January 2005
Monthly Archive
God Holding His Breath on Borrowed Time
Posted by gls on 13 Jan 2005 | Tagged as: Language, Polska, Religion
Until I noticed the reference to God being “blue.”
Many words in Polish have dual meanings. Nothing new there — English is loaded with them, my students like to point out.
“Niebieski” in Polish is derived from the word “niebo,” which is “sky” or “heaven.” Immediately we get into trouble, because the sky is a physical, observable phenomenon, while heaven is, at best, theological conjecture.
With such a start, meanings can only slide into more silliness.
The ontological status of the meaning of “niebo” aside, it gets more confusing when we throw the adjectival form into the mix. As expected, “niebieski” means “heavenly.”
However, “niebieski,” as you first learn it in a Polish course, would be “blue.”
Hence, whenever I’m in Mass and hear that we should now direct our prayers “do niebieskiego ojca,” I can’t help but conjure up images of blue deities even though I know the priest is just telling us to direct our prayers to our “heavenly father.”
There are other slippery words in Polish.
“Pożyczyć” is undoubtedly my favorite. It means, “lend.”
And “borrow.”
[Short pause.]
Exactly.
At first, that seems like saying “xidhb” in some language means “black” and “white.” “Lend” and “borrow” have such intrinsically different, though related, meanings that it’s difficult to comprehend that a language exists that represents both ideas with the same word. But it’s really not that different: lending and borrowing both involve a temporary transaction of a given object, with the implicit understanding of said article’s eventual return.
What English throws into the mix is the ownership information. By using the word “borrow,” I make it clear, without any context, that I am lacking something. By using the word “lend,” though, I make it clear that I am the owner.
Ownership in “pożyczyć” is, of course, differentiated; only it’s done grammatically.
- “pożyczyć komuÅ›” is lend. “KomuÅ›” is the dative case for “ktoÅ›,” which means “someone.” And dative case, for those who don’t know, is the case used in inflected languages to indicate the indirect article.
- “pożyczyż od kogoÅ›” is borrow. “Od kogoÅ›” means “from someone,” which makes the direction of the transaction (and hence ownership) clear.
Beginning students (and, to my dismay, students with some experience with English) often confuse these two English words, and come up with, “Can you borrow me your pen for a moment?” or
“I can borrow you this or that.”
More linguistic ambiguity:
- The words for “lock,” “zipper,” and “castle” are all the same: zamek.
- The words for “pigeon” and “dove” are the same, resulting in students coming up with an interesting construction: Pigeons of Peace.
But linguistic ambiguity is a two-way street, and soon I’ll delve into the wild world of “things that mess with Polish students’ heads.”
Frying Mr. Teddy
Posted by gls on 11 Jan 2005 | Tagged as: Language, Polska
Recently I mentioned the absurdity of the “Freedom Fries” wave sweeping across Patriotic Probably-Mostly-Republican America. Language is a living thing, and we can’t read current politics into a word’s etymology, I argued.
An amusing example of this in Polish: the word “pan.”
In modern usage, it has the meaning of “mister,” as in, “Mr. Scott” being “Pan Scott.” “Mrs.” is “Pani,” and on a side not, I know from an Indian friend that “pani” is Hindi for “water.”
Linguistic webs aside, “pan” would also be translated to French as “vous,” or to German as “Sie.” So when speaking to a stranger in Polish, you speak to them in third person singular out of respect. (Unless you live in the mountains down south and are speaking a dialect, and then it’s like French: second person plural.)
Armed with only this knowledge and some elementary Polish, you’ll be in for an amusing surprise when you go to Mass, because you’ll hear God referred to as “Pan Bóg.”
“Mr. God?” was my first surprised reaction.
More digging.
“Pan” also, and originally, means something like “master,” in the sort of 18th-century, English manor sense. So the patriotic Mickiewicz poem Pan Tadeusz wouldn’t be translated, as a Pole joked with me, “Mr. Teddy,” but rather, “Master Tad” (Source).
And so now “Pan Bóg” makes since: it’s simply “Lord,” or even “the Lord God.” When I learned all this, I stopped snickering under my breath whenever I rarely attended Mass with a friend.
Until I noticed the reference to God being “blue.”
Metablogging
Posted by gls on 08 Jan 2005 | Tagged as: General
CW Fisher wrote about the proliferation of “I” in blogs, then amended those thoughts with one of the best pieces I’ve read about blogging. In a comment,
Isaac wrote,
Fascinating stuff”¦ this whole blog phenom just hasn’t straightened itself out yet, so who knows what kind of writing to call it? And remember — rules for writing should increase accessibility and help convey messages; not serve as prescriptive left-over remnants of the past.
Isaac is right — this is an entirely new form of writing. It’s certainly spawned its fair share of vocabulary. Blog, blogger, blogging, blogosphere, blog rolling and many others have in a short period of time gone from oblivion to cliché. I hate all those words — they sound almost obscene, but I’m too lazy to go about re-inventing vocabulary.
I’m new to the web log scene, and before then, I’d never even really read that many of them. I started writing online because a friend bought me the domain name and, already having a web site, I had to so something with it. I’m not new to daily writing, though, as I’ve kept a journal for over twelve years, amassing close to two million words in that time.
Yet blogging is not journaling.
Nor, as Isaac implied, is it like any other form of writing.
Privacy issues and instant, world-wide accessibility aside, there is one thing about blogging that makes it different from almost all other forms of writing. It’s the activity I’m engaged in right now — metablogging. Blogging about blogging.
Since I’ve been exploring the blog world, I’ve found that we tend to write an amazing amount about what we and others are doing to the blogosphere. Of course it is a world of pundits musing, rambling, ranting, and a host of other blog-clichés about anything from seeing Star Wars trailers online to grieving the loss of a wife, but what I see more often than anything else is blogging about blogging.
The blogging world is a giant printer cable swallowing its own tail, very often publishing about publishing.
How boring.
He says in self-indictement.
So why do we all do it? We’re all enamored with this new technology we’re creating — writing about blogging is standing before a mirror. It’s preening. And it’s the one thing all bloggers have in common. That’s why the post I’ve written on blog-related topics have gotten the most comments. Not everyone cares about Poland or religion (my two favorite topics, truth be told), but most people who bump through care about blogging.
Yet this is somewhat logical, this metablogging, because blogs cannot exist in a vacuum. How many blogs, after all, are there which have no links to other blogs? Before the advent of Blog Explosion and similar sites, blogging was a more organic activity. Manually inserting links, then blog rolling was how everyone kept track of blogs, and how everyone else discovered new ones. Blog Explosion tends to make it a bit more commercial, especially given the fact that we can buy credits. This explains why we see “Pro-Life Blogs” appear time and time again on Blog Explosion. Throw together a banner and we all can have our cyber billboards.
Yet despite Blog Explosion and similar tools, checking out your favorite blogs’ links is still the best way to find interesting reading, and so we’re all still dependent on each other, which goes some way in explaining why we love to blog about blogging.
The question of why we blog about blogging is overshadowed by the larger, more blog-existential question: Why do we even keep a blog at all? If you’re reading this, chances are you keep a blog. Why? Most people blog like they live: without thinking.
I’m not well-read on blogs (probably never will be — there’s too much crap out there), but among all those I’ve ready, only once have I found an expression of the philosophy behind the blogging, an answer to the question, “Why am I doing this?”
Fr. Thomas Dowd, keeper of the blog Waiting in Joyful Hope writes that the philosophy behind his blog is simple:
One item, once per day, inspired by something that happened that day. [. . .] Sometimes my blog will have a direct reflection on my day, other times it will seem to be a more “theoretical” reflection, but I can guarantee that it is (almost) always inspired by something from that day.
A philosophy — why I’m doing this. It’s a great idea. When I ask myself, I’ve no answer.
Because I got the domain name? Hardly a reason.
I must come up with some better reason to continue.
