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Finally caught up on the Txtng DB8. (Did U rlly spl txtng with an i?)
Loved the "beef with au jus sauce" -- especially when you tossed the head-spinner, "In 'beef au jus', which is the noun and which the adjective?"! I could see the shot in Vertigo where it zooms back!
FIRST - I wanted to share a favorite expression from west LA: "The La Brea Tar Pits", the LA Co. Natural History Museum and a pit that's part of Hancock Park, there on Wilshire Blvd. The pits (mostly one large black, sticky "pond") and a major N-S street that runs by just east of the pits were named for the Spanish Rancho la Brea. Unfortunately, "la Brea" means "the tar", so Los Angelenos call it "the the tar tar pits"! Of course, as you noted with au jus, La Brea has now become a proper noun naming one place, requiring us to add in English "the tar pits" to the proper name La Brea.
Side note: the terrific, classic book on software project management, "The Mythical Man-Month", used a mastodon stuck and sinking into the La Brea tar pits on its cover to depict what typically happens to software projects. It's a great book for quotes, puns, phrases, etc., such as extending the observation that nine women can't have a baby in a month into the advice, "Adding programmers to a late project, makes it later."
SECOND - Here's a head spinner that I ran into myself last year. I'm still spinning from it. I was starting to learn Welsh (via book & [antique] cassette), and got at least as far as what letters they use and how they're pronounced. While I loved trying to develop my mounth into the "ll" sound, , differentiate "f" and "ff" and "d" and "dd", the head-spinner was the vowel "w". (FINALLY I see an example of "A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W"! My teachers never knew of a W example!)
As you probably know, the vowel W is pronounced "oo", as in "food" (Welsh pronounciation example, "ffwd"). The head-spinner was when I tried to pronounce English words by replacing the consonant W with the vowel W. Uh oh -- they sound about 95% the same! To this day, oo-en I see a oo-ord oo-ith a W, I have to check to see if it can be pronounced both oo-ays. OO-ell, OO-ay OO-ith OO-rds gurus, is there a difference?? Or is W the harmonic convergence of vowel and consonant? Do any other letters go both oo-ays?
The final OO-elsh thought was when I tried to practice my "rh", as in the name "Rhys", where the instructions said to pronounce the "huh" sound before the "rrr", opposite the writing order, as in "hrees". Makes sense, as I, at least, can't make my mouth speak r followed by h. Though the English "rh" words (rhesus monkey) seem to completely elide the h, I realized that the same spell vs speak order reversal happens with "wh" in English words: they're all pronounced (if you leave the breathy h in at all) "huh" followed by "w" (or "oo"), as in "hoo ale", "hoo en", "hoo ut", etc. Where did this reversal of wh start? Did the English get is from the Welsh, as they conquored them? Did the Welsh get it from the English who got it from ... someone?
Martha's pronunciation was almost perfect, the only mistake being the first sound. The first sound Martha used was like the french"j" (sorry, I can't use the IPA here), if you think of the French word 'bonjour' that's the sound that stands for "j". Now the correct pronunciation is with a 'z' much like in the English 'zombie' or 'zebra' or 'zoo'. So it's 'z domu'.
The translation you gave there is spot on right. "from home" is a word-for-word translation from polish 'z domu'. It is a perfect example of a calque, and basing on my field experience I can assure you calques like these are frequent in Polish or Polish-descendent communities. The phrase does come up in genealogy studies, but, unfortunately, it slowly but surely disappears from spoken language. Nowadays the only contexts where you meet the phrase in Polish is in: official documents (secular and Church - Catholicism is still going strong in this country, and the Churches completes its own sets of documents on their parishoners); genealogy; small town and village communities. The latter one, so the small town and village communities is actually the only context where you can hear this expression spoken. From what your caller from Wisconsin said, the community she found herself in was fairly old, meaning that only the elderly members of the community spoke fluent Polish. That would confirm my observations in Poland. Here only the elderly people belonging to small local communities, where there still survives the respect of intimate family connections, does the term 'z domu' come up in spoken language. Other than that the term is only used in documents and genealogies, but ever more often it is substituted with the term "nazwisko paniańskie" which translates as "maiden name", especially so in secular documents.
"my goal is to find some simple, common names that ordinary adults can use to refer to their toes"
This is late in this discussion, but I'm behind in my podcasts. This is related trivia with perhaps only a name for one more toe. When my son was born with his second toe longer that his Hallux or Great Toe, I found that this extra-long second toe is called "Morton's Toe" - there is quite an interesting entry about it on Wikipedia. This term only applies to a certain percentage of people, but they could use it! Everyone else needs another term. - one thing that occurs to me after reading the Wikipedia entry is that the people with Morton's Toe could call it their "Greek Toe" and everyone else could call it their "Egyptian Toe" That's how the Greeks did it. - it's associated with royalty; the Greeks and Romans valued it; and the Statue of Liberty has it! - but it's still listed as a "disorder" and is linked to excessive pronation and related foot problems.
I live in a Polish area of Northern Wisconsin a couple hours from Steven's Point. There is a nearby town named Lublin that has a Polish Orthodox church and many older native Polish speakers. We live in a rural area with no cities nearby. I asked a couple of women at work about 'your name from home' and none had ever heard that expression, both being 'bushas' I would think they would have heard it. Maybe it is a regional Polish phrase?
Mark
Regarding au jus sauce, I will have to add this to my list of real and tongue-in-cheek food redundancies:
shrimp scampi
spinach florentine
cheese au gratin
grilled ham and cheese cordon bleu
ice cream a la mode (I love this dish!)
I use these latter few with my wife only to indicate my desire for a larger than usual serving.
Hmmm. The grilled ham and cheese cordon bleu on focaccia bread sounds doubly delightful. I might even top it off with some espresso coffee. Thanks for this entirely new vista: pita bread; focaccia bread; naan bread … . I'm getting really, really hungry. All I had for lunch were some vegetables Primavera.
Actually, "salsa" is a good example of how a word borrowed from one language can come to have a somewhat different meaning when used within the context of another. "Salsa" does indeed mean "sauce" in Spanish where it has about the same denotative compass, e.g., salsa de chocolate or salsa holandesa is how you would say "chocolate sauce" or "Hollandaise sauce" when speaking Spanish. But "salsa" has a much more restricted meaning in English. Here, it's used only for tomato-based condiments flavored with onions and peppers. In English, we would even include pico de gallo as a kind of "salsa", even though it is just chopped vegetables and wouldn't qualify as a salsa for someone speaking Spanish. These unequal distributions of denotative compass happen quite a bit with culinary terms borrowed from other languages. We make them fit our own gastronomical experiences.
I have been discussing with my mother the effects of technology on the amount and quality of writing of kids today. (I think she's basing her entire opinion on a single line of opinion in Reader's Digest.)
Anyway, I was wondering if you have links and/or citations to some of the research that you mentioned near the end of this episode. (I've looked around the webpage on this episode but didn't find any, other than the link for Crystal's book.)
Now, if I could just figure out where I heard some statistic comparing the amount of writing (of all kinds) done by kids and/or people today versus a hundred years ago. I know it was on NPR somewhere...
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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