hebrew 'yihyeh 'or veyihyeh-hashke', repeating 'yihyeh' -- 'let there be'. I suppose that one could be liberal enough with it to shift to past tense in the second usage. I am not familiar enough with Hebrew to know the difference. What sayeth Pike?

At any rate, I immensely appreciate your salute!

193. Hashke - 9/17/1999 3:47:26 PM

pseudo:

Turkish? Why not? I'm also interested in Hungarian. I could then write 'Ich sterbe vor Hungarian'.

As it turned out 'Arbeit Macht(e) Fry'.

So, Turkish, kanji, mebbe Hungarian -- what else? Good break from the tedious Navajo font finger exercises.

What the hell, Edmund Wilson was still putzing around in his eighties with Hungarian -- this after his unprecedentedly egregious chutzpa in taking on Nabokov about Vladimir Vladimirovich's translation of 'Onegin'.

Yeah, Turkish. Good idea. Have to czech what's online first and go from there. Bük, bük idea. Have you gotten materials together yet?

194. Hashke - 9/17/1999 3:53:55 PM

Btw, the refueling looked like vozdushnaya polovaya svyaz'.

195. Hashke - 9/17/1999 4:37:41 PM

Now that damned Greek. ;-)) from . This says, more or less:

Okay you monoglots and polyglots, knock off the bullshit scrapping right away and get along in bountiful peace together.

Undoubtably, knowing pseudo somewhat, from a classical source.

196. Hashke - 9/17/1999 4:41:59 PM

Above Greek rendition is from #127. What happened to the MSG NUM linking capability?

197. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 4:55:13 PM

Hashke, the Greek sentence reads: "May the monoglots and the polyglots immediately desist from their war, and may the peace last for a long time." The source for the sentence is no more classical than the Greek composition I was compelled to undertake in my chin-wiping mid-teens. My head is a cache of useless half-baked Greek and Latin sentences that could only have been written by someone aged 16 under the constant shadow of sadistic masters. In fact, I'd say the sentence is a typical specimen from school -- especially if you substituted "whores" & "pimps" for "monoglots" & "polyglots", from an impudent bagatelle I wrote called "The Whores of Corinth Revolt".

198. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 5:03:32 PM

#189, well, the one and only book I took along with me this summer, "Teach Yourself Sanskrit", has gotten a bit more dog-eared than I expected. It's really amazing, when I tackled Hebrew a while back, the attempt was a complete fiasco. Everything about it was unfamiliar and I just didn't have the fortitude to slog through. But Sanskrit is soooooo Indo-European, there is a feeling of familiarity in every aspect of the language, except for the ridiculous (but pretty) script.

As for Devanagari fonts, I have on my hard disk at least several for both Mac & Windows. They are some of the prettiest around, after the Baghdad font showcased above for Arabic. The most beautiful Greek font is Oxford University Press's Porson-Greek-OUP-Two, which is used in the Oxford Classical Series texts.

199. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 5:05:59 PM

By the way, does anyone know of a good internet forum (not a newsgroup or mailing list) in French or German which engages in serious discussion and not chat, without using the the BBS format? I've been looking for a French or German equivalent of the Fray / Suite101 for a little while, but the ones I've found are dead to real debate and the format a discouragement to the sustained exchanges I am fond of. A long ago time ago I tried to contrive a big row at the forums in LeFigaro and Die Welt by making some outrageous statements, but the attempt went nowhere very quickly. (Apart from being told something along the lines of "Monsieur Erasmus, vous n'êtes même pas un liberal mais un fasciste sous le masque de la modernité.)

200. marjoribanks - 9/17/1999 5:07:53 PM

I've never thought Devanagiri is beautiful, partly because my handwriting in it is extremely bad. Worse than my English handwriting. By contrast, I think Tibetan is aesthetically appealing. And printed Bengali has its charms too.

201. Hashke - 9/17/1999 5:11:30 PM

pseudo:

Well, mine was only a pop rendition, but looks like it caught the gist.

There is some online stuff on Turkish, but I'm too beat to tangle with it right now.

Devo tirar uma sesta agora. Até logo.

202. pseudoerasmus - 9/17/1999 5:13:21 PM

Well, Hashke et al., I'll see you all in two weeks.

203. stostosto - 9/17/1999 5:33:26 PM

Hej pseuder
Rart at se dig, gamle sjover!

204. pellenilsson - 9/18/1999 3:16:00 AM

Amazing. A kinder, gentler PE has emerged after the travails in the east. But it is probably a passing phase.

205. pellenilsson - 9/18/1999 3:16:33 AM

And sto: what is sjover?

206. Hashke - 9/18/1999 10:36:14 AM

Ah, pelle, there you are!

'Sjover' = 'sleep', as in 'Jeg sjover som en stein i helle natt'.

;-))

207. DanDillon - 9/18/1999 11:57:35 AM

PE,
Does my 13.8" viewable deceive me, or did you learn modesty and restraint over the summer?

208. RustlerPike - 9/18/1999 12:01:41 PM

Hashke:

I say, first - thanks for the compliment on the limerick (I forgot to say thank you! How will I ever get a job on CNN?!).

As for 'yihyeh': I'm pretty sure the Bible has 'yehi' and 'vayehi' in both places where pe wrote 'yihyeh'. Basically this is the same word in a more archaic, eloquent form. In the first instance it is a imperative/future form - 'let there be', or 'there shall be', and in the second it is a narrative past tense (I assume this is what you mean by the 'second usage').

In Biblical prose, adding the 'and' ('va') to the future tense changes it into a narrative past tense. For example, the third book of the Pentateuch is known as 'Vayikra': 'and he read' or 'and he called', because it begins with that phrase.

209. RustlerPike - 9/18/1999 12:04:18 PM

pelle:

Player 1 - gamle sjover!

210. Hashke - 9/18/1999 1:02:20 PM

Pike:

Thanks for that excellent elucidation! Interesting is that switch to past tense by prefixing 'va'. I'm not sure that that occurs in Arabic.

211. Hashke - 9/18/1999 1:03:34 PM

pelle:

That was supposed to be a Danish-Norwegian pun, but it went over like a lead Walloon.

gamle sjover = game's over

212. ScottLoar - 9/18/1999 1:07:13 PM

Surely that would be leaden Walloon.

213. DanDillon - 9/18/1999 4:09:29 PM

As to the inflected preterit in Arabic, it's not a prefix but a suffix that changes the verb tense. The simple past tense is formed in Arabic by affixing various consonantal forms to the root verb. Is the Hebrew "narrative past tense" analogous to this? Or is what you describe something more akin to the passé simple in French, a verb tense reserved almost solely for literary and artful purposes?

214. Son of god - 9/18/1999 4:18:04 PM

Sanskrit anyone?

karmany evadhikaras te
ma phalesu kadacana

You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action.

215. IrvingSnodgrass - 9/18/1999 8:15:46 PM

Ah, the final clue, after clues in the International and Spiritual Issues threads.

I know who "Son of God" is.

Naradar, why don't you use your regular handle here?

216. marjoribanks - 9/18/1999 10:47:46 PM

Naradar,

Where's the quasi-promised 'Concise History of the Tamils'?

217. RustlerPike - 9/19/1999 1:16:12 AM

Dan:

I assume you were asking me that question:

Q: "Or is what you describe something more akin to the passé simple in French, a verb tense reserved almost solely for literary and artful purposes?"

A: It only appears in the Bible, but it appears there a lot, I'd say exclusively -unless the text is quoting someone speaking (I think). Whether this was the common way of evoking the past tense 3,000 years ago or a purely literary tool even then - I know not, though my guess is the latter.

218. RustlerPike - 9/19/1999 1:23:15 AM

Actually, come to think of it, the 'va' in those cases also serves as a regular 'and'. Now, when you're narrating, the 'and' is very common: 'and then he did this, and then she said that' etc.. But in other usages it is less so. For example, there is a famous bit that goes "haratzakhta gam yarashta" - "did you murder and then proceed to inherit" from the Bible, which uses the regular past tense. And yes, I believe it is a quote from someone: maybe Samuel admonishing David about the Uriah affair?

219. God - 9/19/1999 2:01:07 AM

SonofGod/Naradar

Sorry for covering my ass in JJ's Arts and Music thread. I wasn't sure if you weren't somebody who was just here trying to make me look bad. Sorry for that.

You seem to have a very keen mind and aren't afraid to stir up a little trouble. Nice to see someone else like that around here. I hope you keep your new handle.

==):-)

220. joezan - 9/19/1999 2:11:49 AM

They're all the rage in Roswell

222. Hashke - 9/19/1999 11:09:20 AM

Naradar, Son of God:

The Sanscrit is intriguing. Please provide a word-for-word translation if you will. I am interested in seeing what is behind the free version you have provided.

223. Naradar - 9/19/1999 3:03:07 PM

Damn – difficult to get one past you guys.

Irv – my Naradar password is in my home computer. I was at work on a Saturday, wrapped up and decided to lurk in the Mote. Something in the Spiritual folder triggered me off and I indulged under the guise of a new identity. This password thing needs to be solved.

Hashke – I studied Sanskrit in both school and college – Jesuit institutions mind you. Like Pinyin or Wade_Giles I was never taught a way of romanizing Sanskrit. In fact, large portions of the Gita I learned by rote – it is embedded in my psyche. So I literally transcribe the Sanskrit into a form of English. This may not be the lexical way of doing things – the purists would denigrate me. But I have a deep love of Sanskrit – a kind of emotional obsession with it. I am not a scholar – am a mere shisya – another Sanskrit word that combines a sense of servitude coupled with the serious student – of the language.

224. Naradar - 9/19/1999 3:04:00 PM

Here goes –
karmany evadhikaras te
ma phalesu kadacana

karmani – in prescribed duties; eva – certainly; adhikarah – right; te – of you; ma – never; phalesu – in the fruits; kadacana – at any time;

The verse above is perhaps the most quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita. There is a second half

Ma karma-phala hetur bhur
Ma te sango astu akarmanji

Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your actions; and never be attached to not doing your duty

ma – never; karma-phala – in the result of the work; hetuh – cause; bhuh – become; ma – never; te – of you; sangah – attachment; astu – there should be; akarmani - in not doing prescribed duties.

Once again , I reiterate I am a mere aficionado of Sanskrit – NOT a scholar.

The verse above also explains the fatalism of the Hindu.

225. RustlerPike - 9/19/1999 3:22:46 PM

Hashke:

Is this up your alley at all?

226. RustlerPike - 9/19/1999 3:42:28 PM

This is the verse we were discussing. I hope you can see it in Hebrew - you may have to download the fonts they recommend.

227. bloodnfire - 9/19/1999 4:27:36 PM

Rustler. Shalom at Yom Kippur and always. We are discussing a book in the 'Spiritual Issues' thread which compares the Seven Sacraments of the Christian Church, the Seven Chakras of the Hindu, and the ten Safirot of The Tree of Life of 'The Kabballah'.

Could you take a minute to express your understanding of the Kabballah on the Spiritual Issues thread for me. Dantheman, a reform Jew, regards it as less than inspired, I gather.

228. bloodnfire - 9/19/1999 4:28:10 PM

Thanks in advance, RustlerPike.

229. IrvingSnodgrass - 9/19/1999 8:45:57 PM

Naradar:
Please, post more on Sanskrit. I too am a Sanskrit afficianado, but my knowledge of the language is minimal. Some day, given a little time, I would like to undertake serious study of Sanskrit.

230. alistairConnor - 9/19/1999 9:10:48 PM

Glou glou glou. Koff. Ghaspe. Krache. Atchoum

(sounds of Alistair coming up for air in the language thread)

I have nothing of any substance to say... except carry on. Please.

Oh yeah, I did promise Irv that a thread host could define the default font for a thread, and he wanted the phonetic one (ISP? CIA? Something like that). We'll do that soon (say, within a month). In any case, it's about time Irv published some links in that desperately empty butterbar side-dish. For example, to font downloads, dictionaries, Ethnologue stuff, goodness knows.

231. Hashke - 9/19/1999 9:15:10 PM

Naradar:

Thanks for those fine literal translations! I haven't had time yet to check out affinities to other IE languages, but I'm sure that even in those brief examples there are some. 'Te' may be one, 'bhuh' another. What do you think?

There are two Sanscrit books that I am considering, one by Coulson, the other by Egenes. Which do you recommend -- or do you have another preference for a beginner?

232. Hashke - 9/19/1999 9:17:45 PM

Rustler:

I appreciate those links! I've bookmarked them for future reference. I have the passage in an old Hebrew here.

233. pseudoerasmus - 9/19/1999 10:24:04 PM

Well, I guess Hashke didn't want to ask me about it earlier, but I was carrying around the Coulson book this summer, and I thought it quite excellent. (And the book's presentation reminded me very much of Greek and Latin textbooks from school.) But the book's exposition of Devaganari sucks. Try learning the script from some other source first, as I did.

234. Hashke - 9/20/1999 12:17:22 AM

pseudo:

That day was such a busy one for me that I barely had time to post anything. At any rate your comments about Sanscrit turned me on to finding out something about it. I liked your statement about it being soooo comfortably Indo-European, the fact that it was the only book you took along, and that you had lovingly dog-eared it to dust.
All finely-pointed recommendations, in my book.

And then along came Naradar and ignited the after-burner.

In reading back over those posts of a couple of days (daze) ago, I see the terms 'miffed' and 'offence'. Let me again assure you that I was never miffed or offended by any of your comments, but knowing well your capacities for satire, sarcasm, irony, curmudgeonry -- all viable weapons of a creative writer -- I tossed off, purely out of whimsy, the remark about condescension.

The University of Arizona has a site for learning Turkish -- with sound, admittedly basic, but a start. I believe I found it on AltaVista and forgot to bookmark it, typically. Of course you're going to have to saddle up with some much more serious stuff for your assault on Ankara. I'll do my best to keep up with you.

I am very enthusiastic about your invitation to join you in learning
the language, so let us keep in touch about it.

235. Hashke - 9/20/1999 10:26:48 AM

alistair:

Glou Glou Glou. Koff. Ghaspe. Krache. Atchoum

You should see a doc about those knees. And how long have you been smoking?

236. RustlerPike - 9/20/1999 10:30:40 AM

alistair: the crack about work being the curse of the drinking classes was appreciated. Lekhayim!

237. RustlerPike - 9/20/1999 10:32:30 AM

hashke:

Do you know of a book that teaches Kikuyu?

With respect, your mentoree, Rus (I'm at the end of a daylong fast. Sorry. But I'm serious about the Kikuyu book).

238. Hashke - 9/20/1999 10:49:28 AM

Rustler:

Amazon.com has an English-Kikuyu dictionary listed. It is out of print, but they suggest that they can find you a copy.

Yahoo shows a site where you can see and hear a few Kikuyu words. I tried it and it works.

I propose, of course, that if you fail to find a copy anywhere, you and your wife write a book that will teach the language. ;-)

239. marjoribanks - 9/20/1999 10:50:27 AM

Pseuder,

The info I have states that the best way to get from Hyderabad to Trivandrum swiftly is actually to use Bombay as the transit hub. Apparently there are more flights from there. However, I still suggest you use Bangalore or Madras, it should be possible. The question is, where are you leaving India from? The combined price of a Trivandrum-Bombay-Hyderabad air trip for non-Indian passport holders is approximately $450.

Check with a good travel agent. One that specializes in travel in India is Cox and Kings, they have an office in NYC.

240. marjoribanks - 9/20/1999 10:52:45 AM

Further sabotage! The above is supposed to read "Trivandrum to Hyderabad."

241. pellenilsson - 9/20/1999 10:58:37 AM

Good to see you again naradar. You also hinted at the occasional 'ethnographic' observation about how you perceive your Swedish colleagues. That kind of thing is always interesting.

242. marjoribanks - 9/20/1999 11:34:37 AM

Irv,

I only posted that travel thing here because I was being shut out of International. Please feel free to move it.

Naradar,

Don't think I'm going to forget about that project of yours.

243. tmachine - 9/20/1999 2:07:08 PM

Turkic speakers: the Russian Jewish woman who does my nails (we're friendly because she loves the fact that we can speak Russian) emigrated here from Tashkent--she is bilingual in Russian and Uzbek. I was fascinated to discover that she can communicate without a hiccup with the owner of the beauty palace where she works, who emigrated here from Iran. I have been meaning to ask her for some time exactly how close Uzbek and Farsi are.

244. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 2:15:49 PM

Not close at all. In fact, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Farsi is an Indo-European language, uzbek a Turkic language. Farsi has more affinities with English than with Uzbek.

Either your Russian Jew is in fact a Bukharan Jew (and therefore a Judeo-Persian speaker), or your Iranian is an Azerbaijani, which ethnicity comprises nearly 25% of Iran's population.

245. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 2:19:15 PM

Your Iranian could also be a Turkman. Most Turkic languages of Central Asia are mutually intelligible to some degree.

246. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 2:30:24 PM

Speaking of which I met a group of Bukharan Jews this summer on the train, who had left the Soviet Union back in the 1970s, settled in Israel and resettled in NY. They claimed there is a Bokharan Jewish community of 50,000 in NY. I find that hard to believe.

247. tmachine - 9/20/1999 2:42:34 PM

what an ignorant slut I am. Actually I think it's v. possible she's a Bukharan Jew, more likely than that the owner is azerbaijani or turkman--but i'm getting my nails done on friday, so I'll ask them both then.

do you have any idea what the pre-70s Soviet Bokharan Jew population was? I don't, but it seems believable that a very high percentage may have emigrated. I know that none of my manicurist's family (if she is in fact a B. Jew) stayed behind, including both sets of grandparents. And if she is one, she is the mother of three B. Jew sons, so she and her husband have done a bit for the population themselves.

248. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 2:48:25 PM

Well, I was going to save the story of my chat with the quartet of Bukharan Jews on the train for when I started posting them later in the international thread. But they did mention that there used to be hundreds of thousands of them in Bukhara, Tashkent and Samarkand, and they emigrated en masse to Israel starting in the late 1970s. Only a couple of thousand are left today, they said. One of them talked about all this with tears in his eyes.

249. RustlerPike - 9/20/1999 2:54:17 PM

pseudo:

Please tell the story and make sure I read it, wherever you tell it. We have a lot of Bokharans here. I don't really know the difference between the Georgians and Bokharans. Are they both from the Caucasian area? How are they different (sorry)?

250. RustlerPike - 9/20/1999 2:54:55 PM

Bukharan.

251. RustlerPike - 9/20/1999 2:57:22 PM

Hash:

Hmmm. Thanks. If you come across something better - pray inform me. It is SUCH a beautiful language.

252. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 3:17:18 PM

I'll elaborate on the Bukahan Jews later (but it's not like I have so much to say). But Georgians and Bukharan Jews have nothing to do with each other. The Silk Road city-states of Central Asia, before the Soviets herded the Turkic nomads into them, were part of the Persian cultural orbit and very much inhabited by Persian speakers. The Jews came with the Persians as scholars, civil servants, mechants and refugees from other lands.

Naturally, the Soviets being Soviets, they gave Samarkand and Bukhara to the Uzbekhs, rather than to the Tajiks, who are the heirs to the Persian civilisation that flourished in Central Asia.

253. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 3:25:17 PM

But there is an Iranian people in the Caucasus called the Ossetians, who have their own republic, North Ossetia. its capital is a typical Russian name though, Vladivkavkaz, or "Lord of the Caucasus".

Among the Ossetians, and elsewhere in the Caucasus, are a Jewish called the "Tats". I don't know anything about the, however. They speak a language related to Persian, just as do the Ossetians.

254. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 3:38:35 PM

Hashke: I'll let you know what book I get. But I have a year and a half before I get to Ankara, and four years there. No rush. Plus I've so many other things to do.

255. tmachine - 9/20/1999 3:54:03 PM

25 years ago, when I was traveling through central Asia and the Caucasus on my university year abroad, my roommate and I had a wonderful bus trip into the foothills of the Pamirs out of Dushanbe, Tadjikstan's capital (a very pleasant place by then Soviet standards--in the evenings one would sit in bowery cafés and sip coffee--sounds banal but incredibly liberating after six months in Soviet Russia, mostly in the winter). Incredible mountain scenery, stunning flowers and huge butterflies everywhere (it was early summer). I didn't realize at the time how close we were to Afghanistan. A Russian friend of mine who'd had big connections ("svyazi" again!) at one time in her life told me of an occasion when she'd flown with some bigwig into a fertile valley near Fergana that was a sort of Middle Eastern oil phenomenon: a cotton boom area, where due to the incredibly productivity of the land, the economy was weirdly disproportionately wealthy and peasants living in tiny villages had huge modern Japanese televisions and washing machines, etc. Have always wondered if it was true or in fact some Soviet urban legend.

256. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 4:31:40 PM

I would not believe anything a Russian says about the Caucasus or "Middle Asia".

Plus, it's highly unlikely your story, given that Tajikistan was the poorest least developed part of the former Soviet Union. And it remains so today. The mountain inhabitants of the Tajiki Pamirs -- all Ismaili Muslims, by the way -- would starve to death if it were not for the food airlifts financed by the Aga Khan.

I've been to all the former Soviet Central Asia save Tajikistan. Its visa regime is the stricest, most absurd in the CIS and Tajikistan probably has the least enlightened govt in the area. And that's saying something.

I'm surprised they let you roam like that in Central Asia during the Soviet times. I know someone who's become something of a guru of independent travelling in the former USSR, and she told me that in the late 80s she was arrested for wandering outside the travel setpieces of Samarkand, Tashkent, Dushanbe, etc.

257. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 4:48:20 PM

Marzipranks: I will be in both Delhi and Trivandrum. I suppose I must opt for the train if the internal flight in question cost so bloody much.

Hindoooostan and China must be two of the very few countries that still discriminate between foreigners and non-foreigners in internal air prices. Even Russia has gotten rid of that nonsense. Air prices are so cheap in Russia it's ridiculous -- not as cheap as during Soviet times, but still ridiculous. The longest nonstop domestic flight in the world -- from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii to Moscow (or the other way around) cost me all of $150. But such bargains will come to an end soon, since fuel prices in Russia are supposed to quadruple by the end of the year.

258. tmachine - 9/20/1999 4:48:49 PM

Our year-abroad job was working as "style editors" (translation fixers) for Progress, the biggest foreign-language publishers in the Soviet Union. When we took our vacation (a month, part of Progress's agreement with our university department), the KGB rep at Progress--his name was Vadim, and we had to apply to him for every kind of permission to do this and that--simply gave us handwritten internal travel visas with the name of every town we decided we'd like to visit. (We couldn't include places like Sevastopol that were closed to foreigners altogether.) We almost did get in trouble when we took a tiny plane and a bus to get to Khiva, one of the ancient Uzbek desert towns. We had booked a room in the only (disgusting, of course; outside reeking toilets etc.)hotel. When we got there we discovered it was not part of Intourist, the foreigner network. The manager said we couldn't stay there. The last bus out of town had gone. What on earth were we to do? Eventually they put us up in the local youth hostel (it wasn't clear why this was an improvement on keeping us in the hotel, since it wasn't meant for foreigners either), which was quite an experience--an old metskheta turned into a dorm, where we slept on ancient rusted iron bedsteads off the central courtyard and barricaded our room to creep out hordes of creepy little Uzbek boys. we washed at a tap in the courtyard. Khiva was stunning, one-story square mud houses with minarets everywhere and a real wall still around the town.

259. tmachine - 9/20/1999 4:50:06 PM

"keep out," not "creep out"

260. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 4:51:31 PM

Even in Iran foreigners aren't charged special rates for air travel. The hour-and-half flight from Mashad to Yazd (in Iran) cost -- incredible -- $10. $10!!! That's still less, per hour, than the Moscow/Petropavlovsk flight.

261. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 4:54:03 PM

Yes, Khiva is stunning. It's one of the "museum cities" that the Soviets created & maintained. They basically cleared out the inhabitants and made the city into an open-air museum.

262. tmachine - 9/20/1999 5:00:10 PM

how charming. What sort of period did they do the clearing out? The town did appear to contain real people when we were there, or were they just Potemkin villagers?

263. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 5:25:33 PM

I don't know if they wholly depopulated the city, but when I was there I was told that the city before the 1940s had several hundred thousand people. I don't think it has more than 30,000 today.

264. WirelessWonder - 9/20/1999 6:09:39 PM

Ycmeehan,
Bonjour, comment allez vous?

265. ycmeehan - 9/20/1999 6:10:24 PM

wirelesswonder,
ça va bien, friend, ça boume

266. ycmeehan - 9/20/1999 6:12:10 PM

Glad to have you aboard finally, wireless.

267. WirelessWonder - 9/20/1999 6:16:27 PM

ycmeehan,
Je suis content de participer a la Mote.

268. ycmeehan - 9/20/1999 6:34:09 PM

Wireless,
Can you get your brother here, or is he too young, do you think?

269. WirelessWonder - 9/20/1999 7:38:26 PM

No, that would be a mistake.

270. alistairConnor - 9/20/1999 9:10:39 PM

Ouah ici : tu recrutes des francophones? Bien! Je vais m'y mettre 1 de ces 4, mais il faudrait organiser un fil dédié à la francopholie.

MerveilleSansFil, sois donc bienvenu(e).

271. pseudoerasmus - 9/20/1999 9:21:15 PM

ycmeehan! T'as survécu à mon absence! ou tu t'es arraché les cheveux?

272. Hashke - 9/21/1999 11:15:31 AM

pseudo:

Fine on the Turkish. I am in a similar time press right now, so at your leisure.

Are you familiar with Egenes work on Sanscrit?

273. marjoribanks - 9/21/1999 11:56:01 AM

Hashke,

That scamp, Pseuder, has taken to referring to me (bhel puri) as balourd pourri in TT. An insult it is, I'm sure, and I get a vague sense of the meaning. But could you translate it adequately for me please?

274. tmachine - 9/21/1999 1:14:26 PM

marj--it means something like "smelly lummox." pourri is "rotten" and balourd is "clumsy." not pe's best effort perhaps

275. pseudoerasmus - 9/21/1999 1:21:02 PM

Well, probably not Tmachine's best effort at translation.

pourri can mean, besides "rotten" (as in fruit), "badly raised", or "spoilt", or "morally corrupted".

276. Hashke - 9/21/1999 1:36:54 PM

'Balourd' is argot for 'idiot', 'twerp', 'twit'. It also classifies something as phony, false, imitation. 'Balourds' are fake identity papers or banknotes.

Conventional use: 'dumbo' or 'gauche'.

None of these appellations apply to Pak marj!!!

277. tmachine - 9/21/1999 2:53:36 PM

whoops, guess I'm the balourd!! not pourri, though, I hope

278. ycmeehan - 9/21/1999 5:10:41 PM

Hashke, Hashke,
Vous avez vu? Mon prof me parle finalement. En plus, il me tutoie. Vous vous rendez compte quel honneur c'est cela?

279. ycmeehan - 9/21/1999 5:19:29 PM

Cher prof,
J'ai passé mon temps á me faire belle, au cas où je vous rencontre un jour. Pour le moment, bien entendu, je suis folle de joie.

280. ycmeehan - 9/21/1999 5:37:26 PM

Alistair,
Merveillesansfil, ça alors, c'est sensationnel.

Dis donc, Merveille et moi connaissons bien le Midi. Il me semble qu'une fois, tu avais dit quelque part que tu connaissais bien la région. Connais-tu autour de Nîmes et Bagnol-sur-Cèze, par hazard?

Et Merveille est un homme. Il a trente-trois ans.

281. ycmeehan - 9/21/1999 5:55:35 PM

Cher prof, a=à. Un peu tard mais la leçon n'est pas perdue, quand même. Vous vous souvenez?

282. Hashke - 9/21/1999 7:06:13 PM

ycmeehan:

Et Merveille est un homme.

Oui, il est l'auteur de Moby Flic.

283. Hashke - 9/21/1999 7:13:09 PM

tmachine:

not pourri, though, I hope

Pas pourri.

284. tmachine - 9/21/1999 11:24:25 PM

hashke: toujours le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche

285. Hashke - 9/22/1999 12:55:06 AM

tmachine:

Merci!

Neither a Bayard, nor a lender be.

--Apologies to Big Bill

He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght.

286. alistairconnor - 9/22/1999 1:21:16 AM

mmmenfin YC, je connais assez peu le midi. Mes terres de prédilection étant la Basse Normandie, la Bourgogne et surtout mon beau departement de Rhone-et-Loire, injustement coupé en deux par la Convention.

(Pardonnez-moi, je n'ai pas trouvé de circonflexe pour l'O limpide du Rhone)

287. alistairconnor - 9/22/1999 1:25:01 AM

Quoique j'ai passé des vacances près de Nîmes l'été dernier mais je suis infichu de retrouver le nom des bleds...

288. tmachine - 9/22/1999 10:26:26 AM

For translators, or people interested in translations, there's a very cheering piece in the arts section of today's NY Times (not, unfortunately, featured on the web site, I just checked): Ben Sonnenberg, arty left-wingish benefactor, commissioned a translation of Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme (when he found there hadn't been a new one for decades) from the poet Richard Howard. Of course he paid Howard farmore money than most translators usually get from publishers, and they would go over the translation together chapter by chapter as Howard was writing it, a very enjoyable process according to Howard. Sonnenberg gave it to Modern Library to publish, it came out, sold modestly for a short while, and then got fantastic, long reviews in both the New York Review of Books and the Times Book Review. As a result, the book has suddenly been whizzing off the shelves and Modern Library has barely been able to reprint enough to keep up with the demand, in fact apparently you can't find it in a lot of bookstores at the moment for that reason. haven't checked at Amazon but might go and do that now...it made me think about how i haven't read Le Rouge et le noir since I was about 16 and it was time i did it again.

289. alistairConnor - 9/22/1999 10:31:27 AM

Saint-Etienne Vallée Française, ça vous dit quelquechose?

290. tmachine - 9/22/1999 10:44:13 AM

Well, Amazon says Modern Library is indeed out of stock. now I'm feeling instant-gratification-deprived!

291. tmachine - 9/22/1999 10:45:10 AM

hey, alistair, ça me dit quoi? et qu'est-ce que c'est que "bleds"?

292. pseudoerasmus - 9/22/1999 10:52:19 AM

a bled is a tucked away isolated community in the sticks.

293. alistairConnor - 9/22/1999 10:54:32 AM

just a conversation with YCMeehan, I am getting homesick for France again.

294. tmachine - 9/22/1999 11:05:28 AM

thanks for the translation, pe--alistair, will you be moving back sometime?

295. Hashke - 9/22/1999 11:31:46 AM

Some good Russian examples of bled are glush' and aul, gottverlassene Dörfer out in the sticks or the mountains, more remote even than the shtetl. 'Glush'' is related to 'glukhoi', a word of many meanings, including 'deaf', 'out of the way', 'obscure'. 'Aul' sounds Turkic and refers to a remote mountain village.

I am sure that both tmachine and pseudo know those terms. I wonder if 'bled' has any relationship to 'blé' -- 'wheat'.

296. tmachine - 9/22/1999 12:25:54 PM

glush' definitely means in the middle of nowhere, but it's the general area--the boondocks as a whole--rather than a specific village or whatever. Aul--which is a village or hamlet I believe--is Caucasian in derivation, I think--at least I first encountered it in Pushkin's Kavkazskii plennik, although as an exotic word introduced into Russian I suppose it may just as likely be Turkic.

I believe there is actually a place called Bled--I suppose once upon a time it was the back of beyond.

297. ycmeehan - 9/22/1999 5:30:08 PM

Hashke,
I think that 'bled" is an Arabic word. Am I right?298. DanDillon - 9/22/1999 5:42:31 PM

Yes, indeed. bled is an Arabic word meaning "country" or "countryside." It more or less corresponds to the definition PE provided above.

299. ycmeehan - 9/22/1999 5:43:37 PM

A question for you, Prof, please. Is it more correct to say: je suis faché avec vous, or: je suis faché contre vous. I think that the first sentence is correct but I have an argument with another teacher who insists that I am wrong.

300. ycmeehan - 9/22/1999 5:54:05 PM

Dan,
Thanks. I can't imagine where I found this bit of info unless it was in Rivoli, Algeria, one heavenly summer when I was five and rolling in the dirt with the little Arabs next door to my parents' house.

301. ycmeehan - 9/22/1999 6:10:23 PM

Alistair,
I know Saint-Étienne-Des-Sorts, not far from Nîmes, a little bled. There is St-Étienne and it is in the Vallée des Forges. In fact, I have a sword dated 1870, Directoire time, that comes from there and has been documented as genuine. This beautiful piece is not a family"s heirloom, however. The truth is: my husband bought it when he was at the University of Chicago from a French student who had two and wanted to get back home.

302. Hashke - 9/22/1999 7:33:26 PM

The consonants are all there in 'bled', meaning a remote area or place, country. 'Balad', 'bilaad', 'balda', 'baladi' are all common, especially in Egypt. I have never heard the configuration 'bled' as such, nor can I find it written that way in three large dictionaries. Perhaps it is a local pronunciation of either 'balad' or 'bilaad', which is plural of 'balad'.

303. DanDillon - 9/22/1999 11:11:47 PM

hashke,
The bled ycmeehan and I are talking about is most likely a regional variation on the standard pronunciation(s) you offer. More often than not, Maghrebi Arabic syncopates for ease of articulatiuon. Notice she mentions Algeria and I post from a Moroccan p.o.v.

304. alistairconnor - 9/22/1999 11:39:47 PM

oui, TMac, nous retournons au bled au siecle prochain, en avril.

Pas loin de chez nous là-bas, il y a un bled qui s'appelle Pomeys (prononcer: Pomé.)

Eh bien, notre bled à nous, il est encore plus paumé que ça.

305. tmachine - 9/23/1999 12:15:49 AM

Et ton bled, il est plein de bâtards, je crois--et pas seulement à la boulangerie

306. RustlerPike - 9/23/1999 12:38:48 AM

pe:

I knew a Tat girl once but she wouldn't let me touch her tits.

307. bloodnfire - 9/23/1999 6:39:31 AM

RustlerPike. Please take a few minutes to post in the "Spiritual Issues" thread your understanding and opinion of 'The Tree of Life', the Kabballah, would you ? We'd sure appreciate it. Also known as "The Safirot" I believe ? Thanks.

308. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 10:04:03 AM

ycmeehan: There's barely any difference. Although I believe the contre form is perhaps more "correct" and formal, the avec form is probably more common.

309. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 10:10:00 AM

but if you say se fâcher avec, it means something more like "stop being on good terms with".

310. Hashke - 9/23/1999 10:40:21 AM

Dan:

Aiwa, ana ma`ak!

311. DanDillon - 9/23/1999 10:43:32 AM

Na'am asidi. T'barkalla a'aliya!

312. Hashke - 9/23/1999 10:59:42 AM

Dan:

Alf shukr, wa `aleik kamaan!

313. Hashke - 9/23/1999 11:00:26 AM

pseudo:

Hellas, I have no solution for the Japanese riddle you posed.

314. DanDillon - 9/23/1999 11:01:09 AM

No, you kamaan!

315. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 11:03:04 AM

Hashke: The answer to the riddle,

agetemo agetemo agaranai mono wa nandesuka?
[what thing no matter how high you raise it, doesn't rise?]

is tempura, or any other kind of friture.

The answer turns on the pun ageru, which means both "raise" and "fry".

316. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 11:03:20 AM
shit
317. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 11:03:44 AM

double shit

318. marjoribanks - 9/23/1999 11:09:27 AM

Pak Hashke, Pseud,

Wave to Nino Rossi, who is manfully trying to get in here and failing. He can only read, not post.

319. Hashke - 9/23/1999 11:17:38 AM

Hey Nino,

Haimish ponem! Hamotzi lechem min ho'ortets!

320. Hashke - 9/23/1999 11:19:13 AM

pseudo:

Zweimal Scheisse? Wieso?

321. Hashke - 9/23/1999 11:38:58 AM

Dan:

Taba`an, wa `aleiya kamaan! ;-))

322. Hashke - 9/23/1999 1:43:02 PM

pseudo:

When you fry the tempura the tempurature rises, but a rise in the tempura is only tempurary.

323. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 3:12:07 PM

A little warning for Hashke,

324. Hashke - 9/23/1999 3:29:20 PM

pseudo:

Spasibo za vnimaniya, no ya ne boyus'!

Ekh, dorogi...pyl da tu-u-man...kholada trevogi, do stepnoi bu-u-ryan...voron kruzhit...moi drug v trave...ne zhivoi lezhit...
ne khorosho pomnyu...zhalko.

Ty znaesh' etu staruyu pes'nyu?

Ty sam konechno snyal ty cnimku gde-to b rossii, pravil'no?

325. Hashke - 9/23/1999 3:31:58 PM

Damn, gotta get that cyrillic font -- and the Arabic...and...

The Arabic you did was very beautiful!

326. tmachine - 9/23/1999 3:50:56 PM

pe--where did you find the sign? a zoo?

327. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 5:09:25 PM

#324
Hahahahaha. You have lightning fast association in your head. The song "Ekh dorogi" is very well rendered in the 30th (?) anniversay CD from the Yale Russian Chorus. And, yes, I myself took the picture -- outside a village called Ternei, approx. 500 km north of Vladivostok.

#326
Tmachine, the road between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk is dotted with such signs. I seriously doubt there are zoos east of Novosibirsk, and even if there were, they wouldn't be the open-air sort!

#325
To be honest, transliterated Russian gives me a headache. Here are some solutions:

Dr. Berlin's Font Archive.
Summer Institute of Linguistics Font Archive.
Yamada Language Centre font database.
Arabic fonts from Fontographics. The font that I used in this thread came from here -- Baghdad font.

328. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 5:19:32 PM

Hashke, this is right up your alley. My father, who lives in Geneva but still spends probably half the year in Mexico City, told me this following anecdote:

An Argentinian engineer unthinkingly launches into some Buenos Aires slang that the Mexican secretary doesn't understand.

Secretary: ¿Mande?
Engineer: No, not Monday, ahora.

This exchange turns on two cross-lingual puns, a Mex-Spanish/English one and an Arg-Spanish/Mex-Spanish one.

When I heard this story I nearly fell off my seat.

329. Raskolnikov - 9/23/1999 5:26:37 PM

Psuedo: I dont have my Russian dictionary on hand, but that sign seems to be saying "attention, a tiger is on the dear".

I think I am missing another meaning of "doroga". Help? From context, it seems to be saying: "Tiger crossing" or "beware of tigers on the road", but doroga doesn't mean "road", does it?

Its been a *long* time since my last Russian class.

330. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 5:33:34 PM

doroga = road

331. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 5:35:22 PM

you're thinking of dorogoi, as in the french "cher" or Italian "caro".

332. Hashke - 9/23/1999 5:36:08 PM

pseudo:

Haahaha! Good one. 'Mande' is used exclusively around these parts.
Thanks for the font info. See what I can do.

Raskolnikov:

The confusion is between 'doroga' -- 'road', and 'dorogaya' or 'dorogoi' -- 'dear'.

333. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 5:37:47 PM

Hashke, you were aware of the Argentinian meaning of "mande"? How did you come by it?

334. Raskolnikov - 9/23/1999 5:42:50 PM

That possible confusion obviously occurred to me, but I had completely blanked on the word for road being "doroga". That is depressing.

335. ycmeehan - 9/23/1999 5:44:25 PM

Merci beaucoup, Prof.

tmachine: There is also an article in The Talk Of The Town in the Sept. 27 New Yorker issue. Sonnenberg says that this Chartreuse de Parme's translation "will be assigned in schools for the next twenty-five years."

336. Hashke - 9/23/1999 6:08:01 PM

pseudo:

I have heard 'mande?' ('pardon?', 'I beg your pardon?') most of my life here in the southwest US. I was unaware that it is also used in Argentina, but the joke certainly makes sense to me.

Rask:

If it's any consolation, most roads have depressions called 'potholes' in them. Axe us some more.

337. pseudoerasmus - 9/23/1999 6:10:58 PM

Hashke: "Mande" meaning "perdón" is not used in Argentina. In Argentina, mande means "fuck me" in Argentinian Spanish. You didn't think I would offer you something so lame as a mere pun on mande/Monday, did you?

338. Hashke - 9/23/1999 6:15:15 PM

pseudo:

Mande?

339. Hashke - 9/23/1999 6:25:37 PM

pseudo:

Your last comment about 'offering' is funnier than the joke!

340. Hashke - 9/23/1999 6:49:07 PM

Speaking of bled, glush', aul, etc., I just read in 'The New Yorker', in an article about Gabo, the expression 'un pueblucho de mierda'.

341. tmachine - 9/23/1999 11:13:00 PM

ycmeehan: I was so disappointed when amazon was out of stock on Chartreuse de Parme that I immediately bought Le Rouge et le noir and Michael Frayn's new novel Headlong.

Po smolenskoi doroge lesa, lesa, lesa

A wonderful song by Bulat Okudzhava.

342. Stumbo - 9/24/1999 3:31:19 AM

TM: now I've got the tune in my head, but can't remember any more of the lyrics. Thanks a lot.

***

Incidentally, the best English translation of "bled" that I'm aware of is (my apologies) "East Buttfuck." Try it in a sentence, it'll grow on ya.

343. RustlerPike - 9/24/1999 9:10:19 AM

hash:

Is dorogoi at all dorogatory?

344. Rossi - 9/24/1999 10:20:33 AM

I'm in, finally.
Greetings!

345. Rossi - 9/24/1999 10:22:43 AM

Dorogoi is not DOrogatory but it'll cost you anyway :)

346. Hashke - 9/24/1999 10:39:39 AM

Thanks, Stumbo. That was enlightening.

Only if it's a bad road, Pike.

Welcome Rossi! There is a greeting above for you.

347. Rossi - 9/24/1999 11:26:39 AM

{looking above, not seeing any greetings from Hashke}

348. Hashke - 9/24/1999 11:35:43 AM

Rossi:

Ekh, #319. Mir zolen zikh begegnen af simkhes!

349. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 2:28:08 PM

Dillon said in #207

PE, Does my 13.8" viewable deceive me, or did you learn modesty and restraint over the summer?

Of course not. You are still the Sapir-Worfian-Saussurian, PoMo-Lit-Crit-Git-Shit-loving teetotalling virgin.

pellenilsson said in #204,

Amazing. A kinder, gentler PE has emerged after the travails in the east. But it is probably a passing phase.

There is no kinder, gentler PE. I have not changed in the least. You are still a travelling telephone salesman and herring swallower.

350. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 2:43:11 PM

I want to comment on something I read in the archives of the Travel thread of the old Fray. A propos PelleNilsson's failure to learn Arabic in the 14 years of his residence in Arab countries, DanDillon said in #1869:

It sounds to me like you've willed yourself not to learn Arabic more than anything else. I appreciate the nicely enumerated reasons for your not having become fluent, or at least highly proficient, but they seem very much like convenient excuses that have kept you from developing a prowess in loogha aarabiya that you have already honed in the English language.

I completely agree with Dillon. As much as I think Pelle is a swell and first-class fellow, I must say, to have lived in Arab countries for 13 years and not be speaking the language fluently bespeaks a determined lack of interest in learning it.

(1) Marzipranks's defence of Pelle in a subsequent message is part irrelevant, part false: Pelle didn't spend 13 years in Saudi Arabia, where expats are segregated from the locals. Rather, if I recall correctly, he spent the bulk of his time in Jordan, North Africa and Yemen, but mostly in Jordan, where expats are not sheltered from the locals.

351. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 2:44:47 PM

continued

(2) Both Pelle and Marzipranks exaggerate the uselessness of Modern Standard Arabic. Marzipranks even utters the incredible falsehood that one "can practise [Modern Standard Arabic] or use [it] with only your teacher"! The reality is that all educated Arabs can speak Modern Standard Arabic, and even most of the less educated understand it. Why, how else does an educated Moroccan communicate with an educated Iraqi? The point is that given a proficiency in Standard Arabic, one can communicate with all educated Arabs in any country. Moreover, learning Standard Arabic is the gateway to the various national colloquial dialects. SA is also the language of media and most writing in all Arab countries. Surely Pelle would have found the news useful?

(3) Both Pelle and Marzipranks exaggerate the extent to which it's difficult to learn the local dialect. First, according to Pelle himself, his own wife picked up quite a bit of the Jordanian dialect during their residence in Jordan. Moreover, there are countless examples of people learning colloquial Arabic. Dillon learnt his Derija somewhere, did he not? I don't know about the language learning situation in Jordan or in Sweden, but in the USA, the UK, and France, the major dialects of colloquial Arabic -- Derija, Cairene, Levantine -- are taught at universities. When I was an undergraduate, an acquaintance of mine did a 4-year Arabic course which consisted of Standard Arabic in the written curriculum and Cairene in the oral curriculum. An old friend from school in England also went on to do an Arabic course at London's SOAS, where he was instructed in Derija as well as SA. Given sufficient interest and motivation, it is very much possible to receive instruction in both standard & colloquial Arabic somehow.

352. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 2:45:20 PM

continued

Frankly, I still don't understand why at the very least Pelle couldn't be bothered to learn the Arabic script, which is not that difficult. At least street signs and the like would no longer have been ciphers. Did Pelle always pester his Jordanian colleagues to decipher the menu all throughout his seven years in the country? Or did he always eat in hotels?

In my opinion if one has lived in a country for 2 years and has not learnt to speak the language pretty fluently, it's a cause for great shame. The threshold for shame falls to 1 year if the language is Indo-European.

353. marjoribanks - 9/24/1999 2:51:23 PM

The above, gentlemen and ladies, is why I dislike the maintenance of archives.

354. Hashke - 9/24/1999 3:45:22 PM

Pseuder is only expressing affection for all of those mentioned.

355. Hashke - 9/24/1999 3:51:56 PM

tmachine:

I was briefly in Smolensk during the 70s. It struck me as a pleasant, hilly, leafy town -- lazy, peaceful. What must it have been like when the Nasties were trying to churn it into gravel?

Not to speak of Nappy.

356. Hashke - 9/24/1999 4:03:24 PM

pseuder:

A German friend sent some Unicode with Cyrillic, Greek, und eine Menge Sonderzeichen. He says 'das Problem mit Arabisch ist, dass man wegen der Rechts nach Links Geschichte meistens noch einen speziellen Editor braucht, der das verträgt, ich glaube Word kann das noch nicht'.

Was meinst du denn? Ist das richtig? Ich werde mal eine Installation versuchen. Schweitzer hatte Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, aber ich habe Furcht vor der Installation, weiss der Geier warum. ;-)

357. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 4:19:16 PM

That's both right and wrong. Any wordprocessor which will allow you to vary fonts (and that's all wordprocessors) will work with the Arabic fonts that I linked to yesterday. Those fonts don't just have stand-alone forms of the alphabet, but all initial, medial and final as well. Even ligatures.

But you have to type left to right and reverse them manually. That's a real inconvenience.

However, you can get the favourite wordprocessing programme of those working in non-Roman scripts, Nisus Writer, which will take care of that for you. I even think the latest Word does that too, but I'm not sure. Nisus is something you should own anyway. It's cheap, it's foreign-language-friendly, you must own it.

Ah, yes, the keyboard layout is a bitch to figure out. But you can easily buy $5 Arabic keyboard layouts, even stickers for each key.

358. Hashke - 9/24/1999 5:05:58 PM

pseudo:

Thanks for that info!

359. ScottLoar - 9/24/1999 5:12:14 PM

The Nasties trying to turn Smolensk into gravel? You mean Bonaparte's bonne hommes? Smolensk seems to be one of those places that just get in the way of well travelled armies century after century.

360. ScottLoar - 9/24/1999 5:17:59 PM

To assume that one can speak the local language pretty fluently after a two years' residency (one year for Indo-European languages)is a shameless conceit. Yes, one can speak some form of bazaar lingo, but to express oneself fluently (even with some little eloquence) and attuned to the local sensibilities and history takes far more than a year or two's casual bantering in my opinion. Bereft of a bed dictionary it takes even longer than formal study. But Hashke, you've more experience than any in this matter, what's your opinion?

361. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 5:23:46 PM

Ok, several years, then. The actual number doesn't seem all that important. The point is 13 years is more than ample.

But I disagree. A year is really sufficient for an Anglophone to speak a Germanic or a Romance or a Slavic language at a much higher level than mere "bazaar lingo".

Anyway, I said "pretty fluently", not with the carefree grace of a native.

362. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 5:28:28 PM

I base my comments, not on "conceit", but on the experience of many people who have had to learn to speak foreign languages within a year's time. Peace Corps volunteers and foreign service officials, for example, routinely study language(s) for a year (two for difficult ones) and are forced to function in the foreign environment thereafter. Success comes in varying degrees, but in every instance it's more than just a proficiency in "bazaar lingo". I especially saw a lot of it this summer, and I must say I've new found respect for these people.

363. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 5:43:58 PM

I would define "fluent" as being able to communicate your intended meaning spontaneously, with little premeditation, but not necesarily to express every desired nuance, or every kind of thought you can possibly express in your own native language, or to be able to traffick in all the eloquence and linguistic subtleties available to a native. I don't mean near-parity with a native.

364. ScottLoar - 9/24/1999 6:23:58 PM

I agree that a year's intensive study of a foreign language allows a proficiency in a number of subjects (I myself knew religious who could proselytize in Mandarin after a year's study albeit illiterate), but intensive study is not the same as residing in country, burdened with other affairs, and only casually encountering the language. Six week's study of Vietnamese allowed me to gain the lowest possible scored proficiency in the military's language examination, but I daresay even that would be beyond the ability of anyone stationed in Vietnam (Foreign Service included) yet denied formal study. I could speak some Mandarin easily within a year's time, yet serious conversation based on topical events was beyond me. A year's formal study in the language is serious preparation, a year's residency is not.

365. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 6:50:50 PM

#364, Loar, perhaps I didn't make the last three messages very clear, but I didn't mean to argue that a year's study alone or a year's residence alone is sufficient to acquire a basic fluency in a foreign language. Note that in my #352, I said: "In my opinion if one has lived in a country for 2 years and has not learnt to speak the language pretty fluently, it's a cause for great shame." I assume there that one has the opportunity for formal study in addition to local immersion.

I brought up Peace Corps volunteers and FSOs because most of them do achieve fluency after a year of study at home and another year after working in the local country. For example, this summer, I met one of the security officers at the British embassy in Moscow. He didn't speak a word of any foreign language the year before he arrived in Moscow. But when I met him -- less than a year after his arrival -- his Russian was quite excellent, not useful in discoursing about the Great Chain of Being, perhaps, but more than enough to negotiate the harrowing bureaucracy of Moscow and drink vodka with the toughs of the city's milita. I think his experience is not unique but quite valid generally.

I think generalisations based on learning Chinese or Japanese go awry, for these two languages are sui generis, in that anybody learning them is encumbered by the laborious process of acquiring ideographs. And let's face it, to achieve an adult-level fluency, rather than a peurile one, you need to be able to read texts meant for adults.

366. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 7:04:44 PM

But I guess the ultimate point is that a couple of years of residence are ample time both for formal study & local immersion.

367. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 7:07:03 PM

All adults need formal study to speak a foreign language anyway. Only children can pick up foreign languages without formal instruction and through osmosis & immersion.

368. Hashke - 9/24/1999 7:40:36 PM

Depends on the language, and the learner. One would speak a helluva lot more Spanish in a year than weedy Vietnamese, Finnish, or Navajo. In Spanish, for example, one could within a year of study discourse upon the Great Shame of Being, but one's Navajo would sound like the bizarre lingual glokking of a hair-beaked grackle, and the intellectual content like that of a new-born armadillo.

369. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 7:48:10 PM

Well, yes, of course, it does depend on the language.

But all this isn't a matter of opinion. I propound my view as empirical reality, that most people can learn to speak most languages pretty fluently with a year's study and a year's residence in the relevant country.

370. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 7:50:05 PM

...most Indo-European languages...

at the very outset my threshold was lower for IE languages.

371. Hashke - 9/24/1999 7:55:54 PM

Right. I agree with you, but the key word is 'most'. Probably (another key word) Joe Fud down at the Puebluchodemierda JiffyLube
couldn't cut it.

372. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 8:36:33 PM

Another little warning for Hashke:

This Rosetta stone reads "strictly observe the traffic regulations".

373. Hashke - 9/24/1999 9:25:34 PM

Wow, beautiful shot. Sosyot glaza, as they say in Pskov.

Where exactly is this? I dig the lonely aspect and the road is 'tatarskay doroga'. Leading kuda?

374. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 9:28:35 PM

Oh, I forgot to mention, I didn't take this photo, it's a postcard I bought.

You can't guess where it is?

375. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 9:29:50 PM

But I did see this very sign on the road.

376. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 9:39:37 PM

It's on the road leading to Urumqi from the south. I made this & the tiger road sign the main decoration on my redesigned homepage.

377. Hashke - 9/24/1999 10:14:20 PM

Correction: 'tatarskaya'

I can identify the ideographs for 'observe traffic regulations', but not for 'strictly'. And the other language, I take it, is probably Uighur. The first line of the unpointed Arabic script reads 'qaatanaash qaa'id muska', más o menos.

378. ScottLoar - 9/24/1999 10:18:17 PM

Yes, yes, yes, a year's study then a year's experience will carry you very far in language... or in almost any field of competency save occasional understanding like this. I took your initial premise to be a year's residency in a place and bang! you've got the run-of-the-mill Indo-European language down and if two years bang! bang! there goes the average exotic tongue.

Your translation of the road warning from Chinese has a superfluous "the".

379. ScottLoar - 9/24/1999 10:22:44 PM

The first two characters (top line reading left to right) mean "strictly", the first character simplified.

380. Hashke - 9/24/1999 10:44:24 PM

Scott:

I assume that they must. I just haven't yet found them yet in the dictionaries I have recently acquired.

381. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 10:49:45 PM

Loar: You're really getting good at HTML.

Hashke: In Japanese, the first character would be

Of course, the syntax of the whole sentence would be different in Japanese.

382. Hashke - 9/24/1999 10:51:36 PM

pelle:

How does 'skröna' strike you as an equivalent of the English idiomatic expression 'a cock and bull story'? Or 'rövarhistoria'?
'Skröna' must come from 'skryter', 'skröt', eh? Can you think of anything closer?

Something like Indonesian 'omong kosong' -- 'empty talk'. The Navajos say 'hane' t'óó ndiilyáhí áhilní' -- literally, 'story just the one picked out of the air it is told'.

383. CalGal - 9/24/1999 10:53:42 PM

Irv,

In about 10 hours, the links on the front are going away--at least some of them are. I'm requesting that the links be moved to the appropriate thread. Ethnologue should probably move here, don't you think? And any others you want. Just giving you heads up.

384. Hashke - 9/24/1999 10:56:25 PM

pseudo:

Damn, that is pretty!

I installed Unicode, have it in Word, have Baltic, Turkish, Greek, and Cyrillic -- but cannot get the bloody things to key. I can, as you have seen, do the conventional marks by using Alt and numbers on the far right keyboard, but no dice on the Cyrillic. For example Alt + 192, which should give me Cyrillic 'A' gives me +. Govno!

385. pseudoerasmus - 9/24/1999 11:02:37 PM

Hashke:

character charts for Unicode.

386. RustlerPike - 9/25/1999 12:50:14 AM

Zwei Chinesen mit ein kontrabass, sassen auf dem strasse und erzählen sich was...

387. RustlerPike - 9/25/1999 12:57:56 AM

hashke:

Posted by one 'ABK' in response to my query at www.kikuyu.com:

"To my partners who have expressed an interest in learning the language. I've done a little research and hve come up with some info. I've been in touch with a fellow at MSU who has studied the language and suggests the following: 1. Get a good grammer book. He suggests we NOT use those published by Benson or Leakey. They are both very confusing and the style of Gikuyu is outdated. There is a good grammer book out by John Chenge title somthing like "Elementary Grammer of Gikuyu". 2. Get a good accompaniement; TKK Primers by Fred Kago is good for basics. I'm working on where to get copies of both of these. 3. Try to get around somone who speaks fluently. It is a tonal language.

There are also English/Gikuyu and Gikuyu/English dictionaries out there. It just a matter of finding them. I know Oxford University has them on hand. There are also courses offered at Univ of Bos and Univ of Wisonsin. Also Amazon.com has a grammer book in stock but I don't know how good it is. Let's try to keep each other informed.

Monyaka. Getire ondo wa ndereri. Thaai! (Good Luck. Nothing is impossible. Peace!)."

388. RustlerPike - 9/25/1999 1:01:02 AM

hashke:

You can ask to delete #338 if you wish.

389. Bobkat717 - 9/25/1999 3:48:06 AM

Many ex-pats hang out only with co-ex-pats and speak together, socialize, hunt and fish, in their own language. No need to learn the local language. Even after 20 years in the host country.

Peace Corps (100 years ago or so) provided excellent language training, tested periodically, and assigned FS proficiency grades.

Who picked the name "Mote"? Is it like someting you get in your eye, impeding vison between your eye and the horizon? Speck? Of what? Knowlege?

390. Bobkat717 - 9/25/1999 3:53:44 AM

Irving Snodgrass:
Do we have to have the cutesies "Cast Your Mote" and "Check for Dust"? Something more standard would do. Like "Send your Post", "Post Now", "Review Your Post". Cuteness wears dim after a while.

391. Angel-Five - 9/25/1999 3:55:59 AM

clif?

nah. couldn't be.

392. Angel-Five - 9/25/1999 3:57:10 AM

Well, I agree with that, anyway. It's nauseating.

393. CalGal - 9/25/1999 4:07:22 AM

Bobkat,

Irv isn't really involved with the design of this site. And we generally don't have forum design discussions in the Language thread. We're odd that way. If you want your comments heard, with no guarantees, you might want to try the appropriate thread.

394. Angel-Five - 9/25/1999 4:11:39 AM