isoglossia

Many months ago we were contacted by a French publishing house claiming interest in one of our pictures for use on a Slovene language textbook they were putting out. We exchanged a few emails, found out they were serious but pauvre, and agreed to allow use of the photo in exchange for the enormous fame we’d get out of having a picture on the cover of a language textbook. Here’s what we got in the mail yesterday:

The picture is a remarkably badly executed panoramic view of Ljubljana’s famed Prešeren Square that I made in May of 2005 (relatively small ‘large’ version is on Flickr here).

Apart from the card of thanks from Maurice Chevalier, my favorite thing about this is the fact that Magda and Adam have been immortalized on the cover of a French-Slovene textbook, for which the market is no doubt burgeoning. Check it out:

While you wait for Flickr to make you famous, why not read this excellent series of articles about how to position yourself to get more than a free book and some remerciements out of your photographs?

“Right now, every day, people with the power to pluck you out of obscurity are cruising Flickr. They are looking at photographs and at photographers.”

By the way, as neither of us can claim to speak French, and our prowess with Slovene is legend, these language-learning materials are up for grabs. In the unlikely event that our vast readership includes a Francophone who is dying to learn Slovene, drop us a comment or email promising a good home to the book and CD, and we’ll happily put them in the mail to vous.

One of our favorite sports is watching Adam learn to talk. Right now, for example, there is a little phonetic puzzle ^[1] that entertains us no end. When confronted with an English word beginning in S + consonant, he converts it to F ^[2]. You need to know this when you hear him comparing the sizes of objects and he says, “dis one big, dat fall” (the copula ^[3] has long been on his ‘optional features in English’ list, too), or that he wants to eat his cereal with a ‘foon’. This personal phonetic rule is especially fortuitous when you take him for sladoled and he asks for a flavor called ‘Smarties’, but bizarrely it doesn’t obtain in Slovene or Polish ^[4]. In spite of such handicaps, he is making amazing progress in all three languages, but still it all accrues so slowly at times that when a great leap does occur, it really makes you sit up and take notice.

Watching the syntactical puzzle pieces fall into place is intriguing. Adam disdains yes/no questions and is a big fan of the one word sentence. For example, in reply to a question such as “Adam, do you want some juice?” he is likely to answer, “WANT”. If he overhears us talking about how we are out of coffee, he will look up from his Thomas and advise, “BUY” like a stockbroker caricature. Inflection ^[5] is spotty, with no distinction between “Adam do dis” and “Papa do dat”. Interestingly, the things he gets, or doesn’t get, in one language don’t always correspond to the other two he’s picking up. It all makes my brain hurt.

So it was that an electrical current zapped through the room last night when his mother directed a question in English to the Big-Person Grownup Chair at the end of the table where Adam now eats, freed at last from the shackles and tyranny of the Chair That Is High ^[6]:

“Adam, are you eating your sausages?”

Without even glancing up from his Tweety-Bird plate, my son carelessly deployed a flawless example of present continuous aspect ^[7], ‘be’ included. The boy is beginning to get on it.

So at least he knows what we mean when we tell him, ‘Adam, you are so fart’.

NOTES FOR REAL LINGUISTS:
^[1] I don’t know why this link is here.
^[2] The rule is actually a good deal more complex than this, but see the part about my brain hurting.
^[3] Yes, yes, I know, but if you think I am going to get into stuff about predicates and complements and non-copular functions just when my traffic is increasing, you underestimate how shallow I can be.
^[4] This really does cry out for some analysis. I will get on it right after ‘My Name Is Earl’.
^[5] See note 3.
^[6] Just one of many non-funny semi-linguistic ‘jokes’ going on in our house. Want to come over and see our Oil that is Baby?
^[7] Let’s just not even get into this, okay?

A few weeks back I received an email from one of my sisters, a typical email, an everyday, ordinary email, containing the word ‘atlatl’. Though I have a number of sisters, I have only one who is likely to use this word in an idle fashion.

So a few weeks go by and I am moved to reply to this email. What’s more, I feel the need to refer to the atlatls she mentioned. Typing ‘atlatl’ into the pristine whiteness of a text field produces a dotted red underlining which is Firefox’s way of alerting you to a misspelling or typo. This spellchecker is a new addition since Firefox version 2.0, and I am usually happy to have it enabled — it’s especially good for catching typos in blog comment fields. Right-clicking pulls up a context menu with suggestions for what you may have intended to type (above you can see what the dictionary thinks ‘atlatl’ was meant to be), as well as the option of adding the unknown word to the dictionary’s pool of knowledge.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that Firefox is ignorant of this word even if my sister is not. But sometimes the suggestions are pretty outrageous (see the last two offerings for ‘atlatl’).

Of course, I had to inform my sister that the onboard dictionary was unaware of the atlatl and that I was adding the word to the database, just in case I ever have reason to refer to paleolithic dart-launchers again. I find I spend a lot of time educating my dictionary, and there are times when we disagree. For example, on certain compound words:

I am a bit surprised that Firefox’s creators did not make the dictionary a little more web-savvy, given what most users are doing with this browser all day and night:

Related: Firefox seems to be ignorant of the string i + capitalized noun/verb, screening out iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, iSquint (well, okay), etc. Interestingly, ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Colbert’ gave no trouble.

At some point subsequent to the adding of ‘atlatl’ to my Firefox dictionary I typed the word ‘dumbassery’ and of course this got flagged, too:

Use of email in blog posts:
Banjeroo’s thirteen-year-old emails
A Copper Cylinder’s maiden post deconstructs an email from his brother
‘Deconstruct’ should be ‘reconstruct’, says Firefox.

How to: edit your Firefox dictionary
Download additional dictionaries (including Slovene and five varieties of English)

Thematically related: Violations

Me: Say ‘boo’
Adam: buuu
Me: ya
Adam: auuh
Me: ka
Adam: kuh
Me: sha
Adam: tchuh
Me: booyakasha!
Adam: BUUAUUHKUHTCHUH!
Me: aiit?
Adam: aiit!

The original language acquistion was here.

Ali G. last referenced here.

Just the facts:

• On the A4 outside Verona, Italy
• In most European languages, /u/ is pronounced like /oo/ in English
• Michael Manske at The Glory of Carniola maintains a category called “Things you probably won’t see in the U.S.”
• Ballpark Franks^® found that ‘girthy’ was not the most appealing catch-phrase for their frankfurter product
• Woody Harrelson does not eat cooked frankfurters. Or indeed any frankfurters.
• In South America there is a brand of frozen hamburger patties called Barfy^®