Inglés

Hello there! This post is brought to you by a e-mail forward I got from Grammy (my mother's mother) this morning about the lunacy of the English language.

An Ode to English Plural We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes. One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice. If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen? If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth? Then one may be that, and three would be those, Yet hat in the plural would never be hose, And the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother and also of brethren, But though we say mother, we never say methren. Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim! Let's face it - English is a crazy language! There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England. We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane! In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.. We have noses that run and feet that smell... We park in a driveway and drive on a parkway.

I think about things like this all the time, even more so here in Spain. English is weird and I don't envy the people that learn it, but nonetheless it is becoming a worldwide language. Many of the Erasmus students (people studying abroad from other countries in Europe) speak English better than Spanish and speak it amongst each other. One of the biggest "moments" I've had is about eggplant. Where did that name even come from?

Some brief investigation has maybe proven my suspicion of German influence. However, Aubergine appears in the German page too, and aubergine is french and in Spanish it is berenjena, relatively similar. I thought to look in Italian, expecting a word similar its "Romantic" cousins but the word is melanzana! That really threw me for a loop, because it just looks like a hybrid of the words for apple in Italian (mela) and Spanish (manzana)! I'm seriously tempted to go on a linguistic scavenger hunt to discover how the deviations came to be but, as usual, I have more important things to attend to.

Speaking of important things, yesterday I got the CERF, course equivalency request form, submitted so soon I should be finding out the credits I'll be getting for my classes this semester. That process got me thinking that before too long, I'll be selcting my classes for the fall semester back in Madison! I really dislike having to think about things so far in advance, it's just unnecessary anxiety that I definitely don't need in my life. There has been productivity in my life, though. I read a short play for my siglo XVIII lit. class in periods of time from Tursday night to yesterday afternoon. La comedia nueva (The New Play), Leandro Fernández de Moratín.

On an unrelated note, I made French toast for breakfast this morning. It was delicious, but I've never wanted maple syrup more in my life!