-
-
Recent Posts
- The Hinterlands June 23, 2017
- The Goose’s Wing: Materials and Design June 22, 2017
- I’ve been Nominated for a Sidewise Award June 21, 2017
Meta
Category Archives: Language is Great!
Bulgarian has words for:
to wake up completely: разсънвам се (razsanvam se) Raz-san-vam se glosses as “apart-dream-verb reflexive” something like “I break up my dreams.” You can add the same suffixes and prefix to buzh- (the root for “wake,” cognate to Sanskrit “Buddha”) to get разбуждам се … Continue reading
Bulgarian root: Mah “wave”
In Bulgarian class yesterday, we were reading about eagles (like you do) and came across the phrase: Размах на крилете – Raz-mah na kril-e-te – “Wingspan” (lit. apart-wave of wing-s-the). But while English span comes from a root meaning “to stretch” (other … Continue reading
Ergatinglish!
Ha ha, suckers! You thought you were going to get a short story today, but instead I’m going to lecture you about made-up future English. Wait don’t go! It’ll be a form of English that has evolved ergative-absolutive alignment! Wait … Continue reading
Posted in Language is Great!, Wonderful, Awful Ideas
Tagged Eccentrics, Language, languages
Leave a comment
Learning Bulgarian: Vacations and Governments
Remember last week? Well here’s some more Bulgarian vocab! Obrashtam se kam (nyakogo): Turn to (somebody) for help Dezhuren-on duty (from French, de jure meaning “of day”) Pikolo-a bellhop (from Italian, piccolo meaning “smallest”) Funny how English also imported both words, but with different … Continue reading
Learning Bulgarian: vacations
Here’s a new thing I’m doing: typing up my notes from Bulgarian classes, with highlights that might be interesting for you language-nerds out there. Today we talked about vacations. Here are some interesting words: Stanyavane=check-in, from nastanyavam (to check in), from the … Continue reading
Yeah be yeah
My daughter developed a new catch phrase that I first thought was “yippy-yeah!” On closer inspection, however, she is being even more adorable. “Yeah be yeah” would be a literal translation of the Bulgarian “da be da.” Da, obviously, means … Continue reading
English negatives are HARD!
My daughter has an easier time with saying “no” in Bulgarian than she does in English. In Bulgarian, all she has to do is move the verb to the start of the sentence ,and insert the word “ne” before it and she’s … Continue reading
Let’s Pretend
My wife and I were watching our daughter play in the park the other day and she reached up into a tree, picked a seed off a branch, and put it in her mouth. We both told her off … Continue reading
A Swimsuit with Tulips
Pavlina’s favorite Bulgarian children’s song is…a bit disturbing really. Sung to the tune of “Yellow Polka-dot bikini,” it goes like this: Kogato s teb se pazhozhdam do plazha – When I walk around the beach with you Razbiram kolko si vlyuben … Continue reading
Talking and Walking
Here’s a fun thought experiment from Steven Cox: drop a bunch of colonists who all speak the same language on a planet and let them stew for a few centuries. Come back later and count how many languages they now speak. … Continue reading
