Sometimes I worry about my brain.
So, one thing about me is that I am a linguistic dilettante. I love to start learning new languages, but once they get challenging, I tend to move on to something new. The only language besides English that I really legitimately speak is Bulgarian, but I didn't have a lot of options there, and I was pretty motivated to learn to speak it since I, you know, wanted to be able to communicate with people at an adult level. But I've also taken actual classes in Spanish (next best language - well enough to chat on a superficial level), Hebrew (used to be pretty good at it, now very rusty from disuse), Russian (can read and understand a lot better than I can speak, mostly via Bulgarian cognates), Persian, and Arabic (can't speak either worth a damn). I've also attempted to teach myself French and Turkish. Both went about as well as you would expect.
I have these moments where a word will pop into my mind and I know what it means, but I can't remember what language it's from. It's incredibly disconcerting. I recently ran across a Facebook page that had captions written on a collage of pictures in a non-Latin script that I could obviously read but it took me a full minute of wavering to decide that it was Arabic and not Hebrew. I mean, wtf? Arabic and Hebrew don't even look that much alike. (In my defense??? it was written in a funny typeface.)
This post is brought to you by encountering the phrase Harry Potter Kamen modrosti. Now, I knew immediately that a. this was not a language I speak and b. it's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone. Because I knew that kamen means stone. But I wasn't sure why until I googled it - it's Slovenian. Slovenian is related to Bulgarian, in which stone is kamyn. Which...I know that! I just couldn't place the source of my knowledge, and it was just, yeah, disconcerting is the word.
I have these moments where a word will pop into my mind and I know what it means, but I can't remember what language it's from. It's incredibly disconcerting. I recently ran across a Facebook page that had captions written on a collage of pictures in a non-Latin script that I could obviously read but it took me a full minute of wavering to decide that it was Arabic and not Hebrew. I mean, wtf? Arabic and Hebrew don't even look that much alike. (In my defense??? it was written in a funny typeface.)
This post is brought to you by encountering the phrase Harry Potter Kamen modrosti. Now, I knew immediately that a. this was not a language I speak and b. it's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone. Because I knew that kamen means stone. But I wasn't sure why until I googled it - it's Slovenian. Slovenian is related to Bulgarian, in which stone is kamyn. Which...I know that! I just couldn't place the source of my knowledge, and it was just, yeah, disconcerting is the word.