The Aviary

Today in Things I Have Done and Put on the Internet That No One Ever Asked For! In my last post, I mentioned that I was translating Hamilton lyrics into senesh. I did Wait For It, it took a really long time, and I'm pretty proud of it, so I'm posting it here. Get excited!

( showtunes about the Founding Fathers in a language no one else can read! )

I now have a lot of Thoughts about Aaron Burr's use of evidentials, but that is even more ridiculous than the rest of the post, so I think it will stay inside my head for now.

Things:

- Thanks again to everyone who gave me fantasy recommendations! I have so many things on hold right now - it's very exciting.

- While waiting for things on hold, I have checked out The Goblin Emperor, because it was immediately available in my library. I am about 150 pages in and, you guys, it is entirely delightful. And it feels weirdly novel to read a book about a protagonist who is so genuinely kind. I'm really enjoying it.

- On another note: a couple years ago, my sister gave me a textbook for learning Old Norse, which I have not previously gotten around to investigating in depth, but now I am working my way through it. And if you've ever thought you'd like to learn Old Norse - which I realize is not actually a goal a lot of people have - this book is pretty great. And because it assumes that you're learning Old Norse so that you can read the sagas (since no one speaks it anymore) all the vocab comes from the sagas. Which means that I know how to say "settler" and "king" and "man of accomplishment" by chapter two but not, I don't know, "mother" or "house".

- I totally have a particular saga I'm excited about reading once I have enough Old Norse under my belt, too. It is Þiðrekssaga, which I've wanted to read for a while and which has not, as far as I can tell, been translated into English, though you can find the Old Norse easily online. Look at the description on wikipedia - dragons, Niflungs, Attila, and death-by-horse-that-turns-out-to-be-the-devil. Also, in some sources, Þiðrek can evidently breathe fire (though I don't know if that's true in this saga). It sounds amazing.

- The family and I are going to a baseball game today! I...do not really care about sports, but I enjoy going to games. Today, we are going to see the Tacoma Raniers, which should be fun.

I walked into the library this morning (two hours before we open) and the janitor was there. And she said, "So, you know a lot of weird things, right?"

I am overjoyed that this is my reputation, you guys. It is hilarious. So I said, "Well, I know some weird things, sure."

"My daughter asked me this today and I didn't know the answer, so I thought I'd ask you. Why are the nuts of almond trees called 'almonds' and the nuts of pecan trees are called 'pecans' but the nuts from oak trees are called 'acorns'?"

I did not know this! I made up some theory about oaks being native to England (because we tend to have weirder terminology for bits of things that are natively English) and then looked up the etymology. Turns out, 'acorn' is a word from Old English that used to refer to the nut of any forest tree but eventually was restricted to refer only to oak. 'Almond' comes from Latin by way of French. 'Walnut' literally means 'foreign nut'. And 'pecan' is a New World word for a New World plant. 'Filbert' is another word for hazlenut because the nuts ripen near the feast day of St Philbert.

Isn't that interesting? Go, share it with all your friends.

Dear the internet,

Why can I apparently not find Le Fantôme de l'Opéra on the internet in French? I can find the translation for free all over the place, so I assume the original text is in the public domain. I can find all kinds of M. Leroux's other mystery novels - why will you not give me Phantom?

I mean, not that I would be properly able to read it yet or anything. But there's nothing wrong with trying to learn to read by slowly picking away at a text until you can puzzle out what it means and I figure it would be easier with a book that I have kinda memorized bits of in translation.

But no, the internet is determined to frustrate me.

So, here is another "Sara doesn't know how to talk to human beings" question.

When you begin a conversation with someone and they say "Hi [your name]! What d'you know?", what is the expected response? I feel like I've never actually learned the script for that one and my occasionally over-literal brain freezes for a moment, trying to select the thing that I know that is appropriate in this particular instance.

Today, I was silent for about ten seconds and came out with "The plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces are called 'aglets'."* It seemed to go over well and I may try to keep it as a stock response to the question**, but it still felt awkward.

Talking to people is hard.




*It was a wrench not following that with "Their true purpose is sinister", let me tell you.

**Storing up stock responses is often helpful for me. I also have a stock search term for whenever anyone at the library asks me to do a random catalog search to see if things are working or if I know how to do certain things, because otherwise I spend far too long deciding on something to search for. My stock search term is "Dracula" because something always comes up.

In which there is a ridiculous chain of events:

So, I have been watching the Russian Sherlock Holmes, right? And occasionally, there are words I can pick out from that time five years ago when I was trying to learn Russian. (They are all on the level of "excuse me" and "good morning," which is about all I have retained, sadly. Well, that and "I would like tea, please".) This has made me remember how much fun I had while I was trying to learn Russian and inspired me to try again. So I spent some time today browsing Russian books on amazon, trying to find some simple Frog-and-Toad level books in Russian because such a thing would be a nice supplement to textbooks. Along with books like that, I also found The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in Russian for the kindle. (Well, English-and-Russian, though sadly not side-by-side.) It was only 99 cents and would be a fun thing to work towards, so I bought it. Anyway, it was thematically appropriate.

Which led to me sitting in my car on my break between Kingston and Bainbridge, slowly and laboriously sounding out the Russian version of Silver Blaze. I have no idea what any of it said, except insofar as I know the original story, and I was probably mispronouncing things horribly, but I found it oddly satisfying. And now I know how to spell "Sherlock Holmes", "Watson", and "King's Pyland" in Russian.

An odd frustration:

So, I am having one of my occasional I Will Learn Other Languages! periods. This time, it is Portuguese. I keep meaning to learn Portuguese and every time I find language websites I check for Portuguese, but it is always Brazilian Portuguese and I don't want to learn that.* But this time, I have a B&N to spend, so I poked around and found some books and cds to try and teach myself some European Portuguese and bought them. So far, so good.

Then I thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to get a picture book or two in Portuguese, to have something other than textbook stuff to work on?" I poked around amazon and B&N and then the wider interweb and am having the devil's own time finding anything. I've found a couple of My First Portuguese Picture Dictionary things but that's it, unless I actually want to order from Portugal or Brazil, which seems ridiculous.

I mean, I realize that Portuguese isn't Spanish or Japanese, but you'd think there'd be something.




*Not that there is anything wrong with Brazilian Portuguese. It's just, y'know, if I could learn Madeirense Portuguese, I would totally do that, but there are no resources for that at all, at least that I can find. So straight European Portuguese it is.

Things:

- Choir tonight. Our concert is in (checks calendar) four weeks and I feel less than ready. I'm sure that things will work out but I'm not used to feeling this ill-prepared this close to performance time. It's stressful.

- I know that I've had TED Klein's Dark Gods sitting in my to-be-read pile for a couple months now, but I was in the mood for horror tonight so I finally picked it up tonight and started it. I only managed to get a few pages into the first story on break at rehearsal tonight but those few pages were enough to remind me that yeah, I really like TED Klein. I feel...hmm. I feel oddly at home in his writing, as though my mind is comfortable there. Not entirely comfortable - it's a horror story, after all - but a little like a place, a room, that you've been in so many times that you can walk around the furniture in the dark. I don't know what's going to happen in this story and I'm glad because horror should be a surprise the first time. But I can sink into Mr Klein's stories like a comfortable chair. It's lovely.

(The little author blurb in the back of the book is kinda hilarious. "He is currently at work on a new novel". Ahahaha. I mean, not that I would not jump up and down in immense glee if there ever was one. But, y'know, I'm not holding my breath.)

- I have also been reading Ursula K Le Guin lately. Every time I do that, I end up thinking "Wow, I really like this. Why have I not read more of her books?" I finished The Dispossessed the other day, which I loved, and now I am reading Always Coming Home, which is really good. And has a huge glossary in the back. I love fiction with glossaries and made-up words. One of the (many) reasons that I keep rereading Dune is so that I have an excuse to say "shai-hulud". Try it - it feels really good in your mouth. It's one of my favorite made-up words; that and Y'ha-nthlei and Elbereth Gilthoniel.

What made-up words do you guys like?