मिली!

[muckefuck]

In other news, my copy of MacGregor's Outline of Hindi grammar finally turned up--exactly where I thought I'd left it. I was seriously close to buying a new copy, figuring if I ever found the other, I'd just give it away to someone deserving like tyrannio or mollpeartree. I must've looked at the spot on the shelf where it was two dozen times over the past couple weeks without seeing it. Note to self: If you can't find a book you know is there, chances are you're misremembering the colour of the spine. (I kept thinking it would be purple. The cover is purple, but the spine is yellow.)

And my latest acquisition is the new edition of Teach yourself Gaelic. My bear friend at work came across it while moving and figured he was never going to put it to good use. It's so much better than the older version I have it's not even funny. Perusing it, you can actually imagine someone getting conversational from it. I was all excited about reading through it until the MacGregor turned up. (The bits of Urdu and Panjabi sprinkled throughout Sidhwa's book are putting pressure on me to revise those languages. Latest gem: الو کا پٹھا ullū kā paṭhā, a strong insult that translates literally to "tendon of an owl"!)

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

I'm dead curious ... how did that come to be an insult?

I thought you'd never ask!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Actually, it looks like I may have spoken too soon. I was generalising from the Panjabi version, ਉੱਲੂ ਢਾ ਪੱਠਾ, where ਪੱਠਾ paṭṭhā means both "tendon" and "trainee, youth". I had assumed that "tendon" was the base meaning with "trainee" (and from that "young person in general, young animal") as a synecdochal extension. But according to Platts, these are two distinct words in Urdu: پاٿها pāṭhā from Sanskrit पृथुकः meaning "child, young animal" and پٿها paṭṭhā from Sanskrit पत्त्त्रकः ("feather,leaf") meaning "blade, tendon". Ah, well.

Re: I thought you'd never ask!

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

"son of an owl" = bastard?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

No, owls are folklorically foolish in most of Asia, so "son of an owl" = "an idiot's idiot".

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Thanks for thinking of me, but I already have a distressingly underused copy.