Since the raging seas and stormy winds parted my love and I

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[genarti]

The same distinction exists in Akkadian

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.

[sovay]

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...

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.