lady_schrapnell | Mother Tongue

Spent most of the afternoon writing what's supposed to be an essay, but I'm starting to doubt it'll turn into anything remotely close to same by the deadline! Stayed up too late last night reading The Lions of Al-Rassan, which didn't help. It'll still be a while before I finish and have anything sensible (or otherwise) to say about that, so for today I'll write out some bits which I enjoyed from Mother Tongue.

"... the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word giomlaireachd, which means 'the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.' That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life - not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography."

"We in the English-speaking world take French leave, but Italians and Norwegians talk about departing like an Englishman, and Germans talk of running like a Dutchman. Belgian taxi drivers call a poor tipper 'un Anglais'. To be bored to death in French is 'etre de Birmingham', literally 'to be from Birmingham', (which is actually about right)."

I may have to summon up the courage (and borrow my daughter's dictionary) in order to write a message in French to check the last one on the BC French forum!

Finally figured out how to add images to this, and got the cover of Despereaux, but it was far too big. Also hoped to check with my ISP to see about image storing or whatever it's supposed to be, but I was going to treat myself if and when I was happy with a finished first draft of the essay, and it never happened.

What a strange word 'draft' is: noun meaning an unfinished version (as above), a word meaning a sketch or plan (close), an order to pay a certain amount of money, and compulsory recruitment for military service. And verbs meaning corresponding things. Then, if you're this side of the pond, you've got 'draught' pronounced the same and meaning a breeze in a room (spelled 'draft' also in the US), 'a single act of drinking or inhaling' (I'd never have thought of that without the dictionary), and the drawing in a fishing boat (never heard that one at all). Add to all that 'draught' as an adjective, meaning beer served from a cask instead of a bottle or can, and an animal used for pulling heavy loads, and then the whole draughts (boardgame) and draughtboard deal.

I so want a big O.E.D.! This one (Compact) just says the origin is old Norse, and all the draft stuff just came as a variant spelling. How does anyone ever learn English?

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About image hosting, try http://www.imageshack.com or www.photobucket.com, those are really easy to use. Image shack takes images as big as 700k and you can always make images smaller, in windows the way it works is the image viewer has got an option to close window and open file for editing, and then inside the image editing there is a redimensioning option, one can just play with that.

About language and dictionaries, i got the Simon Winchester book on the OED at home, library loan, and I guess it might be a cultural bias again, the way it heaps praises on the importance of the English language feels a bit pompous. And English has a very simple grammar to compensate for very non obvious non consistent spellings.

Imageshack's site is being reorganised, but I appear to have managed to use photoshack successfully! Now, if you could just help me write my essay... I'm sure you're also as knowledgable on archaeological evidence linking Troy to the Iliad, right? Right?

I'll play around with resizing pictures to put them in journal entries later, but just wanted to check this out. Thanks again!

owww, she loks so cute, and so dashing, dainty paws, and red bandanna, and a collie nose, and all that blonde fur. Lovely but I am extremely biased about dogs, thank goodness!

About the Iliad and Troy, I saw a french archeology documentary a while ago which was really good - for some reason the French archeology documentaries shown on our tv are lots better than the american documenraries ( ok, nearly anything would be better than the History Channel or National Geographic channel type documentaries with their "reenactments", bimbo presenters, break every 4 minutes for commercial and totaly shallow data said in definitive ways), or even the british ones. But back to Troy, can not recall much - I know the story about Schlieman and Sophia and how he married her, and their digging up "Pryam´s" treasure, but that is about it. Sorry!

That's interesting about French documentaries - the BBC used to do great ones, but even some of them have gone a bit re-enactment-ish or cheesy narrative style. No commercial breaks at least! But the book I'm reading is from a BBC programme and I didn't expect anything like as much detail or careful referencing and the like. Really good. It was frustrating finding how much of the info on Troy on the web was in German and not translated!

Love the picture of Sophie wearing 'the jewels of Helen'! Hey, what else to do with centuries-old treasure. Hope she used the pottery for tea-parties for all her friends too. :)

Oh, come on, who would not want to try the jewels on? Though with the interest in beading right now, I do wonder about their condition, a lot of it seemed to be based on beads, and any thread would have rotted by then - or be much too fragile to support the stress of a jewel being worn. Dunno. The history behind their marriag, and this is a memory from a book meant for children ( even if it was quite good) was that he announced he would marry the first greek girl to learn the Illiad by heart and Sophia won that? I read the whole Odyssey for the first time a while ago, and geesh that is long and the Illiad even longer, Sophia really had an achievement there.

It's by Bill Bryson, right?
Someone who had read Mother Tongue posted this on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, because she wanted to know if anyone had heard about using "ravintolassa" as a swear word.

"Some cultures don't swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most
Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns,
lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub
your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2.00 a.m., rather oddly
adopted the word *ravintolassa*. It means 'in the restaurant'."

What?! I've never heard anyone use "ravintolassa" as a swear word. And I wasn't the only one. This was news to everyone on the list. There's no lack of swear words in Finnish...

Yes, that's the one. Younger daughter had read that bit out to me and I was planning to ask you about it when I got there! I've found a few inaccuracies with regards Irish (even though I don't speak it at all I could spot them and checked with the girls) and think he's not always the most accurate in the world. I can't even imagine how you'd go about doing research on many other languages in order to compare them, or whatever, but I think if you're going to do it, do it right!

I pretty much decided to stick with learning the Finnish for 'library' after reading this:

Finnish has fifteen case forms, so every noun varies depending on whether it is nominative, accusative, allative, inessive, comitative, or one of ten other grammatical conditions. Imagine learning fifteen ways of spelling cat, dog, house, and so on.

I was going to check it with you though, and of course, if it's all pretty regular, you wouldn't have to learn fifteen different ways of spelling each noun anyway!

Well, yes... Finnish has fifteen case forms: nominative, accusative, genitive, partitive, essive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative and instructive. The last three (abessive, comitative and instructive) are not very common.
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/finnish-cases.html

Other facts about Finnish:
There are no indefinite or definite articles. No prepositions, either.
The third person singular pronoun "hän" corresponds to both he and she.
Words are inflected or conjugated through "gluing" new endings to basic word forms.
All Finnish words have their main stress on the first syllable.

About the Finnish language: http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/finnlang.html
http://members.tripod.com/suomenkieli/
Finnish grammar (in English): http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suomi/
http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/finnish/
Basics: http://donnerwetter.kielikeskus.helsinki.fi/FinnishForForeigners/

I couldn't find a way to edit my previous comment, so I'm adding a new one.
To be accurate I should have said: There are few prepositions (and postpositions) in Finnish. In almost all cases the various word endings are used instead of prepositions. For example "in", "on", "to", "from" don't exist - those are expressed by adding endings to words.

It's ok - I knew what you meant! One advantage to having studied Latin back in school. Only 6 cases for nouns, rather than 15, but at least I got the idea. I had a look at the Finnish links, thanks for those! It does seem hard, but except for the differences relating to place names, regular enough.

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