About the weather...

Sometimes I wish the Eskimo really did have a hundred words for snow, since then we could borrow one to describe what I had to walk through this morning. It looked like snow as it fell but it felt like rain on my skin--not like it was melting on contact, like the first shy flurry of the year, but like it was already liquid inside before it touched me and only had the semblance of an ice crystal. If this were German, I would simply blend Schnee and Regen and call it "Schnegen". Oh, wait, it's English, which means that any German word is fair game.

I kept my eyes peeled for any sign of accumulation, but any flash of white I saw turned out to be nothing more than light reflecting off a slick tree branch or roof tile. When I left for St. "Brown Christmas" Louis two weeks ago, Chicago was still covered in a thick layer of snow, which I expected to come back to on the 27th. But several warm days had reduced it to a few icy piles in the corners of parking lots and it's been nothing but rain and drizzle (on an almost daily basis) ever since. Looking out my windows, the mood is late fall or earliest spring, not dead of winter--how very disorienting.

Dreikönigstag

I try not to have too many regrets about what I haven't accomplished, but seeing snowy_owlet's New Year's resolutions reminded me how lax I've been about her German instruction. When she finally took me up on my suggestion that she post some Rilke and we work through it together, it turned out to be something of a ball-buster. It struck me that a popular song might be a better choice for such an endeavour than the work of a modernist poet. Given her love of carols, a traditional Weihnachtslied seemed a natural choice, but I never got around to selecting one and posting it before Christmas swept past me.

But all is not lost! This is still the eleventh day of Christmas, after all; tomorrow is Epiphany, the celebration of the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem. (How that can occur eight days after the anniversary of Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents on December 28th when it was their arrival that tipped him off, I'll never know, but then the Roman liturgical calendar is not exactly a miracle of consistency.) The Germans don't seem to have a lot of songs for Epiphany (it's more a Southern European thing), I did turn up this suitable traditional song. Shall we start with the "money verse"?

Vom Morgenlande drei Könige kamen,
ein Stern führt sie nach Bethlehem.
Myrrhen, Weihrauch und auch Gold,
brachten sie, brachten sie,
brachten sie dem Kindlein hold.

Now, as Mark Twain pointed out, the first step to parsing a German sentence is to "go on a fishing expedition for the verb". That done, you use your knowledge of the noun cases to locate the subject (since every verb must have one, even if it's a "dummy subject" like the es in es regnet). Everything else should fall into place after that.