It’s nice to feel special…

Homophone n.

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It was funny at the time

This morning, I was standing in the crowded work kitchen, waiting to make my cup of tea and I was hit with a well-known odour…

Marmite? Ugh!

Actually, I quite like Marmite, but the smell is certainly distinctive and not something I care to smell in the morning before my cup of tea.

Anyway… I made my way through the hoarde to the toaster area to investigate the presence of the aforementioned Marmite, and there it was.

However, the Marmite-bearer had not yet opened his jar. I had not seen the jar. I can only suppose that I have developed the power of clairvoyant smell, possibly now known as something like clairsentance if my English-French dictionary is to be trusted.

I’m not sure how I will be able to capitalise on my new found skill… watch this space…

…in fact, I think it’s one year and a day since he last appeared…

It’s the goat in a tub.

Oooh… and following a discussion of the word ‘moot’, today I found out the Danish for moot point is åbent spørgsmål which I think is a wonderful looking phrase.

Hooray! By next Wednesday I will have completed buying half the house that I already bought all of.

It made me think… if you compete you are involved in a competition, so if you complete, how come you’re not involved in a completition? Or should you be in a competion if you’re competing? Just like how you don’t plantate things on a plantation. Which, incidentally, is why I believe you don’t orientate things, but merely orient them.

I shall shut up now.

Today I learnt why Sir Menzies Campbell is pronounced ‘Mingiss’ and as a side effect learnt about a new letter: Yogh (ȝ). I thought I knew my archaic letters, like thorn (þ) which is pronounced ‘th’ and looks like a Y when it’s written in medieval script and is the cause of all those ‘Ye Olde Shoppes’.

But þere you go. Yogh. Who’d have þought it?

[10 points to the first person to point out that 'there' should use eth (ð) rather than thorn (þ)]

I’ve often heard that Finnish is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. However, I’ve found Swedish is significantly harder for me to pick up. I think the key with Finnish is to throw away your Latin/Romance roots which help with English, French, Spanish, Italian and the like, and instead see it as a pure logic problem.

All you have to do is learn the rules, and you’ll do just fine. Unfortunately the rules tend to look something like this:

RULE: if the dictionary verb form ends NN RR SS or ST followed by -A/-Ä, then the A/Ä is dropped as well as the immediately preceding consonant. Before adding the personal ending add e for the present/future tense or i for the past tense. If, to the left of the N L R or S there is a weak form consonant or consonant cluster, it is strengthened in all of the present/future/imperfect forms.

And all that because I accidentally wrote opetellan instead of opettelen.

By way of example, so you don’t have to actually read the rule… työskeNNeLLä is the word for ‘work’. To get to ‘I work’, the ‘ä’ is dropped from the end, as well as the ’sticky L’ of LL, so the word becomes työskeNNeL-

BUT, now that we have L (a weak consonant), not LL (a strong consonant), the NN, which was a weakened form of NT is now allowed to be strong again… that gives työskeNTeL-

And then the present tense, first person ending is put on to make ‘I work’… työskeNTeLen.

These rules do become natural in the end… for example, the place name Joensuu is an interesting one… it comes from two words… ‘Joen’ - of the river and ‘Suu’ - mouth.

The word for river, though is Joki, the ‘e’ having been formed from the ‘i’ when the genitive ‘of’ ending was put on, and because the ‘en’ ending is strong, the ‘k’ which is also strong had to be dropped.

Like I said… easy!

While learning my Japanese, I’m putting all the sentences from my course book into Mnemosyne and learning the meanings as I go along. Looking up is required, because the book is a native Japanese one, so has no English translations, so I use a combination of my Kanji dictionaries, google translate, and if something looks like a simple noun, I use google image search (there is danger involved there, as an Iranian colleague found out when he image-searched to find out what a ‘twat’ was and why he was being called one).

Anyway… I searched for akachan (or 赤ちゃん for those with Japanese characters turned on), and found…

A BABY IN A BUCKET! (or is it a tub?)

So that’s CLEARLY what akachan means. That should only require a small amount of work to get to yagino akachan meaning baby goat in a bucket.

I caught a bit of Look and Read at lunch time. It’s good to see that it’s still running, and while I didn’t see if they still run a serial story like Geordie Racer, or Badger Girl, or Dark Tower, it seems that it’s still an excellent bit of production.

Many kids programmes these days seem to have degenerated into eye candy with little content - but Look and Read still has masses of useful information, presented in a modern, non-patronising way… there was a rap about word families:

everybody in the park today, everything is hot in the park today, people playing games everywhere, everyone having fun etc…

nobody in the park today, nothing… do dee do…

does anybody want to go to the park today… somebody… etc. etc.

There was also a little humorous sketch about some kids who wanted some choclit and thought that vegtables are horrable, and probly this and did you swallow a libry book… and Mrs. Plum and Mr. Toffeenose pointing out that if you pronounce words precisely you will know how to spell them.

Kid: Urg… vegtables are horrable.
Mrs. Plum: Vegetables are horrible.
Mr. Toffeenose: Are they?
Mrs. Plum: No, they’re nice.
Mr. Toffeenose: But you just said…

Had to be there, I guess.

But anyway… top marks to the Look and Read producers.

Ever wondered why there are two names for Japanese ritual suicide? I hadn’t until I happened to be browsing the Kanji dictionary at the weekend. The two names are seppuku and harakiri (often anglicised as harry carry).

Well, here’s the explanation…

You may or may not be aware that Japanese characters have many ‘readings’. Depending on their context, the pronunciation of a character can change completely. For example:

今日は - kon nichi wa - means ‘hello’, or literally (perfectly demonstrating the Japanese roundabout way of speaking)… “as far as today is concerned…”

However, if you take off the は in order to end up with a simple ‘today’, you end up with:

今日 - kyō

This stuff is going on all the time, and is one of the reasons I think reading Japanese aloud is significatly harder than Chinese. The latter may have tones to contend with, but at least it’s generally one character to one sound.

The different readings in Japanese are called ‘on’ and ‘kun’ readings. “On” readings are those used in words derived from Chinese, “Kun” readings are used in native Japanese words.

Anyway… back to our suicide. This is based on two characters:

腹 - ‘Belly’. This has an ‘on’ reading of fuku and a ‘kun’ reading of hara.

切 - ‘Cut’. This has ‘on’ readings of setsu and sai. It also has ‘kun’ readings of ki and kiri.

Are you ahead of me yet?

We can clearly see that 腹 hara + 切 kiri gives us 腹切 - harakiri.

What is not quite so obvious is that 切 setsu + 腹 fuku gives setsufuku which is horribly clumsy to pronounce, and is therefore contracted to seppuku. (If you’re a Japanese scholar, it’s no great leap of faith to convert from tsu to a double letter, and from fu to pu - but that’s beyond the scope of this blog).

So there you go. Same characters, one way round it’s:

切腹 - cut belly - Chinese ‘on’ readings - seppuku

and the other way round:

腹切 - belly cut - Japanese ‘kun’ readings - harakiri

Isn’t that fun?