Recent adventures in linguistics

Thanks to monshu, I won't be going off this Chinese language kick any time soon. Today, I brought my copy of Pulleyblank's Middle Chinese on the train so I could read about the evolution of the retroflex series during the Tang dynasty. (It's a dense book. I've been going through bouts of picking it up, reading a bit, and then having a little liedown for years now.) Yesterday, I was looking through his Classical Chinese grammar on the bus, preparing to delve into some ancient Taoist and Buddhist texts when I got home.

Like I said, blame monshu. I wrote that little ditty for him since he spent the morning fiddling around with the Heart Sutra. Obsessively? Let's just say that he (1) didn't do laundry, (2) didn't do finances, and (3) forgot to call his mother. He recently bought some really swell new fonts and was trying to convert the Chinese text into small seal script. Perversely enough, this works best if we start with GB encoding, which is used for Commie simplified Chinese, rather than Big5, which is preferred for traditional characters.

( Don't spare me the technical details! )

Jokingly, I called our finished product the "Shingetsu Monshu recension" of the Heart Sutra. He insisted on crediting me, but I replied that who ever heard of the ministers who created Han'gul? No, it's the person who commissions a project like this who gets to attach their name to it.

He also has a couple of loose pieces of calligraphy he'd like to get mounted, but it's no easy thing to track down someone who knows traditional Chinese scroll mounting. We tried, but all we got is a reference to a place that doesn't exist any more. (The shop owner we spoke to says it's moved, but he doesn't know where. He gave me the name in characters, since he doesn't know the English name.) At least we had a nice chat, complete with a rambling excursus on Chinese social customs.

But it hasn't all been Shuowen radicals and grass hand. Last Friday, I was crossing the terrace at o_nut's wedding when an elegant older woman grabbed me and said, "Are you the one who knows Schwäbisch? It was o_nut's mother, flouting every stereotype about Swabian stand-offishness and German reserve. I'd totally forgotten that he daughter had forwarded her some of my LJ comments from way back when. I tried to explain that what I'd been exposed to was Badisch, not proper Schwäbisch, but it dented her enthusiasm not a whit. We drifted between English and German (with various degrees of dialectal colouring) for the next half-hour and when she said that we really should get together sometime, I hoped that she meant it. At the very least, she has a dialect poem to deliver to me and I promised to return the favour with some macaronic German-American verse.

Recent adventures in food

Now the post y'all were really waiting for...

I can't remember any meals from last week before Friday. We must've ordered in a lot, since monshu made some remark yesterday about cooking a meal at home "for a change". I had the day off Friday and planned to go to Mon Ami Gabi for lunch, but just my luck that they don't serve lunch. Bastards. So I got a mushroom crepe at Crêpes de Paris instead.

Really, I would just as soon held off until that evening, but I didn't want to show up to the wedding reception famished--as some of my hapless companions did. prilicla enthused about the fact that satay has become so thoroughly nativised that it's now a standard hors-d'œuvre, princeofcairo found a new love in the salmon canapés, and I rekindled my romance with gin. Dinner began with a vichyssoise (patriotically referred to on the menu as "cold potato and leek soup"--though wouldn't sticking it to the Frenchies be better served by recalling their shameful quisling regime?) that couldn't have been more perfect and my kind of salad: pears, walnuts, and not a shred of iceberg. We wondered how they would handle the choice of entree and it turned out the solution was not to allow a choice: Everyone got filet of beef and salmon. Sucks to be picky, but rules to be prilicla and get your husband's salmon in addition to your own.

There were two cakes: a large, traditional, and tasteful white with a short, dowdy devil's food in its shadow. (Made me thing of an antebellum Southern belle and her coloured maidservant.) I missed out on the chocolate, but the regular, with it's custard filling, I could've et all night--despite the absence of good German marzipan! I didn't, though, because that plus the wine plus the gimlet and g'n't's plus vigourous dancefloor motion would've added up to a very unhappy end.

Inevitably, it was all downhill after that. I slept in on Saturday and had no breakfast except for a couple mediocre buns I schnagged in North Chinatown. New Hong Kong Bakery, I shall patronise thee no more! That night, Ibn Abdulra's and spent an hour in Whole Foods, returning with salmon sausages (which he couldn't eat due to the insidious pork casings), cous cous, aranciata, Kettle chips, and other lovely things, but the slide wasn't totally arrested until the next morning when monshu and I did dim sum at Three Happiness.

Some kind of street fair was on and Wentworth was thronged. I was chuffed to see such a full recovery from SARS hysteria, even if I was mystified by the appeal of standing in the sun to buy the same cheap junk you could in the cool interiors of the stores. One stand was selling fresh longan for $4/lb. We couldn't resist. Now comes the race to get through all five pounds before it goes bad! I already gave away some to a Malay coworker (Malay name: mata kucing "cat eye") and have a bag on hand for NLB and Nemuci. If we can't polish the rest off by Wednesday night, I'll probably take the rest of Green Tea for the staff.

After completing our quixotic quest for a game of xiangqi, we paused at a new place in Chinatown Square called Mountainview Food Court for smoothies. (The Chinese name translates as "68 Food Street"; go figure.) I'm definitely going back. The menu was intriguing, with a sizable body of Chaozhou-style specialties and something called "fish dew chicken". (Later, turning to McCawley's fantastic book, I found that lù "dew" is sometimes used for lǔ "gravy". We may all breathe a sigh of relief at how innocuous that turned out to be!) And eel! And Special Duck Noodles!

We were working so feverishly back at the ranch--for starters, I had to look up all the unknown characters I'd jotted down that afternoon--that dinner was somewhat thrown together: Teriyaki chicken sausages, cole slaw, and artichoke salad from the deli next door. Tonight will be another crappy meal at the hospital before visiting Nuphy. Hmm, given the shape of this week, it could well be Friday night before I eat decently again.