Why don't you...

[asakiyume]

Happy mid-Autumn festival, one day late! Please enjoy this Google doodle that was only shown to people in East Asia. In the United States Google was busy urging us to register to vote.

It was a lovely harvest moon--with a bite taken out of it in these parts, due to a partial lunar eclipse. Like a ghostly version of the moon cakes made in its honor.

Some time ago I learned how to ask questions using "Why" in Tikuna. I gave some sample questions (Why is the cat happy? Why are you tired?) and my tutor went to town, giving me *lots* of why questions. There was a theme...

Why don't you listen?
Why don't you listen to your grandparents when they want to give you advice?
Why don't you pay attention to your parents?
Why did you go without telling me?
Why don't you want to?
Why don't you want to eat?

There were others that didn't fit the theme, but those were so salient! I had a feeling these were things my tutor had heard a lot. If I memorize those, I will know how to nag a teenager in Tikuna ;-)

Recently my college-aged nephew was at my house, helping me smash hickory nuts. We smashed enough to get a cup of nutmeats, and then we made a hickory nut shortbread, yum. I sent a picture of my nephew to my tutor, who remarked that he was cute. I said he was two years younger than she is, just twenty years old. "Veinte añitos!" she said, "Waooo!" --I like that Spanish can do that: turn years (años) into cute little years (añitos). Twenty cute little years. Twenty adorable years. Twenty yearlets.

Comments

[raven]

In Gaelic there is a construction, "an e bheil", which translates as "is it that". Examples of this from my teacher and from books all follow a theme:

"is it that you tried your best?"
"is it that he talks too much?"
"is it that he explains things?"
"is it that he forgot your birthday?"

I said at one point that we should call it the "THIS IS WHY YOU DUMP HIM" construction. 😂

Related, slightly off-topic, there is a word that you use for a man of this type, and my teacher told me I should never use it for a woman and I'm still completely unsure as to whether that means grammatically or just on principle.

[asakiyume]

This comment literally made me laugh out loud here alone at my desk.

Do you happen to know how to say in Gaelic, "It's that I want to avoid a man who explains things all the time"? (More generally, I'm assuming if there's an is-it-that construction, there's also a it's-that construction.)

What is the word? I promise not to use it for a woman!

[raven]

But wait! there is a Gaelic word for mansplain! so you could say "'s e gu bheil esan a' fearmíneachadh an-còmnhnaidh", it's that he is always mansplaining; or "'s e gu bheil mise a' seachain na fir a míneachadh rudan", it's that I avoid men who explain things.

(the grammar of "an e gu bheil" and "'s e gu bheil" means you can't quite put anything you like after them, this is because the Gaelic "to be" is a magnificent, multifaceted nightmare.)

The word is "trustar" though I must caution you, should a filthy lecherous bastard (this is what the dictionary defines it as) cross your path, you need the vocative, trustair! because you should for sure be grammatical while delivering this message.

[asakiyume]

Got it! Hie thee from my sight, thou trustair!

(and "[fear]míneachadh" is "[man]explain," then?)

[raven]

yes! though "fearmìneachadh" is the noun form, so the actual verb to mansplain is "a dh'fhearmìnich".

[asakiyume]

languages are THE BEST

[genarti]

This thread fills me with joy and delight.

[asakiyume]

^_^

[heleninwales]

this is because the Gaelic "to be" is a magnificent, multifaceted nightmare

Much like the Welsh "bod" (to be) then. :-)

[asakiyume]

We love our magnificent, multifaceted nightmare verbs!

[amaebi]

This is so beautiful. I so wish I had the Gaelic to remember it with!

[amaebi]

*grin*

[sartorias]

añitos--what a charming word!

[asakiyume]

Right? You add that ending and it conveys affection.

[sartorias]

it's like 'chen' in German. I love language bits like that!

[asakiyume]

^_^ Me too!

[light_of_summer]

Happy mid-Autumn-or-so to you, too! What marks the start of Autumn for you? (Do you count Summer as starting at Beltane and Autumn at Lughnasad?)

I don't think I've ever eaten anything called a hickory nut, but I just now tried to look up where they grow, and Wikipedia informs me that pecans are one kind of hickory nut. I've certainly eaten those—yum! 😊

May I ask the significance of "Waooo" in Spanish &/or Tikuna? (I.e., is it like wow? or whoa? or wahoo? From context, it seems like it might be different from all three of those!)

I hope your day is going well!

[asakiyume]

the whens and hows of autumn are something we discuss and disagree about a lot in my family! I was calling it the Mid-Autumn festival because that's how they call it where they celebrate it rather than because I myself consider it mid autumn where I am. I think for here, I'd call it early autumn, and probably I'd see early autumn as beginning at the very end of August or beginning of September, just in terms of fruit ripening, corn and grasses beginning to wither, autumn flowers blooming, etc. But others would say it's not really autumn until the leaves have started to change (there's only just the beginningest hints of that right now).

Hickory nuts--what we have around here are mainly shagbark hickory nuts--are **very** hard to get out of their shells (hence the smashing, and hence their not being developed for commercial sale), but they are very tasty--they have a maple-y flavor.

"Waoooo" was her extension of Spanish "Wao," which is like English "Wow." So it would be like me writing "Wowwwww" (which i have been known to do.

One way they seem to intensify things in Tikuna is to add the ending eechi or uuchi. For example, "ya" (pronounced "ja") means "old," and "yauuchi" means "very old." Or "wee" means "love" and "weechi" means "love a lot"

[light_of_summer]

Cool—thanks!

Maple-y flavored hickory nuts sound excellent, but I take your point about the difficulty of shelling them. (The hardest nuts to shell that I'm familiar with are Brazil Nuts...)

It feels to me like early autumn, over here, too. That's based more on temperatures and day length than anything else that I encounter regularly, although semi-local produce in stores and the occasional farmers' market also gives me some clues. We can't use grass withering for an autumn indicator, because that happens here in late spring or early summer. Which reminds me of a Kate Wolf song from back in the 1980s:

Here In California

I hope you'll enjoy it!

[asakiyume]

That's lovely! Thank you for sharing!

[genarti]

I love the añitos thing! It's SO cute. I ended up watching a bit of the Olympics in Spanish because they'd already taken down most of the English videos (grr) and I was like "well, okay, my Spanish is mediocre at best but it'll be good listening practice!" Which it was, but one of the really fun "I understood that!!!" moments was when an announcer referred to a relatively young diver as having solamente 16 añitos. (It might not've been 16 -- I forget the exact number -- but she was definitely a teenager.)

[asakiyume]

D'awww, 16 [or thereabouts] and at the Olympics--they really are añitos!

[amaebi]

:)

I would love to ty hickory nut shortbread.

In doing a bunch of first Pimsleur, now mostly Duolingo, I'm struck by the acculturation properly embedded in language instruction. I was puzzled initially at the amount of Jesus-church-speak in the Duolingo Hawai'ian course, but then I paid more attention in that direction when we were in the islands. Ah, understood. I am sad and worried about the emphasis on failing classes in Duolingo Spanish.

[asakiyume]

I love in the Haitian Creole lessons the focus on local foods and places to eat them. Of course at this moment I can't recall ANY for an example, but there was a word for soursop, a word for sugarcane, and a word for a type of eatery--it was nice. (Just checked words: soursop--known to me better by the Spanish guanabana--is in Haitian Creole "kowosòl") Also, they gave words for godmother, godfather, and in-laws, which I still haven't learned officially in Duolingo Spanish (though I know them from telenovelas).

[amaebi]

I only just registered that you’re learning Haitian Creole. That adds weight to that temptation-bucket.

Aaaaaaaaaaargh!

[asakiyume]

Hahahaha--YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!!

(To be honest, I'm not doing it with the fierce drive I was with Portuguese or Indonesian... I just want to have a background of playing with some new languages, because I miss it. I've got Italian going with the same level of non-commitment, and just yesterday I added Chinese, not for Chinese's own sake--sorry, Chinese; maybe some day--but because I wanted something with tones to help me practice tones for doing the Tikuna.)

[amaebi]

I do want to, but I'm concerned about the limits of both my cognition and my time. I am currently maintaining French, Spanish, baby Latin, such-as-it-is Hawai'ian, and Hebrew, and working actively on German, modern Greek, Mandarin, Welsh, Korean, and now Russian. Ideally I'll start building in time to maintain my Koine and to learn more Hawaiian from other resources, and maybe even Latin.

What's the intonation system for Tikuna like? The one for Mandarin is pretty simple: I gather that Cantonese is more complex.

[asakiyume]

That is a lot! I can understand not having the bandwidth at the moment!

Tikuna theoretically has 12 tones (some of these are slides between two tones), plus a "creaky" element that's kind of like vocal fry which the linguists don't consider a tone, I guess. I can't hear or distinguish all these when the linguist presents them (I have a set of recorded videos I'm [slowly] watching, online classes from 2020 or so). When I'm working with Francy, I just try to copy exactly what she says and hope I'm getting it. But I'm hoping the Mandarin (that's the Chinese I'm doing) will help with the difference between a tone as it sounds when you say just one word (I got this when Francy said for me "dea" for "speak" and "deá" for "water") and when you say a whole sentence. Thinking of how things get so blurred when we speak whole sentences--in any language.

[amaebi]

Oh, interesting! Thanks! That is definitely Mandarin-relevant.

And about phrases/sentences and blurring--I started a bunch of languages oral/aural via Pimsleur, and with the non-Euro-regular ones I was fascinated to learn how big a task knowing what a word was, and what a phrase was, by ear alone. Basically it requires either wing or lot of instances.

[zdenka]

Oh my gosh, the google doodle is indeed adorable! Thank you for sharing it!

[asakiyume]

So glad you liked it!

[med_cat]

:))

Very cute doodle, and interesting language insights ;)

[asakiyume]

very glad you enjoyed ^_^