Verschiedenes

• Class turned out better than expected last night. monshu can tell you how I was dreading it, since I was supposed to do a dialogue with a fellow student and simply could not get myself psyched to prepare. I didn't want to let Laoshi down; her confidence has been a bit shaken ever since her brother told her she was a bad teacher. Before class, she suggested that I'd rather be doing something else with my Monday nights, but I assured her that I'd probably just be lazing about doing nothing. In the end, we did alright--though I would've been mortified had another Chinese speaker been listening. The best part was that I left with more enthusiasm than I came with and now I'm looking forward to the next term.
• Xiao Fei wasn't around and Mozhu wanted to get home right away, so I ended up eating a dollar burger at Big Chicks with the Usual Suspects. Verbal was promoting the idea of organising a squirt gun fight for July 4th weekend. I'd love to see this come off. Next time I see him, I'm going to suggest that we divide into Minutemen and Redcoats and re-enact the Battle of Lexington. (For like the first five minutes, that is, until the inevitable free-for-all breaks out.) He's an American history geek; he'll appreciate that.
• Didn't get much sleep last night. At around 11 p.m., it sounded like a dumpster was being unloaded. Was it really a car being towed? Then some of the neighbourhood ruffians were speeding around the street on a noisy-ass little bike. That's the worst kind of disturbance, since you're never sure if it's stopped for good or if there's only a pause. Then, around 3 a.m., the winds whipped up and we got a little rain. No big thunderstorm, only a single sizable flash and some very distant thunder, but I was up for at least an hour. Good thing I don't have class scheduled for tonight!

Local report

DUCKIES! There's a tiny Japanese-style garden tucked in between our ugly modern building and its elegant predecessor next door. It's shaped like a flattened trapezoid with the fieldstone wall of the older building as the base and floor-to-ceiling windows on the other three sides. I was passing one of them this morning when I saw something unexpected: A female mallard, standing right next to the glass. Then I saw something even more unexpected: At least eight recently-hatched ducklings, maybe as many as a dozen, swarming behind her. How the hell did they get in there? The walls around the garden are over four metres high. Obviously the mother can clear them; did she pick this as the most protected brooding site around? Where do they find their water and forage? Does she ferry everything over in her beak? How is it possible that none of the Green Committee--who recently moved all the standing plants from the first floor out in the garden--happened to notice a duck nest in there?

HANKIES The plants were moved outside to protect them from the construction going on all over the first floor. No Brimleys among the current crop of workers, but one guy did catch my eye with the snug-fitting denim over his round butt and the...hankie hanging out of his pocket? Remind me, boys, what's a white hankie in the right-hand pocket? I want to say "anything, anytime", but I don't remember and no way in hell am I going to Google "hankie code" at work.

This verbal complex can beat up your language's verbal complex

I confess: Another reason why I got so little sleep last night is that I was playing with Osage again. I couldn't help it; I'd stopped for a few days because it was distracting me from my Chinese, but I really wanted to plunge deeper into the verbal system. Are you ready for my report of the abyss staring back?

Of course, everyone remembers my excitement at the discovery of doubly-inflected verbs like kõða "he wants/wanted [it]", second person škõšta "you want/ed [it]". Last night, I discovered that the reflexive/reciprocal infix hkik also takes agent inflection, giving it the ability to create triply-inflected verbs.

You know about reflexives; they add to a verb the sense of doing something to or for oneself. Stick it into špižõ "you learn/ed [it]" (ž and š being both marked allomorphs of the second person active agent prefix) and you reach the giddy heights of ðahkišpižõ "you learn/ed [it] for yourself" (ða being the default form of this prefix--isn't allomorphy a gas?).

But is this the highest we can go? No way, baby!

Strictly speaking, Osage has no infinitive (although the unmarked third-person singular form is occasionally used as one). In complex predicates, speakers often inflect both verbs. In itself, this isn't the least bit usual. Many Balkan languages also lack infinitives or use them very seldom, preferring subordinate constructions. So whereas a Spanish speaker would say Quieres aprenderlo? "Do you want to learn it?", encoding the subject only once (i.e. -es), a Rumanian would say something like vrei să învăţezi'l--literally "Do you want that you learn it?" That is, both the verb a vrea "to want" and a învăţa "to learn" are inflected for a second-person subject. An Osage speaker, with her doubly-inflecting verbs, would see the Romanian and raise him twofold. In špižõ škõšta agent inflection appears twice on each verb for a grand total of four times. Combine this with my new discovery of the behaviour of hkik and you arrive at the glorious apotheosis:

ðahkišpižõ škõšta

There it is: A single predicate quintuply inflected for agent! Compare the first-person singular version, ahkihpimõ hkõbra "I want to learn it for myself". Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? Lesser languages, look upon these works and despair!

(I must go; tears are welling up in my eyes!)