I iz dum (Part 403)

I can lose anything. For New Year's, monshu wanted to raid the beautiful boxed set of chopsticks he bought me last year for his banquet. I tore apart the place, never found it. I "lost" my cellphone charger for two days merely by plugging it into a different outlet; when it wasn't by my bed, I assumed it was (a) at monshu's or (b) at work, and when it wasn't either of those places, I declared it "missing".

Earlier this morning, I was awakened by cat foolishness. (Yes, the lovely Delia is again my houseguest.) She's an indoor cat; she's always been an indoor cat. So, of course, the outdoors holds an irresistable fascination for her, even when it consists merely of the hall beyond my front door. She kept meowing, leading me to the front door, and turning in small circles until I decided to give her a taste of the forbidden so she could discover just how insipid it was.

I went to put on my bathrobe and, lo, what did I find underneath it? The khaki slacks I've been looking for two weeks! I last wore them at Christmastime and couldn't figure out what I'd done with them. Apparently, I was short of hangers when I laundered them and doubled up. They've been right under my nose all this time, kept out of sight by a bit gray flannel.

That is why I am stupid.

The best books in life are free

Not.

Ah, gift books! A treasure trove of the bizarre, the trivial, the irredeemably misguided. What do we have today? Why it's a treatise of the relationship of Sanskrit to English! Who's the author, a world reknown linguist? Um, not exactly. Okay, then, a self-taught scholar? You could say that--but why, when "retired barrister in Joliet" is what really fits?

Oh, lookit that, it opened naturally to the page where the paperwork was stuck in. Let's have a look-see:

Another language family is the Tibetan, Chinese, Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian. Tibetan and Chinese belong to this family. The Tibeto-Chinese language consists of mono-syllabic words, words pronounced in four different tones--level, rising, falling and high rising--to distinguish words or syllables that have the same series of consonants and vowels but different meanings. They have more 'vowel-like sounds' and 'vowel-like accents' than the Indo-European languages. French is a good illustration to show how vowel sounds change in these languages.

Hey, kids! How many gross factual errors can you spot? (I found six, or more than the number of complete sentences.)

Of course, our polymath can't restrict himself to languages--what dilettante this talented could? Let's see what he has to say on the complex topic of religion:

The Jews also originally followed the Vedic religion at one time, but because of heir captivity [sic] in Babylon and Egypt they adopted some of creeds of these countries. The Ten Commandments of Moses are from the Vedas.

I know I have some Jewish readers and I'm betting they didn't know that. (Sad how little modern secularised Jews know about their own religion!)

After excursus like these, it's almost an anticlimax to get to the meat of the work and find typical dirt-ignorant popular etymologising like "The word cerebellum for a part of the head comes from the Sanskrit word Shri Brahm (Siri is head which becomes cere, and brahm becomes bellum.(the 'ra' becomes 'la')." Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't still gems to be unearthed. I particularly like the correspondences:

D'Silva -- of Shilpa
Lufthansa -- Lift+hansa Flying=swan
Nickelodium -- Relating to young ones
Vatican -- Vaatika (residence, as in Panch +vatika of Ram in forest) Vatican in Rome is Ram Vaatika

Why, your very own name or surname may be Sanskrit and you didn't even know it!

German Word-of-the-Day for Owlet: Day 11

die Umständlichkeit "fussiness"

In a recent Gallup poll (so take that for what it's worth), 6% of respondents to the question "Was ist Ihrer Meinung nach typisch deutsch?" replied with "Umständlichkeit". That's not the only way in which this is a "typically German" word; it's built up from smaller elements according to common derivation processes.

Working backwards, we can see the abstract ending -keit, a variation of -heit (cf. English -hood) used after the adjectival endings -lich and -ig. -lich often ends up tacked on to nouns, as in ehrlich (die Ehre "honour; honesty"), herzlich (das Herz "heart"), and the world-famous gemütlich (das Gemüt "mind, soul"). Strip it away and we're down to die Umstände, the plural of der Umstand "case, circumstance, factor" (e.g. entscheidender Umstand "deciding factor"). Its parts are um "about, around" and der Stand "condition, status", but it's possible it derives from an obsolete verb *umstehen or something. (I'll know more after I've looked it up properly.)

Be that as it may, in colloquial use the plural noun has acquired the connotation of "bother, trouble, fuss"--which goes some to explaining why umständlich means what it does and not something more neutral like "circumstantial". Was this too complicated and roundabout a way to explain the meaning of a simple word? Perhaps; but--as the Germans say--Warum einfach, wenn es auch umständlich geht?