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tmatoes
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Name: Toddy
Country: United States
State: Wisconsin
Metro: Madison
Gender: Male
Interests: Linguistics, History of Literacy and Book Culture
Expertise: The Letters J and V
Occupation: I teach
Industry: University
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/29/2006
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| So I am in the midst of writing my prospectus for my dissertation. It is one of the most difficult things to put into writing that I have done. I think, first of all, in ideas or pictures and putting that into words is a challenge, as always. In addition, to create a linear and tangible thesis from the myriad information makes my head spin. I admire good writers so much - both those in academia and those who write elsewhere. I think of the picture from Le Petit Prince of the snake who swallowed the elephant. Not that I feel like giving up but the bewildering idea of a snake swallowing an elephant. Perhaps the picture just looks better as a hat? | | |
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Mobile Blogging from here.
So it has been so long since I have written an entry in this blog, I am not even sure if it is worth continuing. I am finally back in a two person home again and after a bout with pneumonia, I have a whole partner. Winter is in full swing and I am feeling that the two weeks I spent in phoenix is slowly making less and less of a difference on my demeanor with each passing gray-skied day. Teaching is going extremely well, but it is tiring day after day. I admire full-time teachers more and more.
I am excited with the national elections, though I feel like a little kid, as I want everything to change now. There are many things brewing right now. I will take my prelims in May and who knows what will happen from there.
So many things on the horizon, who knows...
Well enough for now, more soon I hope I dear reader.
Homo homini lupus | | |
| I am taking a seminar this semester called the History of Readers and Reading, and have really enjoyed it thus far. I always thought that I am a more practical person and less of a theoretical type. This seminar has somewhat changed my opinion. So a few weeks ago we were discussing what the word book meant, so I did some work on that etymology and came up with the following answer.
I looked up the meaning of the word book in two places, the 1957 edition of the Cleasby Vigfusson Icelandic-English Dictionary and Ernest Weekley’s An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. Both books state about the same thing. Bók (Old Norse) is related to Old Saxon Bôc, meaning a beech tree. In addition they mean book, in the modern or contemporary sense, but by the following way: bôc meant beech bark, upon which it is believed runes were written. In a sense the generalized and modern meaning of book to mean codex, is not how it began. Originally book was synecdochically related to codex, in that it meant more of a text or writing and not a volume per se. As one can see Modern English has two different words for Beech and Book, but they are related. Modern German has the Words Buche and Buch, Norwegian and Swedish have Bok for both, Icelandic and Old Norse have Bók for both, Modern Danish has Bøg and Bog and Modern Dutch has Beuk and Boek.
I find it fascinating that words are so intertwined. There are many words that can be traced, some that cannot, but each and every word has an entire history, family and path upon which it came to the present. I am a word nerd.
So this was out on State Street (the shopping street for the university here in Madison - Like Mill Ave in Tempe, 4th in Tucson, etc. etc.) Quite a "romantic" idea for Valentine's Day. Better than a greeting card, some overpriced and/or cheap chocolates, I guess. I don't know if I would trust a condom from a pizzeria...
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So as a philology student and now certified and certifiable librarian, without-position, I have taken to working on investigations for myself and others, trying to create a position as a researcher. Perhaps, it is training for the one day that I become a librarian-with-position. Or perhaps it is for when I become a superhero, knocking down naiveté and fighting ignorance for the greater good, oh God who am I kidding, by the time I graduate from school, I fear that all positions as librarians and professors will be obsolete, or I will be dead. Anyway off the hyperbolic and on to the exciting story:
I looked up the use of gray in the Bible. The color gray does not exist in the New Testament at all, which is amazing when you think about all the possibilities, especially old people with out the modern wonders of hair dye in the Bible. Well there is henna/mendhi, but nobody, in my understanding, ever referred to the Israelites as the tribe of red headed elders. The Old Testament does have the color gray, though always pertaining to the color of hair and never describing a creature. Now I know, dear readers (wait, when did you become plural) that you will go out and look and perhaps you will find the Bible that mentions in Leviticus that one may eat a certain gray spotted locust and not offend God, well let me tell you, most Bibles do not translate it that way; the Hebrew word is quite different - Hargol, which oddly enough is transliterated into the Norwegian Bible. (I am really glad that I could look many of these passages up online and compare, rather than having to check out 15 different Bibles just to make a point. Thank you religious right!) So good news! Keep on eating those Hargol/gray spotted locusts and no need to fret about eternal damnation for doing so. I do not know Hebrew, so I cannot comment on the use of gray in Hebrew, however the modern word for gray is Ah-for, which might be related to the word for ashes. Canus seems to be the word of choice for gray hair in Latin, which also means elder. This to me suggests that Latin may not have had a word for gray and had to use Canus to describe being old. If this was done for the Bible or even earlier, I am not sure. It is through interaction with other languages that words coving such "new" concepts like gray come into being. Berlin and Kay go into more detail about the evolution of color terms in their book Basic Color. What I found most interesting about their investigation - which at its time was quite revolutionary, albeit slightly lacking in that its breadth is great but its depth leaves major holes in language families like IE - is the comparison of minority languages. But I will leave it at that...
Now in the interest of feeling a bit nostalgic, I found the following website dedicated to Legend City. I remember I went there only once as a child and probably as a reward for some odd thing, like not sucking my thumb anymore. My parents were not big on theme parks and this one was riddled with problems. Nevertheless, it is really a trip down the old lane o' memories to see the website dedicated to it: click here. Back in the day, Phoenix was such a different place. Not to sound all crotchety or anything, sitting on my porch with my corn-cob pipe and talkin' bout them good ol' days when the youngin's respected their elders, but there was a bit of the old west - cowboy, Texas-style, big steak houses and women in long saloon style dresses and men in jeans, chaps and vests style, that is gone now, and I won't comment on exactly how I feel about that, because I am not quite sure, yet....
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| V got Tenure! Thank God. The weekend has been spent trying to catch up on sleep and de-stress. And this week is Thanksgiving, so the semester's end is nigh...
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