A Long One

So. I haven't written a post of substance in a while... I haven't even checked Drudge Report for the latest bullshit rumors in half a week... that's a record. But as I prepare for my week of work, I am reflecting on a number of incidents this past week. One incident in particular that will resonate for eons. Maybe that was a little overstated, but I will remember it for a while.

Last Tuesday, mun rakas and I went to Teaneck to get her transcripts translated from Finnish into English for applications into College. Finnish isn't the easiest language to find a translator for, in fact the translator who wound up performing the task didn't know a lick of it. Although he did not know Finnish, he is proficient in, oh, a billion tongues. I asked him, "How many languages do you know?" He replied, "I know the Slavic Languages, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, some Hebrew, some Korean, Arabic, Aramaic and Turkish." I think that was the first time I've heard of anyone answering that question with "I know the Slavic Languages."

The fella was born in a part of what was, at the time, Poland but is now the Ukraine (which is not weak, I might add). He was deported from Poland in 1940 to Kazakhstan. He later emigrated to the United States in 1949 where, presumably, he never left his room without a dictionary, thesaurus, and bottle of Ginkgo Biloba.

We wound up staying in this man's foyer for far too long talking about the peculiarities of dialects and their evolutions, similarities of unrelated languages and the ridiculousness of Finnish with it's twelve tenses and no word for "please."

He wound up telling us the hilarity (maybe I overstated this a bit, howzabout irony) of the transcontinental similarities of the words for father. In the very old languages Hebrew and Arabic, the word for father is Aba and Baba respectively (translated into Roman Characters for the sake of, well, everybody but The Translator). The words here are similar, and if I remember correctly, in Turkish it is most similar to the Arabic, naturally. In Albanian, baba; in Swedish, pappa; in Malay, bapa; swahili, baba; Afrikaans, vader; in Spanish, padre in German, vater, Flemish, vader; yet in Finnish it is isä, and in Georgian it is mama! that's right, mama.

I don't know how many of you find this as interesting as I do so whatever... in the words of our soon-to-be-ousted VP, Go Fuck Yourself. (P.S. If I left off any interesting examples, comment on it.)

So, I laughed when he told me the Georgian word (and for those who don't know where Georgia is, go fuck yourself and Michael Stipe in Athens).

The most intriguing part of the conversation came when he told us about a project he'd been working on for the last millennium... he was trying to write down a biblical phrase in every language. He was eager as a little kid when we told him that mu rakas could give him another in Finnish. He ran to get his sheets of paper and when he scanned through and found that he had Finnish, he let out an accented shriek... the shriek of a 90 year old translator who'd just found that he already had the phrase translated into Finnish. "FINNISH! THERE IT IS! I'VE GOT FINNISH! HA HA!" Then he shook his fist at the sky, as if he was taunting God and Death themselves.

So, what's the damn phrase you ask? "Love thy neighbor as you love yourself" The most interesting part of this is that English is the only language that has this phrase using the word neighbor. Many languages don't even have an identical word to match neighbor. In almost all of the other languages, which numbered over 30, the word neighbor was replaced by "fellow man." When he informed me of this I said that it was because when King James or the Gideons or whatever sacrilegious bastard ruined the old testament, they astutely realized that it was more prudent to instill a sort of patriotism. It is much easier to love thy neighbor and kill your fellow man than the other way around.

Later we spoke about the evolution of language, ebonics, who and whom, and the hilarity of Finnish's twelve tenses (this is not overstated a bit).

I guess tomorrow I will go over the long weekend in which I turned myself into a black man, cooked some sick sea bass, and jerked chicken -- not in that order.