fox

[Poll #494304]

( curling spoilers for people who have not yet seen or heard the results of the women's world championships )

to answer invader_jim's question:  the japanese players say "yes" and "whoa" just like everybody else.  but the norwegians and the swedes do not, i discovered.  (norway wasn't in that draw the other day when i mentioned the prevalence of "whoa", and sweden was far away and i couldn't hear them.)  they say things in their respective languages.

russian fans say маладцы, девшята! -- maladtsy, devshjata! -- which means, approximately, you go, grrls!

маладец -- maladjets (and that j is pronounced like the english letter y) -- is a noun that means attaboy or similar, and takes the plural often and the feminine sometimes.  (i mean, i've heard it.  but i also understand that a girl who has done something impressive may be as likely to be called маладец as маладца -- maladtsa.  native russian speakers are encouraged to comment on this.)

the second word is much more interesting.  the word for girl is девушка -- devushka -- and its plural is девушки -- devushki.  there is a word, ребëнок -- rebjonok -- that means baby (like, literally, a baby, an infant, a child), but which in its plural form ребята -- rebjata -- means kids in a casual sense, and which if used to address a group of young people could indeed mean hey, you guys.  (russian uses a whole different word, дети -- djeti -- for children.  go figure.)  and there are several other words, all describing young creatures, that have this -ëнок ending in the singular and thus -ята in the plural.  but as far as i know, there is no such word as *девшëнок -- *devshjonok -- which is what the singular would have to be in order to get девшята in the plural.  in conclusion:  Russian speakers have done a little back-formation-y kind of thing there, which is why i glossed the word as grrls up above instead of girls.

AND:  i noticed it!  not that i didn't hear it, like, a lot -- but there was a lot of russian being spoken, and i didn't catch most of it.  (i did catch when two of the coach-or-fan-types came out of the hotel to get on the bus in the morning and said часто нежарко, да? -- chasto nezharko, da? -- sort of not-warm, isn't it?  it was maybe 40 degrees, and i'd have gone all-out and called it "cool".  heh.  those crazy russians.)

i had a hellish trip back here today, but if i rant about it now i'll just make myself cranky again.  maybe tomorrow.

also:  sore throat and tickly ears, i.e. beginning of a head cold.  woke up this way yesterday. FEH.

I won Virtual Hangman in ellen_fremedon's LJ, so here's Round 12.

The word:

M A G N A N I M I T Y - yay for reginagiraffe! go see her for the next round.



Guessed letters: ESRLVOC
Incorrectly guessed words:

why don't we say *imvisible? (is it because [v] is labiodental rather than bilabial?)

why is it, do you suppose, that nobody (as far as i know) uses, even jokingly, the word *stickle -- meaning what it is sticklers do? people can be sticklers about a variety of different things, after all, but there's no verb related to this clearly nominal form; i wonder why speakers seem not to think of that -er as the agentive suffix (whether it is or not) and thus consider the noun to be derived from the verb, and thus go ahead and coin the verb to fill that slot. i know the way to split it is more likely to be stick + ler than stickl(e) + er, but we have "but(t)le," don't we, for what a butler does?

x-posted to philologist.

[ETA:

well, i'll be damned.

One entry found for stickle.

Main Entry: stick·le
Pronunciation: 'sti-k&l
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): stick·led; stick·ling /-k(&-)li[ng]/
Etymology: alteration of Middle English stightlen, frequentative of stighten to arrange, from Old English stihtan; akin to Old Norse stEtta to found, support
1 : to contend especially stubbornly and usually on insufficient grounds
2 : to feel scruples : SCRUPLE]

it's not that i ever hope to direct R&J, because it just makes me yawn. but if i ever do -- is there anything in the text that requires friar lawrence to be a father figure? couldn't he be a young guy like romeo and mercutio and the gang? is there any reason the whole mess can't be his fault because he's just not ready for the kind of responsibility he's required to handle?

a few more скороговорки, which i haven't updated in a while:

Кукушка кукушонку купила капушон -- как в капушоне он смешон!
(The cuckoo bird bought the little cuckoo bird a hooded sweatshirt -- in his sweatshirt how funny he looks!)

Пекар Пётр пёк пироги.
(Peter the baker is baking pies.)

На дрове трава; на траве дрова; не руби дрова на траве двора.
(In the yard is grass; on the grass is firewood; do not chop the firewood on the grass of the yard.)

Фараона фаворит на сапфир менял нефрит.
i don't actually know what this one means. i was out that day. something about the pharaoh's favorite sapphire.

На мели мы лениво налима ловили;
Меняли налима вы мне на линя.
О любви не меня ли вы мило молили --
Туманы лимана манили меня.
(On the sandbank we were lazily catching eel-fish;
You traded me an eel-fish for a tench.
Wasn't it me that you sweetly asked about love --
The fogs of the tidewater lured me.)

this evening: три маленьких поросёнка, the three little pigs.

-- as a sentence with some really long damned words.

В городе Днепропетровске главнаяа достопримечательность это гидроэлектросианция.

(In the city Dnepropetrovsk the main point of interest is the hydro-electric power station.)

Honest.

i've seen their Complete History of America (abridged). i've seen their Complete History of the Bible (abridged). i've seen their Complete History of the World (abridged), which was a special Y2K thing. oddly enough, i've never actually seen their Compleat Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), though i've read it several times.

and now they're doing All the Great Books (abridged). woo-hoo! i'm so there. although, looking at the list, ( i've read surprisingly few of these ... )

22. out of 83. that's a little embarrassing, methinks. but, dudes -- my parents taught english literature for thirty years. each! you'd be surprised how much of this stuff i know through osmosis. a bunch of times, i was about to bold-face something up here on the list and then stopped and went no, wait, i never did actually read that.

the post style invitational is ten years old this week, and the contest is to try and top the past ten years' winners with even funnier answers. which is fine, but of course the fun is reading the winners' answers themselves. two of my favorites:

New elements for the Periodic Table, with their symbols and properties (Feb. 1, 1997):
Canadium (Eh): Similar to Americium, but a little denser. Much more rigid. Often called Boron.

Annoying Nerdspeak (July 1, 1999):
One should not say "Today is my birthday," since a person has only one birthday, the very day he was born. More properly, one should say "Today is the ANNIVERSARY of my birthday." Assuming, of course, it is the anniversary of one's birthday.

In "Asylum," Fraser speaks Inuktitut to Dief, right? Yes. The whole joke is that he says a really short sentence means "Fetch the knife from the hood of that car and apply it to the ties that bind us," and a really long sentence means "hide."

So I played the scene nine or ten times and wrote down what I heard him saying, and then it occurred to me that the folks with the scripts might have what he actually was saying (and thus I wouldn't have to count on my judgment of where the word boundaries are), and I poked through my books trying to translate it all.

First, Fraser says:

Savik. Aklhunaaq.
     (The 'L' sound is actually a sort of a sideways-hissing sound, made by putting your tongue where it goes for the 'l' in 'lake' and then making the sound 'h' instead. Similar, I think, to the sound spelled with a double-l in Welsh. I've spelled it 'lh' here because HTML won't allow me to make the character I really want, which is a lowercase L bisected crossways by a wavy line.)
     The script has "altuneat" for the second word, but (1) I hear the hard sound before the 'L' sound; (2) on the script page the Inuktitut stuff is flagged as having been handwritten, "misspellings and all;" and (3) the word under their spelling isn't in my dictionary here, but under my spelling it is. Spelled my way, the whole thing means:
Knife. Rope.

[grin]

Then , he says:

Tuaviinnaaluk ullaniaqquht nuqqattailiutiiu kisiani tikiutiguut ijiksimavittavanunit qanuqunatit.
     What I got when I listened to that was 'uavinaluq ulaniakutit nukataililuqtilu kisiau vikiu tikuvit iksimavit tiavannit kannuiku mapit,' which goes to show (1) some not-very-interesting things about how carefully actors pronounce things in languages they don't actually speak (and how accurately others of us hear things in languages we don't actually speak, of course) and (2) some moderately-interesting stuff about how, as a native speaker of English, I really really want words to max out at about three or four syllables.
     The first word has to do with a hurry or a rush; the -aaluk suffix means something I'm not familiar with.

=->edited to add: am so. i knew it looked familiar. it's a reinforcer.

     The second word has me stumped -- but if I'm right and the script-transcriber is wrong (i.e., if it ends in -utit instead of -uht, which is a reasonable way a person might misread someone else's handwriting and which makes sense since there's no 'h' in Inuktitut), then it's a second-person singular intransitive verb. (Makes sense. Fraser's talking to Dief.)
     The root of the third word is mysterious to me as well, but the -taili- in the middle there means "avoid" and it's possible the -uti is reciprocal -- so whatever nuqqat- means, whoever it refers to doesn't want to do it to each other. :-)
     The fourth word, kisiani, means "only."
     The fifth word is another one I can't find; more precisely, I can find it but I can't find a translation of it. However, the ending -iguut marks the verb as first person plural intransitive: by this point Fraser's talking about himself and Ray. (I just don't know what he's saying, exactly.)
     The beginning of the sixth word, ijiksimavit, means "you are hidden." I'd guess the rest has to do with mood and/or aspect in some way.
     qanuq means "how." The rest of the word looks like a verbal affix and some other verbal paraphernelia; possibly "how you are" or "how you're doing it." Yielding:
Hurry! You   verb     pronoun   avoid   verb   each other (?) only we   verb   you hide   ?   how you do it.

Clearly, this demonstrates the need for better Inuktitut-English dictionaries.