Frost and ice
Jan. 9th, 2025 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeIt's cold here.
The water in the marsh froze clear--where it's deep, you can see all the growing things, the mud, the bubbles ... the tossed cans... frozen in it. In shallower places, you can see the marsh grass is frozen in it and on it, held down by hoarfrost stitchery.
On the paths in the woods, water in the soil has frozen in the formation known in Japan as 霜柱 (shimo bashira), frost pillars. Sometimes they look like ribbon candy, other times like tiny stalactite formations, and other times, as here, like ghost moss.
At the field hut
Old wooden fruit crates serve as both stools & table at the field hut. Mikele sits on one, toasting coffee beans over a fire. He grinds these as he waits for water to boil, then brews a perfect cup of coffee. Temper, Mikele's striped cat, weaves between the old man's legs, purring.
Mikele's granddaughter once laid out a set of playing cards & painted the Battle of Icy Falls across their backs. Now Mikele treats these cards as a puzzle, turning them over one by one.
The water in the marsh froze clear--where it's deep, you can see all the growing things, the mud, the bubbles ... the tossed cans... frozen in it. In shallower places, you can see the marsh grass is frozen in it and on it, held down by hoarfrost stitchery.
On the paths in the woods, water in the soil has frozen in the formation known in Japan as 霜柱 (shimo bashira), frost pillars. Sometimes they look like ribbon candy, other times like tiny stalactite formations, and other times, as here, like ghost moss.
At the field hut
Old wooden fruit crates serve as both stools & table at the field hut. Mikele sits on one, toasting coffee beans over a fire. He grinds these as he waits for water to boil, then brews a perfect cup of coffee. Temper, Mikele's striped cat, weaves between the old man's legs, purring.
Mikele's granddaughter once laid out a set of playing cards & painted the Battle of Icy Falls across their backs. Now Mikele treats these cards as a puzzle, turning them over one by one.
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Date: 2025-01-09 03:21 pm (UTC)We have had several days of hard frost here now.
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Date: 2025-01-09 03:52 pm (UTC)that's about the size of it, hahaha shivers
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Date: 2025-01-09 05:51 pm (UTC)Since I am learning/upkeeping Hawai'ian almost entirely on Dueling*, I am intuiting grammar as I go, and I'm pretty open-minded about it. That is, I don't come in with grammatical categories to be filed in, but since I was raised in Eurolanguages I do naturally think in noun-verb-modifer-preposition terms. A meander through my good dictionary and reading its introduction and doing a little online lookup led me to something that said that Hawai'ian is a language in which words operate flexibly and aren't pinned down as nouns or verbs or adjectives.** And not only is this consistent with my experience of the language, but I was overwhelmed with the romance of it.
And I thought that was pretty weird even for me. But a couple of days later I realized that it makes sense. For a couple of decades now I've been thinking about and in terms of how in some noun-verb type languages, for example English, what tends to be primary is a sentence's noun, with verbs merely expressing something about them, with them The Actors. Whereas I'm more interested in process and so have loved Greek, which is a noun-verb language that I think centers verbs in all of many nuanced forms. And so a language whose words get the kind of flex and power that the remark suggested true of Hawai'ian goes to my wild untutored linguistic heart.
* I know and sorrow about their firing their humans translators and that I am encouraging the expenditure of wild amounts of resources on AI, but obviously here I am doing it.
** This was one source. Others said other things, often in terms of nouns and verbs. I have no idea what's authoritative, and as I thought about it I didn't know what authoritative would mean. Some grammarians are trying to understand Hawai'ian in their own terms and/or to teach Hawai'ian to Eurolanguages types, and imposing a Latin-based grammatical frame is reasonable enough for them. A language speaks for itself and would, I think, sneer or laugh at the hubris of taxonomizing it in some grammar. I would love to read a Hawai'ian on Hawai'ian grammar, though, and I've figured out someone to ask.
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Date: 2025-01-09 07:12 pm (UTC)Hawai'ian is an Austronesian language-family language like Tetun and Indonesian! There don't seem to be many word similarities between the two (different branches of the family) but for instance the Tetun word for "man" is "mane" and the Hawai'ian one is apparently "kane"?--so you can see something there.
And yeah, it's fun when languages have a different approach to how words do their thing, and it's fun to feel your way forward! I loved when I noticed that -curaum was used as an intensifier in Ticuna: cha muum, I'm frightened, cha muumcuraum, I'm really frightened. At least, that was how it felt to me, but pertinent to what you say about how speakers of a language understand the language, that's not how Francy put it to me: she described it as two different types of fear, varying with situation and context--which I only hazily understand. I tell myself, if I use phrases in ways I hear Francy using them, maybe I'll be getting it right, and maybe one day I'll have a sense of the why of it (assuming I'm ever again in a situation to try, which: who knows?)
But even the notion of analyzing an language in terms of its elements might be alien to speakers of some languages, such that maybe what you'd get, if you asked for a grammar from your contact, would be something more like a series of stories or--well I don't know. There was a professor at Wakanomori's university, someone of Anishinaabe heritage who wanted to learn her language, and she brought a guy to campus to offer an informal course. I sat in on a session or two--this was in 2014--and he just taught some random phrases and said it was better to learn words in context, as you do activities. I didn't end up able to get to more sessions, but I gathered from an acquaintance that the professor felt frustrated by the approach. Later she did find a way of learning that suited her. I would have been frustrated too if I was trying to master the language for everyday conversation, but as an outsider just drifting in for a session or too, his way of teaching made sense to me; it felt like might do the heart good to try a whole different approach to learning a thing. But I appreciate wanting to be able to deploy the language more quickly than that approach might allow for. I'm glad the prof. found a different way of getting instruction.
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Date: 2025-01-09 08:12 pm (UTC)When I was learning Hebrew I was entranced not only by the grammar— of for example the verb forms— https://hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_Ten/Seven_Binyanim_Overview.pdf — but the centrality of verbs stems in etymologies. I read that as suggesting mentalité in the association of a verb’s concepts with nouns’ meanings. Yum yum yum.
And then one of my colleagues talked about that juiciness, and said, “But maybe that’s not how the writers or today’s speakers would have understood their words.” Which, sure. And in English, for example, the word “car” for the compound “automobile” comes from an ancient word for “chariot.”
But I thought about it for a while, and thought that that deliciousness of association is something valid for me, so long as I yak are not to attribute it to people whose language it is without other support. As a pleasure and aid to me. I hope so, anyway.
framing
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Date: 2025-01-09 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-09 09:28 pm (UTC)I have definitely noticed words in indigenous American languages that are similar to Hawai’ian words, though that startles me. As language restoration pioneers (though I don’t forget Hebrew*), they’ve been consulted by and helped a bunch of indigenous language people on the continent, but the common phonemes have seemed to me likelier to be older than fifty years. (Though, sadly, I don’t specifically remember any. I just remember a surprising number of them going by….)
* Hebrew of course is not only from a different language family, but has a large and varied written corpus in Hebrew Bible, a close descendant in Aramaic, and continued liturgical use. So different heavy lifting, if not less.
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Date: 2025-01-09 10:21 pm (UTC)The only things I know about New World languages have to do with Amazonian languages. Tikuna is a language isolate, but in the same way that any language absorbs words from languages around it, it's absorbed words from other indigenous languages. I sometimes watch Instagram videos from this guy who chats about ancient Tupi, and in one video--the one I linked to--he talks about words meaning "work," and the last word, "porabyky," is very close to the Ticuna word, "poracu." I'd found out in the recorded classes I'm (slowly) watching that there was a lingua franca that was common in the region in the 18th century that had lots of Tupi words, so that's probably how this word entered Ticuna.
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Date: 2025-01-10 05:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-10 02:34 pm (UTC)Anyway, thank you for your kind reply!
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Date: 2025-01-10 02:49 pm (UTC)I was not kind-- I was fascinated! And I am not expecting any sort of completeness or perfection I've imagined in my fevers brain to crucified others on. I just like conversation, and I think that a lot of [the best] conversation is associative.
Thank your putting up with me, and I stand (sit with Gingersnap on me) ready to repent.
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Date: 2025-01-09 08:29 pm (UTC)I love that you can see time frozen in your marsh. It snowed here this morning, but thinly, and didn't stick. It just made the right kind of cloud-light.
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Date: 2025-01-10 07:58 pm (UTC)A scattering of thoughts:
Re frost: I recall seeing frost ice needles during at least one winter during my childhood, but never knew what they were called—I'm glad to know, now, though I'm not eager to see them again! (I'm someone who would rather be too hot than too cold, which was one factor in my settling ~280 miles south of where I grew up...)
Re languages: I am fluent only in English (I had 1 year of Spanish instruction in Jr. High, and 2 years of German in High School), but I really like learning and thinking about bits of other languages. A few anecdotes:
My late father, who was of Irish heritage, worked as a forester for an Apache community, as a young man, and came back with a notebook of some words and phrases in Apache. I pored over the notebook, as a child, and can still count to ten in what purports to be Apache. But when, decades after he left the res, my dad tried out the words on a new Apache acquaintance, the new acquaintance said that the words sounded like they could be from his region, but he didn't recognize them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also re languages, are you familiar with the constructed languages of Láadan and Kesh, developed respectively by Suzette Haden Elgin and Ursula K. Le Guin?
SHE designed Láadan in the hope that it could do a better job of expressing women's experiences than English does. The language plays a part in SHE's (rather emotionally wrenching) novel Native Tongue, and a dictionary was separately produced. The thing I remember liking best about Laádan was the concept of declarative sentences requiring a part of speech that specifies what evidence the speaker has for their declaration. I believe SHE borrowed that from an existing language, but I don't recall which.
UKLeG dreamed up the Kesh language as part of a whole science-fictionally anthropological culture based in post-eco-collapse Northern California's Napa Valley. It's laid out in the novel Always Coming Home, and UKLeG worked with several musicians to compose, perform, and produce a cassette's worth of Kesh songs and storytelling to accompany the book. If I could only bring ten books to exile on a desert island, ACH would be one of the ten I'd pick to bring.
And, back in real life, on one trip to Arizona, I ran across a Navajo-English dictionary in the gift shop of the Heard Museum. I opened it at random, and the first word my eye fell on was the Navajo word for chicken lice. I bought the dictionary immediately! 😄
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Date: 2025-01-10 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-11 12:58 am (UTC)I *so* love the story of your dad's experience with Apache, and then yours. Do you know how long he worked in the Apache community? --It's just wonderful that you adopted that notebook and learned to count to ten--that's the spirit! A spirit I totally identify with. And as for how accurately it represented what the numbers really sound like when pronounced in Apache, well, you were doing your best with what you had! And your dad too, was doing his best to write down what he heard, but it's hard! And after decades, it's not surprising that what your dad was able to say didn't quite get across to his new acquaintance. It's easy for the words to drift when you're only saying them to yourself, with no one to practice them with and not even a chance to hear them spoken. ... We're so lucky nowadays that you *can* go listen to so many language--though it's harder to find indigenous ones. Here's an interesting resource! I haven't checked to see if it has one through ten, but it might!
And yes, chicken lice would be an absolute draw ;-)
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Date: 2025-01-11 03:53 am (UTC)I don't actually know how long Dad worked for an Apache community—my guess would be that it was for at least six months and probably under three years; maybe under two. I do know that it was long enough that he went to the Mountain Spirits Dance ceremony at least once, because he painted his memory of that experience, and I grew up with that painting in our home.
Yes, pronunciation drift in isolation seems much to be expected. Thanks for the link!
Edited to add: the numbers are there, and the words look closely related to what I remember—very cool!😀
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