Living in the moment

[muckefuck]

• Spam of the Moment: Your wealth., casserole fish
• Mondegreen of the Moment: "Matilda, she take me money and run Venezuela."
• Language of the Moment: Vietnamese. With all the Sinitic loanwords and grammatical similarities to Chinese, I figure it's like getting a bonus language for free, right? If only the orthography weren't so wacked, the North-South dialectal differences weren't so pronounced, and the vocabulary words would stick in my head a little better.
• Hero of the Moment: aadroma for taking his brother to a straight strip club and trying to scam some sugar for himself! (I've done the first, but I didn't have the big brassy ones to attempt the second.)

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Mongegreen of the Moment: "Matilda, she take me money and run Venezuela."

Is that a mondegreen? I'd thought it was the actual lyric (and Google at least suggests that so did Harry Belafonte).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

HA! I've never looked at the actual lyrics, but a co-worker just sang "She take me money and run with a tailor", so I just assumed that I'd had it wrong all these years. How ironic if this turns out to be the mondegreen!

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

This is what I was going to say. I think "with the sailor" is the mondegreen. And Allan Sherman would say "with the tailor."

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Ah, "My Zelda"! (When I was 10-12 or so, I bid fair to wear out my parents' LP of My Son, the Folk Singer.)

[bengt.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Vietnamese have more tones too?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. There are three tone diacritics, but arguably there are only three phonemic tones which, when combined with two tone registers, give one a total of six register complexes (or five if you're a Southerner who merges the ngã and hỏi tones).

[wiped.livejournal.com]

vietnamese is a neat language...i tried learning it when i was spending a lot of time with a vietnamese friend, but my studying fizzled out after she moved away. i'd like to pick it up again, especially in order to read this interview in which i'm featured, haha. and the orthography could use some reform, for sure. it's frustrating to have to learn the rules of a language and its writing system and at the same time memorize its idiosyncrasies and exceptions.

[wiped.livejournal.com]

oh, and i forgot to mention, i found this online vietnamese course while i was studying the language. i was able to access it without signing up or paying any tuition; i hope you find it useful.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks! Those look quite useful. Monash University used to have a good series up, but I just found out they had to take them down.