Friday

[nightdog_barks]

Sunny and warming up -- 61 right now (16.11 C), and it's supposed to get up to 67 or so today. Will probably go get a haircut and stop by the store. A little earlier there was a wren in the house -- I have the back door open a bit, and one found its way in. It investigated the Norfolk pine that's close by, then flew under the kitchen table and peered underneath the top. Then it sat on one of the chairbacks for a moment, and finally departed in a whir of wings. That's what they always do (this has happened before) -- they come in, poke around for a minute, then fly back out.

So. Here's another bit from The Possessed, occurring after a distant uncle of Elif's had married an Uzbek beauty named Lola:

Everyone would always ask my uncle: "How do you live with someone you can't communicate with?" And my uncle always shouted: "Uzbek Turkish is very close to our Turkish language!"

I hadn't believed my uncle, partly because he was crazy -- hadn't he spent his later years in a gardening shed in New Jersey, writing a book about string theory and spiders? -- and partly because, in my experience, Turkish people thought that every language was close to our Turkish language. Many times I had been told that Hungarian was related to Turkish, and the Hungarians and Turks descended from the same Altaic peoples, that Attila the Hun was Turkish, and so on. When I went to Hungary, however, I discovered that Hungarians do not share these beliefs at all. "Of course we have some Turkish words in our language," they would say. "For example, handcuffs. But that's because you occupied our country for four hundred years."

Comments

[felis-nocturna.livejournal.com]

because I couldn't remember you spelling things with a "u"

Ha. I do that at times, because we were taught British English at school. But the impertinent LJ spellcheck tells me it's wrong every time...