Double date

I guess a couple good things did come out of reading Şafak's book: It rekindled my interest in Armenian, which I haven't touched for years. And all the descriptions of lavish Anatolian meals made me hungry for Masouleh, prompting monshu to make a visit last night.

Originally, the plan was to go on Tuesday evening, but he was worn out from work and I was still weak from a bout of my periodic mystery flu which kept me home (and gave me the time to finish off the novel). When I came back from work to find him on the porch stewing in the humid air, I said, "We should've gone last night!"

We'd just gotten our appetisers when our Gay Bear Neighbours Who Will Need Decent Aliases If I Keep Writing About Them popped in and we decided to share a table. (That is, me and the ginger bear decided and then dragged our partners along.) As you might expect, we talked mostly about food.

I ordered the chengeh rare and Nazim negotiated me down to medium-rare. "If you ask a Persian how he wants it cooked, he will say well-done!" Fortunately he seems to have lived here long enough to see the folly of that. Before I handed him my credit card, I asked if he took Discover and he said, "We take whatever you want to give us. Even if you want to give us nothing, that's okay." "Oh, be serious!" I replied. "I am being serious!" he protested.

Only after I got home did I remember that it was Ramadan and I'd forgotten to wish him a good fast. But then, I don't even know for sure they're Muslim. It's the way to bet, of course, but you'd hate to get that sort of thing wrong.

Scaling Ararat

When I'm studying a language closely related to ones I know already, I savour those words which stand out. Most Catalan words, for instance, can be easily mapped to Spanish or French or both. So when you run into something like boig "mad" or tancar "to close", it tends to stick in your memory. With a more foreign foreign language, it's the opposite. When every word is a completely novel combination of sound and meaning, it's a relief and a joy to spot one which can be identified with something you already know.

Despite being an Indo-European language, Armenian definitely falls into the latter category for me. The developments from the protolanguage are famously opaque, with *dwóh₁ > erku (երկու) "two" being one of the classic examples of perfectly regular change that you would never recognise as such if not for a huge body of painstaking comparative work. It has a lot of borrowed vocabulary, but it's predominately from Iranian--and not Modern Persian (like Hindi), but Middle Persian or--more frequently--Parthian.

So in a language where "milk" is kat' (կաթ)¹ and "butter" is karag (կարագ), it's a pleasure to discover that "cheese" is dear old panir (պանիր). Or to see katu (կատու) "cat" staring out at me from among šun (շուն) "dog" and ji (ձի) "horse". Even gini (գինի) "wine" and vard (վարդ) "rose" are, despite some substantial reconfiguration, recognisable for the champion wanderwörter they are.

And then there are those "international words" which you can always count on, right? I mean, some languages have to get all puristic about it and use loan-translations for something like "telephone" or "computer", but even they capitulate before such inevitabilities as "tea/chai"² [Arm. t'ey (թեյ)] or "coffee" [Arm. surč (սուրճ)].

Wait, what?

Yeah, that's right, surč. Their word for coffee looks like none other in the world. That's not unprecedented to me; after all, the Siouan languages use nonce coinages (e.g. Osage mąhkása "black medicine"). I was more surprised to find turm (տուրմ) for "chocolate". But really, chocolate? A word you can comprehend instantly in almost any language of Earth? True, other versions exist such as kolahat (կոլահատ) and šokolat (շոկոլատ)--just as kofe (կոֆե) for "coffee" exists in the colloquial language of Armenia. But that doesn't diminish the weirdness of paging through the dictionary and finding a word like turm.


¹ From the same PIE root as Latin lacte and Greek γάλα, though again this isn't immediately obvious.
² The only question is: did it first arrive overland (and thus show a reflex of Middle Chinese chá) or by sea (reflecting Minnan tê)?