"Enkasuy wa enkore!", or, Kids today are soft

So after hearing a couple of people on a site for language geeks whine that they couldn't find any usable materials for learning Ainu in English, I started looking for myself. Holy crap! There's a websuite out there with useful phrases, complete with audio! My God, what are these whippersnappers looking for? An Ainu chat forum? A complete course free online?

You know what I had to use when I was trying to learn some Ainu back in the day? The grammatical sketch in the back of Shibatani's The languages of Japan supplemented by Hattori's very basic アイヌ語方言辞典 = Ainu dialect dictionary and some short ritual texts in an anthropological work. And I was lucky, since this was back when I worked at a university with a dedicated East Asian library. (Of course, I never got very far because I'm fundamentally a lazy bitch and I like my language books bright and shiny, but at least I have the humility to recognise that this is my failing, not that of the materials.)

Nowadays there's a comprehensive English-language grammar available from Hokkaido University of Education! Sure, it probably costs a million dollars and good luck trying to order it directly from a Japanese vendor, but Ann Arbor has a copy you could ILL. Other useful books, like Yamada Takako's The world view of the Ainu : nature and cosmos reading from language or Vovin's A reconstruction of Proto-Ainu, you can even buy on Amazon for less than an arm and a leg.

In short, kids of today, if you're stymied in your ambition to learn the agglutinative isolate spoken by the hairy bear-worshippers of Hokkaido, it's your OWN DAMN FAULT. Quit mewling and do some damn legwork before I start bapping you all with my silver-tipped sword cane.

Kaj gelo o bejteri?

Hurricane-force winds! Baseball-sized hail! Blackouts! Flash floods! Widespread panic!

That's what the talk was of yesterday afternoon. The storm predictions grew more and more dire even as the clouds were still hundreds of kilometres west of the city. And in the end? I don't think we even got any rain. Walking home last night, I saw more downed branches in the park than I'd ever seen before...and then I realised that the Park Service had been there earlier in the day trimming with abandon.

I hear there were power outtages on the South Side and flooding in the Northwest Burbs, but here the chief effect seems to have been to shake loose all the lime-green bracts from the lindens and cotton from the cottonwoods. The locusts are just beginning to come into seed, too, but I didn't see many of their fruits on the ground at all.

We're in that transition from late spring--iris still blooming in most places--to early summer. Columbine and spiderwort are in bloom and people have planted their flats of annuals. The leaves are still fresh and green--not dusty, chewed up, and possibly even sere as they will be a couple months from now.

And the cicadas? Still no sign! But Father's Day Weekend we'll be out in glorious Oak Brook for the Highland Games. If the polo grounds aren't infested with the little buggers, I for one will be sorely disappointed. Cicadas haggis, anyone?