Well, one contract has ended , and another is beginning. Yesterday evening, while riding BART home from teaching, I sat next to a young man who turned out to be homeless. He had spent the day in San Francisco word processing his résumé and was then returning to Berkeley. We ended up talking about his application for an AC Transit job. He had driven a school bus before, and he still had his class B license. He didn't ask me for money, and when he got off at the Berkeley station, a group of eight Indians got on: two women and six men. A young black man asked one of the men if any of their group spoke Arabic. The Indian was a bit confused, but finally answered a simple "no". The young man looked disappointed and left at the next stop. The Indians were speaking to each other in Hindi. I could just make out a couple of words in their conversation: âcchâ and hai.
"A student in his beginning {Russian] class recalls that on the first day of the term, Nabokov happened to find on his desk a yellow vase with blue flowers. He went to the blackboard, wrote 'yellow blue vase,' and asked the students what it said. 'Yellow blue vase,' of course. 'That is almost "I love you" in Russian,' he explained, and repeated the phrase, ja ljublju vas, adding: 'That is probably the most important phrase I will teach you.'" [Ben Boyd. 1991. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. p. 122.]
"When I finished trimming my nails, I made some coffee and drank it at the kitchen table, German book open. Stripping down to a T-shirt in the sun-filled kitchen, I had set about memorizing all the forms in a grammar chart when I was struck by an odd feeling. It seemed to me that the longest imaginable distance separated irregular German verb forms from this kitchen table." [Haruki Murakami. 2000. Norwegian Wood, p. 135.]
I've been reading Norwegian Wood on BART while commuting to and from my latest contract work, and it's alternately delightful and depressing. The protagonist, Toru Watananbe, is in his forties remembering his college years in the late sixites: friends, loves, sex, deaths. I read Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase a couple years ago, when a fellow instructor at GGU told me to read it, loaning me his copy. Murakami's style reminds me of a pomo-updating of the nouveau roman. With a depressing little heart.
I've been reading Brian Boy's Nabokov's Pale Fire and having a great time remembering one of my favorite novels. Pale Fire is a novel composed of a poem of 1000 lines, a commentary written by a mad man that has almost nothing to do with the poem is comments upon, and a strange index that continues to provide more insight into the commentary than the poem. Anyway, during the comments upon line 80 of the poem "[Here was] my bedroom[, now reserved for guests]", the madman, Professor Kinbote, quotes a couplet from a famous Zemblan poet, Romulus Arnor [1914-1958], in the original Zemblan. Zemblan is a language that Nabokov constructed from Scandanavian and Slavic roots. Here:
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána.
A dream king in the sandy wastes of time
would give three hundred camels and three foutnains.
werem 'time' cf Russian vremja; trem-kin 'dream king'; verbalala 'camels', cf. Russian verbljud 'camel' and Gothic ublandus, Old English olfend from a root originally meaning an elephant.
Continuing in the jughead direction from the previous entry, I've been looking into the Sanskrit word for 'head', mûrdhan, which also appears in the Indian grammarian term, mûrdhanya 'cerebral, or retroflex, articulation'. This series of consonants, mainly stops, are pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled up and back inside the mouth touching the roof of the mouth. (Just imagine Peter Sellars doing his stage Indian accent pronouncing any word with a 't' or a 'd' in it.) When transliterating Sanskrit words, these retroflex consonants have dots underneath them. Anyway, the reconstructed Indo-European root for mûrdhan is quite strange:
*melhxdho-.
It only appears in a few words in Avestan, Sanskrit, Greek, and Old English. [Gk blothros 'tall', OE molda 'top of the head; elevation'.]
I was thinking about the Japanese word hachimaki 'headband' the other day, wondering whether the first element hachi was the word for eight or a homonym. Quick trip to a dictionary showed that the kanji for hachi in this case was not the one for the numeral eight, but rather a word meaning a bowl or pot. So, literally hachi means 'bowl-roll'. Of course, this set off the free association mechanism in my head: Latin testa, soldiers' slang for head, but literally 'pot, jug, earthenware bowl', which yielded French and Italian words for head, tête and testa, immediately came to mind. Testa is related to torreo 'to burn, scorch' and also to terra. Jughead and scorched earth.
Well, my friend Ian has started down the blog trail. Check out the pictures and commentary at Desiderata. And my cousin, Doris, has also started updating her blog on a weekly basis. She's doing hers the old fashioned way: directly editing the pages. Ian and I opted for the easy way out: blog software.
Yesterday, a colleague at listen dot com was telling me about his band, Salty Dish, and somehow it came up that I was "interested in etymology". [Actually, I said something about salary and making ones daily salt.] Well, I perked up, as it's not every day that I run across somebody who uses the word casually in conversation or doesn't think it has something to do with the study of insects. Anyway, he wanted to know if Latin sal 'salt' and salus, salutis 'health' might be related. Of the top of my head, I said I thought not, but that I'd look into it. None of my reference dictionaries mentioned the possibility, but that doesn't mean much, I suppose. I was fascinated, as always when etymologizing, that Greek holos 'whole, entire' and Sanskrit sarva 'all, entire' were cognates.
As a result of this, I've been thinking about Malkiel's Studies in Irreversible Binomials. That is collocutions that are only used in one order: "Sturm und Drang", "hard and fast", and "hook, line, and sinker" (though the last is a trinomial).
The title of this entry has to do with Meillet's conjecture that Irish Gaelic slàn 'whole, healthy, safe' may have been une contamination from the Latin phrase salva ac sana. Without the -wo- suffix, the root in salvus yields sollus 'alone' and solidus 'solid'. It's interesting that the 'w' in whole is an addition in Early Modern English orthography. Whole is cognate with 'hale' (also from English) and 'hail' (borrowed from Norse). Safe and sound, Latin salvus ac validus, Old English hæl ond trum.
More to come: Hale and hearty; hearty-hale. Hearth and home. Health.
Kibei. sb. /ki:bej/ [< Japanese ki 'return' + bei 'rice; America'] : A nisei (second generation Japanese-American) who returns to America after finishing education in Japan.
Ergativity. sb. /'@rg@,tIv@ti:/ [< Gk ergates 'worker' < ergon 'work': cf. Eng work] : Describes a grammatical pattern in which the subject of an intransitive clause is treated in the same way as the object of a transitive clause, and differently from a transitive subject. In systems with inflected case, the former is called the ergative case and the later the absolutive case. Some ergative languages are Basque, Mayan, Sinhalese, and Eskimo.
Examples from Dyirbal, an Australian Aboriginal language:
1a. Numa banaga-nyu
1b. father+abs return-nonfuture
1c. Father returned.
2a. yabu banaga-nyu
2b. mother+abs return-nonfuture
2c. Mother returned.
3a. Numa yabu-Ngu bura-n
3b. father+abs mother-erg see-nonfuture
3c. Mother saw father.
4a. yabu Numa-Ngu bura-n
4b. mother+abs fatther-erg see-nonfuture
4c. Father saw mother.
[R. M. W. Dixon. 1994. Ergativity, 10.]