Words, words, words

[muckefuck]

At Meinl yesterday, I babbled something to princeofcairo about discovering two new Greek "words for love". Everyone knows about ero:s, agape:, and philia, but who knew there was also storge:? Liddell & Scott define it simply as "love; affection", though they do note that it's especially used "of parents and children". The source where I originally saw it (and whose title, naturally, has fallen out of my sieve-like brain) defined it as "family love", that is, the non-sexual affection of close kin for one another. The other term I had in mind was probably either himeros or pothos, both of which are defined as "longing". One source defines the first as desire for the humanly obtainable and the other as yearning for the unobtainable, but I'm not sure how deeply to trust that.

I also babbled something to granuaile about the Austrian word for "sour cherry" being Weichsel rather than Sauerkirsche. Other sources (including Meinl itself) define this specifically as a morello cherry, in case that means anything to anyone. (It didn't to caitalainn, who was the one searching for the stuff in the first place.)

I also babbled the name of a Greek cheese which is commonly used to for saganaki, kefalotiri, but no one besides princeofcairo seemed to parse it. The name literally translates as "head cheese", but is made from sheep milk, so maybe, as with tetilla, this refers to the shape or something.

Speaking of cheese, at Tizi Melloul, I struggled to remember the name of the maggot-infested Sardinian cheese that appeared in News of the Weird not long ago. Casu marzu was one the tip of my brain, though it appears that casu modde (goddamn ASCII! there should be dots under them d's) may be the more "echt" Sard name.

Comments

[welcomerain.livejournal.com]

I looked all over for an example of your special Sardinian D. I couldn't find it anywhere, even on Wikipedia or here: http://www.evertype.com/standards/tc304wg2/p11/

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Apparently, it's a notation (Unicode 1E0D, in the Latin Extended Additional range) used by linguists and isn't part of the barely three-year old unified standard orthography, which wasn't around last time I looked into these things. I guess regular d is never geminate (i.e. "doubled") in Sard so dd can be pressed into service to represent /d./, a retroflex/cacuminal sound. Compare Basque, where dd serves to represent the voiced palatal stop (i.e. Hungarian gy or Albanian gj).

So modde is correct after all, even with out little dots below. Huzzah!

[zompist.livejournal.com]

Huh, you just don't read the right books. :) I remember storge: from C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves in college (and indeed, carefully put words for all four into a conlang).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I Was A Teenage Catholic, but I drifted away in college. It's exactly as my grandfather feared, me attending a godless hotbed of socialism instead of a respectable institution like Notre Dame or Georgetown.