The Elkdog Men

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Regional Accent Meme!

Includes: Canadian accent, problematic hair, weird unconscious expressions.

Say These Words:

Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting Image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught

Now answer these questions:

What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?

What is the bug that when you touch it, curls into a ball?

What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?

What do you call gym shoes?

What do you say to address a group of people?

What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?

What do you call your grandparents?

What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?

What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?

What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

“A Dictionary of the Cree Language, as Spoken by the Indians of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territories, compiled by the Reverend Edwin Arthur Watkins, missionary of the Church Missionary Society.”

Should win for most redundant ecclesiastical title.

Looking at lists of words in another language makes the brain generate vague narratives to go with them—I always associate the first declension nouns in Latin with the nebulous story in my head about the poet (poeta) and the rose (rosa) and the girl (puella) and the farmer (agricola), the first words taught in the Wheelock textbook. Languages like Cree suggest more detailed stories from the dictionary definitions:

A place where sand drifts into the eyes. The wind comes from there. He is lean, he is starving, he is skin and bone. I wonder if he did it. He confesses it to him. It serves him right, it’s his own fault. He kills him easily. He buries him under the snow. He is alone with his family. It snows into the tent. Red foxes are numerous. A tree on which a deer has rubbed his horns. He goes backwards and forwards, he retraces his steps over and over again. He is secretly listening. It is doubtful what it is. What is it, I wonder? I do not know what it is. They differ in opinion. He courts her, or she courts him. She makes a petticoat out of it. The flesh of the thigh. He feels it carefully. Low, low down, below. They dance together. Carefully, gently, gradually, slowly. Just so, that very place, there. She pretends to be asleep. He sleeps with his shoes on.

ATM in Vatican City with instructions in Latin.

Interrupting is rude.

Something that never stops being strange to me is the way it sounds when an unseen translator’s voice is dubbed over the person speaking their own first language, like on the news and in recorded interviews. (Link that prompted this observation, on Henryk Gorecki.) My ear can’t fully ignore the person’s real voice because I’m still trying to catch the tone and expression, and the two languages always run at different tempos. The dissonance is also worse when the genders of speaker/translator are mismatched, or if I happen to know any of the original language in question. Reading a translation lets you have the illusion that you’re receiving the message accurately, but hearing the overlap makes it obvious that you never really can.

(The opposite is when you’re reading a translation with the original on facing pages, like the Latin and Greek Loeb editions. This lets you pretend that you understand way more of the original language than you actually do.)

What the Romans named their dogs

Issa. f. “Her Little Ladyship”. An adored pup mentioned in one of Martial’s epigrams (Book I, 109). …naughtier than Catullus’ sparrow…more winning than any girl…If she whines, you will think she’s talking…

Margarita. f. “Pearl”. From an ancient epitaph to a dog, cited in Abbott’s work. …a great white hunting dog…who coursed through trackless forests…

Patricus. m. “Noble”. From an ancient epitaph to a dog, cited in Abbott’s work. …an Italian dog, at Salernum…”My eyes were wet with tears, our dear little dog…In thy qualities, sagacious thou wert like a human being.”

Others here. “Issa” is interesting as colloquial Latin, since it’s a form of the reflexive pronoun ipsa (“herself”) used humourously in the same way we do in English, referring to someone as “Herself” or “The Missus”.

It is Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend! For people in a hurry, here are some bison eating pumpkins. For those with more time on their hands, I have a longer post on the Iroquois Thanksgiving Address in my repository of stuff that is tl;dr for tumblr.

Akwekon enhskat tsi entitewahwe’nonni’ ne onkwa’nikònra, tanon tenyethinonhweraton’ ne Onkwehson’a ne’ akwekon skennen akenhake’. Etho niyohtonhak ne onkwa’nikònra.

We will all join together in our minds, and we will give thanks to the People for their continued peace. So our minds will continue to be.

Lakota words

aca’hsu, v. To form ice on something in little drops, as on trees, grass, etc.

hia’kigle, v. To set the teeth firmly, as a dying person does.

hena’gi, n. The shadow of a hill.

ica’konta, v. To cut a groove in, as one branch resting on another will do when swayed by the wind.

iyu’s’o, v. When a man rides through water and gets wet in spite of lifting his legs.

kable’blesic’iya, v. refl. To rest one’s mind by walking around after hard work.

opu’hli, v. To stuff anything into, as an old coat into a broken window.

wica’natasloka, n. A dry human skull.

wo’econla, v. To consider something hard work but it is not.

(listed in Ian Frazier’s On the Rez)

I bring you only the best obscurities

I know what you’re thinking. How many times have you been playing NES on the Navajo reservation and you wanted to talk about Dr. Mario in the native language, but you just didn’t know the correct term?

“Azee’ handéhé This phrase literally means, “falling medicine.” My grandma and her older sister are the only people who use this word. Both of their grandchildren taught them how to play the original NES system. This is their favorite game, along with Tetris. Examples: Shimásání dóó bádí azee’ handéhé yee naanée eh. My grandma and her older sister play Dr. Mario quite frequently.”

Lots of other interesting words and phrases too.

Flowers have no names: the revival of Hebrew as a living language after two thousand years was no miracle

But much more was required for Hebrew to become a living language. The American Yiddish poet, linguist, and lexicographer Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarten), already at work on his translation of the whole Bible into Yiddish, came to Palestine in 1913. Walking in the settlement of Ekron, he saw a girl of fifteen or sixteen sitting in the window of her home, above a beautiful flowerbed. He asked her in Hebrew: “What is the name of these flowers?” To which she replied: “Flowers have no names.”

Very long and interesting article.

EDIT: also I want to post especially this quote:

None of it was easy. As Shlomo Lavi, who came with the Second Aliya and later became one of the founders of the first Kibbutz Ein Harod in 1921, recalled, “It cannot be appreciated how much it costs a man to go from speaking one language to another and especially to a language that is not yet a spoken language. How much breaking of the will it takes. And how many torments of the soul that wants to speak and has something to say—and is mute and stammering.” And the spiritual leader of the labor movement, Berl Katznelson, who read a great deal of Hebrew literature, reminisced: “In the first days, I had a hard time with Hebrew…. When I came to Eretz-Israel, I couldn’t make a natural sentence in Hebrew and I didn’t want to talk a foreign language. I decided I wouldn’t utter a foreign word. And for ten days, I didn’t speak at all; when I was forced to answer—I would reply with some Biblical verse close to the issue.” Nevertheless, in a short time he became one of the finest essayists in modern Hebrew.

The 'Matzav:' Etymology of a Word