who only by moving can balance

tavern (Latin taberna) and town (German Zaun i.e. a fence)...

... except then you go back a bit further and "taberna" is PIE *treb-, "wooden beam", which sounds like it might be related back to fencing, and indeed is the source of the German Dorf "village", which is a bit like a town...

... but no! because town is in fact derived from PIE *dʰewh₂- ("to finish, come full circle"), via hill forts.

Obviously.

Irish, answers: freagrann (etymology)
German, to ask: fragen (etymology)


I take some comfort from the fact that having spotted why it keeps tripping me up I might finally learn it...

Lo these many years ago, I had Pride and Prejudice as a GCSE set text, and I loved it. I think it was the following summer, between secondary school and sixth form, that I decided to read the rest of them, though it might very well also have been between sixth form and university, or 2012 after the antidepressants had kicked in but before the start of the academic year had rolled back around. Regardless, my mother had remarked upon my reading to a friend, or colleague, or friendly colleague, who responded, wistfully, that I was awfully lucky to be reading so much of Austen for the first time.

I was distinctly unimpressed with all of them.

I spent them going "ah, this is this book's Mr Collins", or "ah, this is this book's Wickham", and so on and so forth, with impatience and no small degree of disappointment, and while I've reread P&P many times since and got more out of it every time, I didn't return to any of the others until Thursday, when I picked Persuasion back up.

It transpires that one of the advantages of (relative) age is a much greater appreciation of Austen's terribly dry and wonderfully crisp snark about absolutely everything, which I'm enjoying a very great deal if a touch ruefully; and as a bonus, I remember very little of any of the text or plots except for faint glimmers of... a walk? through a park? perhaps in Sense and Sensibility? -- so I'm getting to experience them anew again.

All of which is to say that I'm very much enjoying reading Jane Austen for the "first" time, and also, seeing "innoxious" written down made me realise that "innocuous" is from Latin nocere (to harm or hurt), so that's some extra entertainment for me and I am well pleased by it.

words that are (much) less related than I expected them to be: berbere, peri-peri, berberis/barberry.

Via Amnesty pushing a human rights-related FutureLearn course at me a few weeks ago, I shook the site to see what else fell out & found there was another round of Irish 101 due to start soon. I made one previous attempt at it but gave up during I think week two (or possibly three?) of four, because the approach really wasn't working for me with the level of knowledge I had then -- I was getting anxious and unhappy about being handed set phrases to learn by rote with no unpacking of how they were constructed or what the vocabulary meant, and about unit titles I similarly didn't understand at all, and I was probably in the middle of an essay crisis (as is ever the way), so I was feeling overwhelmed enough that I just... stopped.

And carried on with Duolingo.

And now I feel like Duolingo's given me enough basic vocabulary and grammar overview that I'm getting a whole lot more out of this second attempt at Week 1: I understand how the phrases are made up! I can look at the proverb of the week (seanfhocal na seachtaine) and not only understand more of what's going on in the grammar of the headline (focal = word, cognate vocabulary, lenited in compound; na "of" rather than plural definite article; seachtaine = week, genitive, I think) but pick out most of the words! Tús maith leath na hoibre, a good start is half the work, where "maith" is "good" and "na hoibre" is "of the work" (work: oibreobair), leaving me with tús presumably being "start" (yep! just looked it up) and leath being "half" and, thus, two new words and a sense of accomplishment.

I couldn't make head nor tail of the proverb last time. Fingers crossed for Week 2.

As I occasionally mention, I'm learning Turkish on Duolingo, partly for interest (second non-Indo-European language! agglutination! vowel & consonant harmony!) and partly because it's turned out to be rather more useful in my day-to-day life than I anticipated when I started (for reasons various).

One of the things I find really very soothing about Turkish is that it's a language that doesn't have grammatical gender, and doesn't have gendered pronouns. Unfortunately, Duolingo hasn't quite caught up with current usage, which means that translations of the third-person singular pronoun "o" get marked wrong unless you use "he" or "she" (rather than "they"); obviously I stubbornly default to translating as "she".

I am also, As We Know, really very fond of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, which "she" as the universal gender-irrelevant third-person singular.

Taken together, this means I'm occasionally catching myself defaulting to gender-irrelevant/gender-unknown usage of "she" in English, and possibly drifting slightly more towards third-person singular "they" as indicating a specific gender space.

I am, as you might well imagine, rather facepalmy over the Entire Situation.

We are, in this household, quite fond of the millenial (anglosphere?) pursuit of saying two words, pausing, and then smooshing them together.

This means that several plum just emanated from the kitchen, followed shortly thereafter by ... sum? and then, with great satisfaction, sum.

I, meanwhile, am still pleased about one of my utterances from a few weeks ago, while cooking a stirfry. Oh no, I said, in some dismay: floorgette.[1]

Which was also particularly satisfying because it made a truly resounding plap, that being also the noise of the pigeons waddling industriously around on the patio.

[1] floor + courgette

Reading. Still, slowly, The Audacity of Hope.

TV. Another couple of episodes of Leverage, in which Eliot was inexplicably bad at making sandwiches.

Growth. So many plant. So many upcoming plant. (Trying not to go "but greenhouse? D: D: D:" now that I have bought a different greenhouse, but also, GREENHOUSE.)

Living space. We! Are back in London! And slowly unpacking. (I say "back in London": actually we're currently both in Cambridge, my at my parents' and A at a LARP thing, where I have dropped some bits off and am gently sitting around on the Internet, talking about genealogy and occasionally being fed; at some point there will doubtless be Scrabble.) Additionally and furthermore, A has been shifting from Wunderlist to Trello, and is sufficiently convinced by it he wants to stick, so while I was procrastinating this morning I moved all of our shared house lists over and made Very Important Decisions about Which Succulents to have as backgrounds. (I'm in the process of moving my own lists over, too.)

And now that we're back for real, in a house that... is actually ours... that we're expecting to stay in for at least the medium term... I'm having a think about rearranging furniture for more efficient and pleasant use of space. Conclusions mostly reached; enactment blocked on garage storage arriving. Interestingly, I'm... actually not missing Belfast, yet. There was a lot of it that was nice! I miss having multiple bathrooms! I'm also really glad to be home.

Language. I took the "quite a lot of signage is bilingual" hint, my last few weeks in Belfast, and finally started learning Irish on Duolingo. On the one hand I'm finding adjusting to the orthography and pronunciation mildly interesting; on the other, I do keep... finding it gently amusing... that they're very earnestly explaining slender versus broad vowels, and the general concept of vowel harmony, Very Much For Anglophones: "broad" vowels, which (approximately) I know as "dark" vowels from German, these being the vowels that take umlauts, and as far as vowel harmony goes there are fewer vowels than Turkish okay. (Sorta, mostly.) I am gradually acquainting myself with consonantal conventions. It is not the Celtic I had planned to learn first -- I'd been aiming for the Brythonics, the Welsh-Cornish-Breton branch, rather than the Goidelics, on account of the mouldering ancestral pile being in Cornwall, our familial surname being associated with the Brythonics, etc etc, but nevertheless here is where I find myself.

On the topic of Brythonics, though, I was delighted that I did in fact manage to pretty much just parse "Sẃ Mor" on a roadsign in North Wales on our way home: apparently I can tolerably well work out that "Sẃ" is the loan of the Greek "zoo", and "mor" I am familiar with as "sea" because, well, Cornwall, innit. V pleasing.

spot the difference!

preferment: the selection of clergy to hold positions of senior office in the Church (of England) (largely obsolete)
preferment: a preparation of a portion of a bread dough that is made several hours or more in advance of mixing the final dough

my recreational reading, you see, currently includes a nontrivial amount of Austen and a nontrivial amount of The Theory Of Sourdough. APPARENTLY in this modern day and age we don't believe in clarifying punctuation. as a result I am spending a lot of time being very confused about theology.

Specifically, the ableist issues with metaphorical deployment of "using something as a crutch" are well-documented. FwD suggests the alternative "training wheels", which never really worked for me; something about the connotations, I think.

I've just noticed that "using ... as a buttress" really does: while buttresses are reassuring and nice to look at, they fundamentally arise because we didn't understand physics so couldn't build things that stayed up without them. As we've deepened and developed our understanding of the world and our place in it they become superfluous: there are less visible and more efficient ways to achieve the same effect, but they require thought and work.

Which has a different flavour, to me, around whether there's an expected stepping stone to build confidence (as training wheels so often are), or whether one is fundamentally struggling to replace a maladaptive approach that was the best that could be done at the time but has been rendered obsolete, if you can get the budget and the time and the support to do the upgrade work.