Méar a sháigh ann

I'm still plugging away at Bun-Ghaeilge--I practised with it practically every night during my week in Tahoe, in fact. I'm just not posting my new words learned any more partly out of laziness and partly because I seem to have reached a point where I can no longer easily distinguish between words which I've really just learned for the first time and those which I've learned before without them quite making it into my active vocabulary.

Only ten lessons to go and I'm pleased to say I've gotten better at spotting the lies in the book. For instance, the declension of "finger" is given as an mhéir, na méire, na méara. Now, independent of the fact that this is a word I should already know (having listed already among the words I learned over three months ago--see, this is what I'm up against!), something looked wrong to me about it: While there are examples of words ending in a slender consonant that become broad in the plural (e.g. deoir "tear", plural na deora), it's apparently more common for a broad-ending noun to slenderise in the genitive and dative. Consequently, méir screams "dative" to me.

Sure enough, the standard citation form is an mhéar. It's not unusual for the nominative/accusative to get replaced with an originally dative form--other examples include Gaeilge in Connacht or tigh in Munster--so I assume that there is some attested variety somewhere that has an mhéir for "the finger". As I mentioned before, the language of the book is a mélange of forms seemingly selected on the basis of "simplicity" for the learner. Nouns ending in a slender consonant are normally feminine in Irish, so using an mhéir disposes with a troublesome exception. (Well and good, but then why isn't it listed among the deviations from standard forms in the appendix?)

Of course, it does this at the expense of introducing another exception in the shape of the "irregular" plural. Which rather underlies the difficulty with reshaping a language for paedogoical purposes: There are so many interlocking patterns, and they are sometimes at odds with each other. Regularise one exception and you may end up creating another elsewhere. What will serve the student more in the end? In the absence of good data showing, for instance, that L2 learners pick up a certain rule before another, it's all subjective, so applied linguists would do well to tread lightly. I rather wish Risteárd Ó Glaisne had trod a bit lighter when writing his book, but I've got enough alternative sources that I'm not particularly worried about weeding out his infelicities.

Restless

I haven't been getting enough sleep lately. I know, who has? But I know I've exceeded some tacit limit due to the fact that I overslept by an hour this morning. Then, thinking about it, it seemed to me I've only had one or two really solid nights' sleep in the past two weeks or so. Obviously, I've had plenty of chances to sleep in, so I've come to the conclusion that this is something I'm doing to myself deliberately but unconsciously. If I go through every day in a stupor, I'm less likely to get bent out of shape by stupid things.

Lately, that's mostly meant the whole house-buying process. Last Friday, after monshu and I got our loan approval, he crowed that we were finally done. "We're never done," I reminded him. "There's always something else." True to my namesake before me, I saw my words incarnated on Monday when we had to deal with the inclusion of a contingency that we specifically asked be left out. But now work is getting in on the act, too. Monday's revelation that I was going to have less available labour for the coming month or so was the cue for several departments to suddenly inform me that they had projects for me to do. It's all far less stress than many people have to deal with, but any amount is a lot when you've specifically arranged your life in order to minimise such fuss.

At least I've been having some fun. The proximate cause of my oversleeping was Ethiopian Diamond at 8 o'clock, which predictably kept me up past midnight. That was supposed to be Mama Desta's at 6:30 or so, but unforeseen difficulties (primarily the fact that they're not open on Tuesdays) forced a change of venue and corresponding slippage of schedule. I could always have settled for a less spicy cuisine, of course, but I promised an out-of-towner his first Ethiopian and I intended to deliver.

I can't remember if I posted at the time about the cuddly Beiruti I met at Bear Pride, but he's in town for a few days (at this point, for only a few more hours) staying with a mutual friend who lives in monshu's very-soon-to-be-ex building. Said friend had a previous engagement last night, so I promised to take al-Finīqī under my wing. When I called him, he was browsing the Brown Elephant, so I met him at North End and wandered Lakeview for a bit before hopping the El to Granville.

He was especially taken with the injera, which was a relief, because it tends to be the make-it-or-break-it component as far as enjoying Ethiopian goes. Either the prospect of picking up morsels with spongy sour bread gives you shivers of delight or it becomes a barrier you just can't surmount. All through the meal, he was telling me what Levantine food a particular dish reminded him of.

Afterwards, we walked the calories off along the Lake. He insisted on going up to the water simply to touch it. It was a reasonably pleasant night--cool, if a bit humid--but the best part was how easily the talk flowed. We exchanged tales of our early sexual experiences and he filed me in on his backstory as we looped down the shore and back to where he was staying. There, our buddy disputed the fact that he was "Phoenician" ("They were from...Babel or someplace!") and al-Finīqī responded by telling him how the Phoenicians had invented not only seafaring but also language and colour[*]. "And time, too," I added. "Before the Phoenicians came along, everything was static. Oh, and they invented gravity."

I hope everything works out for him. He's got the usual bullshit that goes along with being a long-term foreign resident in addition to the whole Arab-in-America thing and he's just now coming out of a LTR. If he lived in Chicago, he probably be another of the half-broken gay men that my neighbourhood seems to be a clearinghouse for. As it is, he's just another reminder for me to see how my problems really aren't.


[*] Read "the alphabet" and "commercial dyes".

Hold the tee

How many times have you thought you knew exactly what something was only to look it up and discover that there are more things in Heaven and Earth &c.? What prompted this particular Wikipedia jaunt was a friend's pronunciation of "bergamot" with a silent "t" (as if from the French; hélas, the actual French is bergamote). It's unlike her to be pretentious, so I assume she's merely the innocent victim of seeing something spelled on frou-frou packaging and never hearing it spoken aloud.

I had the opposite problem myself and mispronounced it "bergamont" for years, adding an intrusive "n" to make it fit the pattern of accustomed words like "Claremont" and "Belmont". So I gave her the benefit of the doubt and looked up the word to see if her variant was sanctioned only to find out...but before we get to that, let me ask you a question: What plant comes to mind when I say "bergamot"?