You're only here because of me

For reasons I can no longer reconstruct, I found myself wondering this afternoon Whatever happened to brat pack literary darling Tama Janowitz? So I did what I would do with any old half-remembered name from my school days and Googled her.

Whoah, Nelly!

It's good to see such a vigorous debate on the issue of transnational/transracial adoption, especially in light of how common it's becoming. It really expands the parametres of the debate that previous generations of adoptees have matured into such thoughtful articulate voices. If you read no other links from that page, peruse Sumeia Williams' meditative piece on the responsibilities of parents to their adoptive children. Her story particularly touched me because of how much I've been thinking lately about patents' obligations to their children and children's obligations to their parents.

Yes, it is the double surgeries (among other things) that have steered my thoughts in this direction and, no, I don't think I'm ready for a substantive post on this yet. I'm particularly grateful I didn't post the entry I had in my head yesterday, which would've been pretty ranty and accusational. The good news is that Dad is home safe and his wife joins him there tomorrow; the bad news is, well, as a friend remarked upon hearing of my father's discharge, "The hard work begins now."

To have and to hold

There are two kinds of languages in this world: Those with a lexical verb for "have" and those which make do without. Irish is (famously?) one of those which make do without. What I find interesting is how it exploits its alternative, prepositional means to express distinctions which are not obligatory in English.

When speaking Irish, something that is in your possession is described as being "at" you. We have a similar expression in English ("Do you have a pencil on you?") except that this is limited to portable items. Not so in Irish: An bhfuil tigh[*] agat "Do you have a house?" (Lit. "Is house at-you?") But you can have something without owning it, a distinction Irish expresses by using the preposition le "with" instead of ag. So if I say Tá tigh againn, that leaves open the question of whether we also own it, rent it, or have come into possession of it through some other means. Conversely, Tá tigh linn leaves open the question of whether we live there or elsewhere.

As I may have explained before, emotions and ailments are in a class of their own. You don't "have" a cold in Irish; rather, a cold is "on" you. In German, the usual idiom for "I'm hungry" is not "Ich bin hungrig" but "Ich habe Hunger"; in Irish, it is Tá ocras orm. This causes consternation for learners, for whom Táim ocrach would be more natural, though native speakers could interpret this as "I am stricken with hunger" instead of "I could eat."

It is only through a conflation of these two forms, one native and one an English calque, that I can explain the sentence I saw today: Tá tuirseach orum[**]. Tuirseach isn't "tiredness" (that would be tuirse), it's "tired". As a noun, however, it means "a tired person". I could see how having a tired person on top of you could make you one yourself, but somehow I don't think this is what the speaker in question meant to say!


[*] Standard Irish teach. The Munster nominative/accusative form tigh is historically dative.
[**] Sic. As anyone familiar with the Hiberno-English accent knows, it's quite regular to add the extra syllable here. (I once knew a charming young man from the North who was always going to see "fillums".) Some Munster varieties even switch the stress, saying /o'rum/ by analogy with /a'gum/ (agam).