to sow / to sew

The first time I learned dikmek was on a farm, in reference to planting roses in the ground.

Later I popped my head into a shop that was obviously concerned with leather, to ask if they had wax for leather shoes. "No, sorry, here we're only dikiyoruz." Here we're only stitching leather.

So dikmek can mean to sow.

And dikmek can mean to sew.

Huh. I never thought about these English homonyms as possible brothers in meaning. To push something down into something else.

I just looked up the etymology of the two English words, though, and they are not as linked as I had hoped.

Ah well. Language learning is mostly a private pleasure anyway, so you can enjoy whatever you want, including moments of "Huh" when you reconsider things in your first language.

Native speakers, eh?

Mariusz came from Poland to Canada five years ago. He ties rebar. At his new job site, there are Mexicans, a Russian, and a Serb. Mariusz is happy, because now he can understand what people are saying in English. At his last job site, he worked only with Anglo Canadians. They spoke so fast and shortened words so much that he was lost. And these people were working; they were too busy to slow down and help. Now, with the other non-native English speakers, he can actually participate in English.

"Basics"

Hello

Hi

Hey

"But which one is the best?" Fahad demands, between plaintive and playful. "When I go into the coffee shop, which one should I say to the man?"

I consider.

"It really depends."

"But here, in Canada."

"I know! It depends. On me--how I feel; on the other person--Do they speak English as a first language? Are they stressed? Relaxed? Is there a connection?"

Fahad isn't impressed.

"Ok. If you say 'Hey,' then you let the person know that you speak English pretty well. Because Level 1 kids only say 'Hello'--they see it in the textbook and their teacher greets them with it, even though no one says 'Hello.'"

Now I have his attention.

"From a native speaker, 'Hello, how are you?' is basically another way to say, 'You obviously don't speak English as a first language.' 'Hi' is better. 'Hey' is probably best, unless you don't like the person."

More attention still.

"Because it's so short. The longer the greeting, the more you like the person. 'Heyyyyyyyyyy' means 'I'm your friend. I'm really, truly happy to see you.' If you hate the person, 'Hi' [clipped, short, a blow dart]."

Fahad and I practice our super-long 'Heyyyyyyyyyyyys.'

Because friends don't let friends say 'Hi.'

Scribbles

My room is filled with the detritus of a reading and writing life. Books and school notebooks, pocket journals and torn bits of paper, photocopies and newspaper clippings. Burning the lot appeals to me sometimes. But how could I toss the following scrap--one of those daily calendar pages, this one themed "Insights From the Dalai Lama"--with the soothing reminder that, "When even one person indulges in spiritual practice, it gives encouragement to the guardian spirits of the land, and to the celestial deities who have sworn to uphold goodness."

Under which is scribbled, in my brother's wild hand,

can you make jello with T3s in it?? will they work?

(His wisdom teeth had just been yanked, and he communicated in scrawl).

German joke

What's between vier (pronounced "fear") and sechs (pronounced "sex")?

fünf

Haha. I guess it only works if you speak English and know your German numbers.

Vier=4. Fünf=5. Sechs=6.

It reminds me of the English joke: Why is 6 afraid of 7?

Because 7 ate/8 9.

Silly, but great.

"Normalicy"

"Seldomly"

"Manipulatory"

"Normalicy"

Heard during a single session of Research Methodology, a class offered to graduate students in the Department of Education.

*"Manipulatory" is actually a word. The fellow definitely meant "manipulative," though.

Trolls and trolling

A troll is someone who posts something ridiculous online to get a reaction.

Trolling is the verb for doing this. (Convergent words).

But when people say, "Don't feed trolls," (as in, don't respond to that idiot on the message board), they say so with an image of a monster under a bridge, while when they say, "Don't troll," (as in, don't be an idiot and put inflammatory prompts on the message board), they say so with an image of fishing using long lines off the back of a boat. (Divergent images).

Which came first? Trolling before trolls, surely. And then "Don't feed trolls" was a funny leap off the back of the ship to under the bridge. It makes me furrow my eyebrows.

The words come from totally different places, too.

The verb troll comes from Old French troller, a hunting term.

The noun troll comes from Old Norse for a mythological monster.

Nadir

The word is so interesting, and it's come up twice this week.

I asked Afsaneh how to say, "No problem" in Farsi. The answer, though I am surely transcribing it with mistakes, is something like "Moshkeli nadire" (MOSH-KAY-LEE NAD-DEE-RAY). This made easy sense, because both the words are familiar.

"Mafi moshkela" we used to say in Saudi, for "No problem."

"Nadir" is "rare" in Turkish.

Then, yesterday, Robin asked for the opposite of "zenith." He was fishing around for a word that he already knew. "Nadir," I put forward, "but it's an Arabic word, I think." "No, that's it!" And so it is. "Nadir" is English for the direction pointing directly below something. It can also work like "trough" or "bottom." Such words are almost invisible, they are so rarely used. Likewise, the spiderweb connections between languages often go unnoticed.

"Nadir" comes from the Arabic نَظِيرُ السَّمْت, nadhir as-samt, "counterpart to the zenith".

Love is a bowel movement

"Sevgi emekmiş"

Can Yücel writes in his poem, "Anladım."

"Emek" is Turkish for something like "effort." Nesli and I searched synonyms for "effort." A huge list appeared: attempt, endeavour, feat, effort, campaign, exertion... bowel movement.

I explained and we laughed for a long time. Sure, love is a bowel movement.

Gasp! Rasp!

Did you know they were spelled raspberries?

I did not.

"Fleas"

There are two sisters from Iraq in my Level 3 English class, a class provided for new immigrants to Canada. The two women are quiet, so I walk over and sit with them. Tonight I noticed one writing in Arabic under new words.

She was not translating, though. She was transliterating--putting the sounds of English into the writing of Arabic.

"Fleas" = Faa + Laam + Yaa + Miim (those are the letters)

I used to do exactly this in reverse! Figuring out how to represent Arabic in the Roman alphabet was a pet passion in Morocco! Some people use numbers. I used capital letters and accents.

Wednesday, I'll show the young women from Iraq my old lessons, which appear as a tangle of English, French, Arabic, and Arabic-transliterated-into-Roman-alphabet. Hopefully they will get a kick out of it.

The importance of being earnest

In speaking a foreign language, we tend to lose years, as well as other kinds of time, to become gentler, more innocent, more courteous versions of ourselves. We find ourselves reduced to basic adjectives, like "happy" and "sad," and erring on the side of including our "Monsieur"s; and we are obliged to grow more resourceful and imaginative in conveying our most complex needs and feelings in the few terms we remember (like a child rebuilding Chartres out of Lego blocks).

... Speaking a foreign language, we cannot so easily speak our minds; but we do, willy-nilly, speak our hearts.

... And even when we're not speaking Spanish, but only English that a Spaniard will understand, the effect is just as rejuvenating. Reducing our own language to its basic elements, we find, of a sudden, that it becomes new to us, and wondrous. How vivid the cliché "over the hill" sounds when we're explaining it to an Osaka businessman! How rich the idiom "raining cats and dogs"! Speaking English as a second language, we find ourselves rethinking ourselves, simplifying ourselves, committed, for once, not to making impressive sentences, but just to making sense.

Pico Iyer, from the essay "Excusez-moi! Speakez-vous Franglais?"

Monolingualism starts to sound like a disease

On native speakers of English:

Not only do the majority not speak languages other than their L1 English, but they also tend to be less competent than many non-native speakers in their acquisition and use of accommodation strategies, and instead expect non-native speakers to make all the adjustments. This may in part be the result of their monolingualism.

in the near future, those who occupy the top of the English language hierarchy will no longer be native speakers of English, but bilingual speakers of English who have the skills to function comfortably in multilingual communication.

--Jennifer Jenkins, in her article, "Exploring attitudes towards English as a lingua france in the East Asian context"

It's his attention to detail

I was asking if you wanted to zone over :-)

I'm stroll staffing it up

Going to head out finnish

Chime over later?

You've sleazy southern airport might not mean what I say, auto text humor! Auto text!

It really just writes hawks

Storch

A word gift from the Outer Circle (yeah, I'm talking about you, Jojo).

Toe the line

Toe the line

Tow the line?

No, toe the line!

I'm seeing ships

Sailors

Definitely nautical

Nautical?

Rope

Like, heavy rope

A.k.a. lines

That you tow

What about the party line

Tow the party line?

Toe the party line?

Toes on the line

Runners

Athletics

Now I'm thinking Capture the Flag

Toes

Lines

Taunting

No, wait, respecting the line?

Staying behind the line?

Or is it pushing it?

Like pushing the envelope?

The party envelope

A bunch of sailors toeing/towing lines and pushing envelopes

While playing Capture the Flag

I have yet to find an expressions that bears such a wondrous constellation of simultaneous divergence and convergence in associations in people's minds.

Language is not a thing

Canagarajah has a bone to pick with linguistics:

"To begin with, the field treats language as a thing in itself, an objective, identifiable product. The field also gives important to form, treating langauge as a tightly knit structure, neglecting other processes and practices that always accompany communication... Inadequate attention is paid to the way in which various language forms and varieties are embedded in diverse environments, perfectly adequate in their own way for the functions at hand."

--from "Ecology of Global English" (2007)

Cool your horses

More advice from my awesome brother.

Texts from the new year

This new you is creepy.

How's the body? I know when I've wiped out on my bike, adrenaline gets me to where I need to be then a few hours starts to ache.

Did u put up porters for tandem lang. learning? if so, awesome and if not then we need to break some knee caps.

Hahahah. Sharmuta.

Um who is this? And i don't get pics

Yo yo homie? What good? I just got out da can and lookin 4 sum shorties. U down?

Amazing news so call home!

I'm glad that was g rated because I sent it to your mom first

Can type although im camless and my mother is sleeping in the next room. :)

Agreed. Meeting. Ugh.

We will drink Turkish coffee and everything..

Ridden? Rode? Oh god. English.

A date?!?! Gasp!

WHAAAAA? Where'd you find snow shoes from?

Hey doo you jabbed held?

Oh mah god so hot a canadian text MASSAGE

Happy * day

You are quite pretty, you know

Word of the day: sublime

Greatness with which nothing else can be compared, beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. From the Latin sublimis 'sloping up to the lintel, uplifted, high, lofty, elevated, exalted.'

Thanks, Wikipedia.

A lot of people have thought about what is sublime.