Sun Jan 17, 2010
This Is Awesome!
Daniel Pipes has put on his site a book he wrote while a student of the Arabic language. You can download it and print it out for free. It is called "An Arabist's Guide To Egyptian Colloquial" and is designed for someone with a year or two of college Modern Standard Arabic. You can read all about it and download it here. Each Arab country has, for the most part, its own dialect of Arabic that is not really understandable to someone from another Arab country. Everyone learns Modern Standard in school (it is based on classical Arabic) but most people also understand the Egyptian dialect since most Arab language movies are made in Egypt and are thus in Egyptian Arabic. An easy way to recognize Egyptian Arabic is when you hear a g sound (as in golf); this replaces the j sound, so Gamal Abdel Nasser would be Jamal in Standard Arabic.
Wed Jan 06, 2010
Fever, Fire and Pythons
I speak Greek with people almost everyday at the Cathedral, and lately I have been saying "E Vaia echei pyreto" - Vaia has a fever, which she does, although she is otherwise herself and should be fine. Pyretos, meaning fever, has the root pyr which means fire. In fact, fire is a direct transliteration of pyr (pronounced "peer" with a rolled r) - think pyromania or funeral pyre. Usually when figuring these things out only the consonants matter - you can discard the vowels. P and f are different letters and sounds but are actually very close; the labial p and the labio-dental f sounds are made in the mouth in similar fashion and often are swapped for each other when words move across languages. In Hebrew the sound shifts depending on doubling and other grammatical factors. In Greek we see the p become an f as pyr becomes fire in English. We also see the reverse: the Greek word fythi, meaning snake, is the source of the English word python.
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '942' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Tue Jul 07, 2009
Tanjara/Tandoor
The other day I was picking up Vaia from Teita's and Teita said the Arabic word for pot - tanjara. My "language geek" persona kicked in and I immediately thought, it must be related to tandoor (the oven from which the tandoori chicken you eat at an Indian restaurant comes) probably through some Indo-Iranian root. The wikipedia entry on tandoor as well as the one on khubz, while not without their problems, fill in most of the details on the connection.
[26] comments (124 views)
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '931' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Sat Jun 06, 2009
News In Easy Modern Hebrew
I am sure that very few Cathedral people know that Panos, one of our extremely talented chanters, is fluent in modern Hebrew. He told me today about a newspaper called Sha'ar Lamat'hil, or Gateway to the Beginner that is a great tool for learning modern Hebrew. I know biblical Hebrew pretty well and would love to learn modern but, well, there is only so much time in the day. The paper is published weekly and has sections of various degrees of easiness. And it has the vowel markers printed - Hebrew, like Arabic, omits short vowels in print except for children's books and scripture. Sounds great! One thing I miss about living in Brookline/Boston while at the seminary (and the campus has the border between the two cutting right through it) is being able to zip over to the Israel Book Shop, which happens to carry the paper as well as many other cool things.
More...
[16] comments (238 views)
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '917' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Sun May 17, 2009
A Real-Life Shibboleth
I had a delightful conversation today with Kit P. about his last name being a shibboleth. Here is the background...
I was reading the book of Judges the other day and came across the famous passage that is the origin of the idea of a shibboleth:
"And the Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the E'phraimites. And when any of the fugitives of E'phraim said, "Let me go over," the men of Gilead said to him, "Are you an E'phraimite?" When he said, "No,"
they said to him, "Then say Shibboleth," and he said, "Sibboleth," for he could not pronounce it right; then they seized him and slew him at the fords of the Jordan. And there fell at that time forty-two thousand of the E'phraimites.
More...
[15] comments (111 views)
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '915' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Sat May 16, 2009
Language Connections?
The other day I entered the office and glanced at one of the Greek papers by the mailboxes. A word in a headline jumped out at me because I didn't know it: brabeuetai (the beta being a v sound in Greek so vraveuetai). I looked it up - to be given an award, with the active verb brabeuw meaning to reward or to award a prize. I love language stuff, so the synapses started firing and I thought, "Is this the origin of the word bravo, or is brabeuw a new Greek word based on the (probably Latin) bravo?". I did what I usually do in this situation: check my Classical Greek dictionary, which had the verb listed and meaning to judge or umpire. Close enough. I next went to this handy reference, which connects the Greek verb with the Gothic greipan meaning to seize, the English word grip and the Latin grebti. But a quick dictionary check has bravo coming from a 16th century Italian word meaning brave.
More...
[10] comments (86 views)
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '905' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Mon May 04, 2009
A Memory
I was reading a short story/essay by Augusten Burroughs tonight and he mentioned in passing Tower Records. I was instantly transported mentally back to my first trip to England in 1988. One of my goals was to go to Tower Records, London - a five floor building that was the biggest record store in the world at the time. This statistic was secondary to the fact that I would have a chance to buy a bunch of Beatles records on the Apple label rather than the Capitol ones I had already purchased here. I was then in the early throes of my lifelong fascination with the Fab Four, and this was like a pilgrimmage. I bought a handful of LPs - this was well into the time when records were on the way out due to the new CD format and the dominance of hideous-sounding cassette tapes - and I remember there being far more records available in English stores than those back home.
More...
[15] comments (175 views)
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '879' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Thu Mar 12, 2009
No Word For Yes?
Fr. Nick and I were together recently at an event where much Romanian was being spoken. I kept up as much as I could but couldn't help but notice the frequency of the word "da", clearly the Slavic "Yes". I asked Fr. Nick about this. He told me that Latin (and Romanian is the closest Romance language to Latin besides Romansh, spoken in a couple of Swiss cantons) has no word for yes. This knocked me out - you can read more here. This is kinda-sorta true. In Latin you would either say "Verily" or "Assuredly" or something like that, or restate the question in a positive way. So Romanian took "da" from Slavic neighbors. And there you have it.
[11] comments (202 views)
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '869' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Thu Feb 19, 2009
Bilqis?
Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir recently broke Rebecca Lobo's (Mass.) state scoring record and has been in the news as much for her attire as for her play. She is headed to Memphis in the fall and no doubt will be successful in any endeavor to which she applies herself. She seems a wonderful young lady. What really got my attention, though, was her first name. The Americanized version of her name is Bil-KEES, much as the Semitic MAL-ik becomes Ma-LEEK, but the Semitic pronunciation of Bilqis is BIL-qis, with Q pronounced as a uvular plosive stop. And what is the origin of the name Bilqis? Why, she was the Queen Of Sheba. Neither the Biblical nor Qur'anic accounts mention the queen by her first name but together the two texts provide the foundation of her story.
[19] comments (130 views)
MySQL Error: 145 Table './devshirm_pmch1/pm_comments' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Query: SELECT pm_comments.member_id FROM pm_comments WHERE pm_comments.post_id = '865' ORDER BY pm_comments.t_stamp DESC LIMIT 0 , 1
Wed Feb 11, 2009
Poor St. Charalambos
On the right side of the narthex of our Cathedral we have a glass case that houses a paper icon of the saint or event of the day (or the most recent one if there is no major saint celebrated) - it is located at 7 o'clock of the case containing St. Spyridon's slipper relics. We have a stack of beautiful icon prints that we put in the case depending on the day; when there is no icon available for a particular day, we use an icon of the Panagia and Christ. Most of the saints or events (the Annunciation, Dormition, etc) are obvious ones but there are a good number of more obscure saints - Therapon, Solomoni, etc - that we would not expect to be included but are there in the stack. I titled this post "Poor St. Charalambos" because he is a fairly major saint in our tradition but his icon only stays in the narthex for a day since we have an icon for St. Vlasios who celebrates the next day; Charalambos gets replaced very quickly by a saint who is obscure but deserves to be more well known.
More...
[16] comments (220 views)
| NEXT page |
