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Since the raging seas and stormy winds parted my love and I
I dreamed that I won the right to a cameo mention as some kind of Boston-area folkloric creature in Margaret Ronald's latest novel by singing "The Lowlands of Holland" in a kulfi shop. You ordered a particular flavor, they asked you to sing for it. I had that terrible real-life blankness that seizes the brain when you know literally more songs than you count and someone says vaguely but encouragingly, having no idea of this, "I don't know, whatever you feel like." Turned out one of the other patrons knew the same version; we wound up trading off harmonies. Is there a kulfi shop anywhere in Boston?
. . . This is probably the most realist dream I've had in months.
My poem "Theseid" has been accepted by Not One of Us.
. . . This is probably the most realist dream I've had in months.
My poem "Theseid" has been accepted by Not One of Us.
random linguistic rambling
The actual letter is -- well, in Urdu, it's ق, which is often transliterated with a Q. I could cut and paste from Wikipedia for the Hindi spelling, but I don't actually know what I'm talking about there. I don't know any Urdu either, to be honest, just a smattering of half-forgotten Arabic, but I can tell you that in at least most Arabic dialects I learned about, K and Q are in fact distinct sounds.
The ق/Q is pronounced differently in various Arabic dialects (close to a G, a glottal stop, etc), but in the Modern Standard I mostly learned it's a back-of-the-throat sound like a crow's call. Quite different from the middle-of-the-mouth K, but it took me a good year or two to learn to reliably say it and to hear the difference. A "voiceless uvular plosive," says Wikipedia, which sounds reasonable to me; I was never any good with phonetics terminology.
Again, I don't actually know any Hindi-Urdu, and I don't think I've heard the word said, so I have no idea how kulfi/qulfi is usually pronounced, and whether the k/q distinction is a relevant one. (A quick look at Wikipedia leads me to believe it is, but... Wikipedia. I add a spoonful of salt to that.) But have some half-educated linguistic rambling anyway!
no subject
The same distinction exists in Akkadian: q is emphatic where k is not; it's died out of modern Israeli Hebrew, but I believe there are other dialects which kept it. Greek also used to have a qoppa, but I think it was gone by the fifth century BCE. I can't pronounce any of the Akkadian emphatics correctly, but at least I know they exist.
But have some half-educated linguistic rambling anyway!
Linguistic rambling is always appreciated! I didn't know you knew Arabic.
no subject
Does it! That's fascinating, if not hugely surprising. I wish I knew more about the ancient languages of the area, but then I wish I knew more about just about every language in existence... Still, very cool.
I knew about Hebrew, at least sort of, in that I took a semester of conversational (modern Israeli) Hebrew in college. I've forgotten nearly all of it, but I remember noticing that, and also the variety of S and T sounds which our teacher told us to pronounce the same but which I instantly mapped to Arabic letters which do have distinctions.
I didn't know you knew Arabic.
I did my undergrad degree in Middle Eastern Studies, back in 2000-2004, so I studied Arabic for most of college, and spent a semester in Cairo. (Mostly I learned Modern Standard, but I acquired some bits of Egyptian dialect on the fly.) I'm woefully out of practice, and I've forgotten most of the vocabulary and grammar I once knew. It's been erased by both time and being in better practice with other languages. Still, some of the fundamentals have stuck around, and if I ever get free time and free brain to brush up on my Arabic, I might try. It's a fascinating language, and it always feels like such a waste to forget skills one used to have.
no subject
Basically, yeah.
and also the variety of S and T sounds which our teacher told us to pronounce the same but which I instantly mapped to Arabic letters which do have distinctions.
I believe Akkadian ṭ is equivalent to Hebrew ט, which has just turned into another straight-up t-sound in the modern form; non-emphatic t in Akkadian is equivalent to ת. There are three forms of s in Akkadian—s, ṣ, and š—which still have corresponding phonemes in Hebrew, which for some reason this comment is refusing to post in correct Unicode (samekh, tsadi, and shin). And at this point we begin to run out of comparatives I can do off the top of my head, because my knowledge of Hebrew is actually minimal.
(Mostly I learned Modern Standard, but I acquired some bits of Egyptian dialect on the fly.)
That's great. I hope you get the chance to revive it.
no subject
Amen, sister!
no subject
Correct. The Tiberian Masoretic standard had /q/ for ק, as do some of the Musta‘rib pronunciations of Hebrew today. Yemenite Hebrew has /g/, and Iraqi Hebrew has something which sure sounds to me like /χ/, but supposedly is different.
no subject
Thank you.
Re: random linguistic rambling
I've always sort of wanted to learn Arabic,* but never got round to it.**
But have some half-educated linguistic rambling anyway!
Always fun, that. And you're ahead of me--the best I was able to manage was thinking that the first consonant in kulfi sounds a little bit like the Irish broad-c, but without the hint of a w-glide at the end that my dialect would tend to put there if it occurs in an initial or a medial context.
*A PhD student from Near Eastern Studies who took my favourite history professor's Ireland and India class told me I should learn Persian instead. If she'd offered to teach me, I'd have taken her up on it, but no such luck. A pity, really: "Let's learn each others' languages" has always struck me as the ultimate in delightfully geeky pickup lines.
**Realistically speaking I'll spend the rest of my life just trying to speak Irish at a level I find acceptable, and maybe I'll manage to get my French back, and once that's done there's enough Swedish to properly berate my grandmother's shade for all the years she pretended to never have spoken it, and Yiddish...