Weird/Not Weird

The only thing that’s strange is that nothing is strange. Dropped into a foreign land, yet not at all foreign.

After our departure in September 2017, we kept in the back of our minds the desire to get back to Europe some day in the future. But after four serious moves* in only two and a half years, we were hoping to stay put for a while. If for no other reason than to take a rest. We bought property, we were happy to be near the kids and family... Time for a breather. Time to discover a little of what America had to offer, after 19 years abroad.

And then... Opportunity knocked, and here we are back in Stuttgart (five moves in under four years).

The first weeks, we were pinching ourselves. Differently from the last moves, we knew where everything was, how everything worked. The German began flowing again. We found our favorite running trails, our favorite grocery products, our old friends, our familiar sights. We slipped back into this life as if we were coming home.

It's a weird thing, but the little, unassuming leaf at right encompasses more than you'd think.

The next several pictures show some of the sights we've returned to, and are appreciating to the fullest. (Click to see them larger)

* Stuttgart-Tbilisi (Nov 15); Tbilisi-Stuttgart (Nov 16); Stuttgart-Honolulu (Sep 17); Honolulu-Washington D.C. (Apr 18)

Closing the circle on a series of revelations

Riding along the Neckar river the other weekend, we came upon some navigational locks. I couldn't think of the German word. I asked Anne for the French word to see if that would jog anything. While it didn't jog my memory for the German word (I had to ask a passerby), it did jog something else... Here are the links in my chain of thought:

1. How do you say river/canal lock in French? L'écluse
2. Well that's like English close and all those other latinate words with the -cl- root, such as exclude and French clef (key)
3. Makes sense because locking and closing are thematically and linguistically close, shall we say
4. German for this kind of lock is Schleuse
5. Well that's like English sluice
6. And sluice is like German schliessen which is to close.

And thus, the circle is closed.

Let's look more closely at some Germanic, Latinate, and other Indo-European words for a river lock. In addition to above, we have the following:

• la chiusa (Italian)
• l'esclusa (Spanish)
• Sluis (Dutch)
• šliuzas (Lithuanian)
• ecluză (Romanian)
• shlyuz (шлюз, Russian and Ukrainian. All the Slavic languages I sampled save Croatian have some variation of this, but I think it's probably a borrowing from the sea-faring Dutch, where Peter the Great got most of the Russian empire's maritime terminology) 
• sluse (Danish)
• kliewi (Maltese)
• etc.

It's no surprise why this river/canal navigational aid has these names: they require water to be closed in and sluiced out. But it's fun when one word knocks a whole bunch of other words into place in my brain.  

(Photo reposted from Popular Mechanics online article, "7 of the World's Most Impressive Canal Locks," by Tim Newcomb, 13 Dec 2016, accessed 5 Oct 2019)

Guess Who's Back

Right. So it's been about a year since the last post, and before that another year, and before that about four years. I've decided to cave in to the overwhelming popular demand and resurrect this little corner of Cyberia. I'm going to shift focus in A Little Light Writing away from exclusively language and photography, and make it more of a place I provide updates to the one or two people I know want them.

Why?

I quit Facebook over a year ago, for a number of reasons -- not least of which was the sour feeling FaceBookLife had begun generating.

I'm also currently on an Instagram cleanse. I had started an account to showcase my photography (go see it! @yash.holbrook). Which was fine, but two things happened: 1) I began taking more photos with my phone than with my real camera, and 2) I wasted a lot of time scrolling through my feed and those of others. I'll eventually go back once I've broken the habit, but for now I'm just trying to be bored -- i.e., not tickle my eyes with little squares, and not thinking of things I see in terms of whether it would look good as a little square.

But I'm still taking pictures I would ordinarily share on FB or IG, outlets I've now cut off. So I will start using this blog as that outlet. So let's start with my morning's ride to work through my Stuttgart forests. In particular, a misty sunny October morning at Bärensee.

(A favorite picture spot)

I'll take this opportunity to highlight these are not iPhone pictures.

Sunday Morning in Hawaii (Feb 2018)

As an east-coast November kicks off, I find myself sometimes drifting in my mind to the Pacific. Here's where I tend to go:

One February Sunday, a gray and forbidding morning, I got out the door even before my first coffee. My aim was to grab a cup at the Island Brew Cafe on the marina, and go watch the waves rolling into Sunrise Beach. This being a Sunday, formal “sunrise” was already in the past, but the overcast made the point moot. I packed a camp chair into the car, put on some water shoes, and headed out.

When I got to the water, I grabbed the chair and planted it in the sand. There were only a few shore fisherman on one side of a berm, and just me and the waves on the other.

The surf was wild. The evening before, I had noticed the most energetic wave action crashing at China Walls, and apparently the churn was still on. The air was thick with sea mist. I looked west and saw the looming hulk of Koko Crater, a greenish gloom against the pewter sky. The top of the crater seemed almost disconnected from the earth, cut off by the whitish salt mist.

It wasn’t windy, but the waves were piling in and piling on, crashing into each other before beating onto the rocks. The air was visible up and down the beach, but not if I looked straight out. I could taste salt on my lips. I sat and sipped, watching the turmoil as the waves broke and pushed into the rocky tidal pools a dozen yards from me, then sluiced back out through the ragged crannies.

My coffee was finished, but I sat and watched. I’ve found that, despite telling myself it’s time to move on, I can't tear myself away from the water. My daughter once called the rolling surf mesmerizing, and that’s exactly what it is. It casts a spell that you don’t want to break. Turning your back on the surf is hard.

After 45 minutes, I walked barefoot into the tidal pool directly in front of me. I egg-shelled over the slippery, eroded volcanic rock into the clear pool. The cold shock of the first contact phased quickly to inviting, and my feet sank into in the sand. Up to my knees in clear water, I waited while more pushed into and out of the pool where I was standing.

It took me another half hour to slowly pull back, imagining weirdly that part of me was sluicing out with the water as it rushed away from the shore.

Shifty Double Agents (revisited)

In this post, we take a second look at the curious, and curiously similar, double lives of the verbs to hew and to cleave.

Part One: How “K” can equal “H” 

In Hewing and Gluing (March 2012), I explored how cleave and hew both mean “to chop, split, cut,” etc. and, strangely, the very opposite of splitting: “sticking to” or “staying close to.” I concluded by noting how odd it was that these two very distinct verbs, which don't appear to be linguistically related, could both share that same, strange conceptual double duty. I posited that perhaps the two words were, in fact, not so distinct from each other after all. I wondered whether the similarity the two words share goes beyond the conceptual. Whether, in fact, the words themselves might be “physically” related — or, in other words, cognate.

Since those first musings, I’ve learned about “Grimm’s Law,” a consonant shift that occurred a couple thousand years ago, breaking what would become the Germanic branch of Indo-European (IE) off from the main stem and its resulting non-Germanic IE descendants.[1] According to this pattern of shifts, some IE consonants changed in the Germanic branch: IE “p” became Germanic “f”, “t” became “th”, “b” became “p”, “d” became “t”, and so on for roughly a baker’s dozen consonants. Including “k” shifting to “h”.

Linguists have noted “k”-to-“h”-shifted cognates between, say, Latin and its descendants on one hand, and proto-Germanic and its descendants on the other. The following table illustrates some examples, by first presenting a reconstructed Proto Indo-European (PIE) root, then a Latin word derived from that root, a modern French word derived from the root, a modern German, “h”-shifted word derived from the same root, and a modern English one. 

Proto Indo-European root (the * means the root is "reconstructed," not attested)	Latin word based on root	mod. French from Latin word	mod. German word from IE root	mod. English from Germanic word
*kwon- [dog]	canis	chien	hund	hound
*ker- [horn]	cornu	corne	horn	horn
*kerd- [heart]	cor	coeur	herz	heart
*kaput- [head] [2]	caput	chef (and all the -chap- root words)	haupt	head

CL	EA	VE
H	E	W

CL	EA	VE
KL	E	B (-en)
H	E	W

Looking at this table, we can see that root of the German verb kleben (-kleb) might be seen as a bridge between cleave and hew.

CL	EA	VE
KL	E	B (-en)
H	E	W
H	AU	(-en)

All this to say that if we pick apart the modern English verbs to cleave and to hew we can imagine that they are in fact cognate, with the “k” sounding word shifted to the “h” sound:

That we have both a pre-shift derived word (cleave) and a shifted version (hew) might simply be due to when they entered the language. English being a voracious consumer of the rest of the world’s words, cleave might have been brought in from a different IE language sometime after the original word shifted to hew.

Part Two: Forehead slap

Now, to complicate things, we can consider something else. The title of my March 2012 post was “Hewing and Gluing,” making a sort of rhyming pun about of the dual concepts of splitting and sticking together. While thinking about the verb cleave in the new light of Grimm’s Law, I had a forehead-slap moment. I recognized that cleave almost 1000% is related to the modern German verb kleben – which means “to glue, affix.” 

Part Three: The mystery deepens, colloquially speaking

So we’ve seen that cleave and hew may in fact be structurally related. But there’s also possibly an idiomatic relationship between the English hew and German hauen. As noted in my very first post on these weird words, German hauen (chop) and English hew are cognate. Both have a chopping, cutting sense. If those two are cognate, then, if I’m right in my speculations above, hauen and German kleben are also cognate. Thinking about these words for this blog post, I recalled a colloquial German phrase: Hau ab! (infinitive abhauen), which means “get lost!” or “get out of here!” It suddenly struck me (cleaved me? hewed me?) that we have a colloquial English phrase to cut out, as it “he saw the look on her face and cut out of there without thinking twice.” We also have the colloquial to split as another way to indicate making a hasty departure from the scene. Stretching things just a bit further, we also have English to strike out for… as in “they struck out for Texas and we never saw them again.” The table showing relationships now looks even weirder:

Hew, cut, split, strike, abhauen -- What's going on here? What is it about this sense of cutting or hitting in both English and German that lends itself quick departures?

And still unanswered: What is this mysterious, dual conceptual relationship between striking, chopping, cutting, on one hand, and sticking, affixing, staying close to on the other? I’m no closer to a reasonable speculation on the answer to that one, but I imagine, in the next 5 years, I might come up with something!

Footnotes:

[1] Grimm's Law is also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift (and some other terms). I learned about it listening to Kevin Stroud’s excellent History of English Podcast (especially episodes 4 “A Grimm Brother Resurrects the Dead,” and 21 “ Early Germanic Words”). This shift, which scholars believe probably happened a little over 2000 years ago, distinguishes modern Germanic languages from Latin, Greek, and other, more modern IE languages (paraphrased from Elly van Gelderen, A History of the English Language. John Benjamins, 2006, cited here).   https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-grimms-law-1690827

[2] This last one, the *kaput- root, is a good one to try to get our heads around. Although the modern German word for “head” is “Kopf,” there’s another word, “Haupt.” This latter word today is the adjective “main,” but originally meant both the body part “head” and the figurative word “head” or “chief.” Consider the German word for “captain,” which is “Hauptmann.” On the face of it, the English word "head" might not seem related with Latin-derived "cap" or "chief" or "capital.” But due to the consonant shift formalized as Grimm’s Law, we can see how they actually are. Old English "head" was "heafod,” which looks, not coincidentally, like modern German "haupt,” which in turn is a shifted version of the Latin word “caput”.

Portraits of an Intimate Nature

Time for a post on photography...

I've got a few running themes that go through much of my photography. Some time ago, I decided I wasn't a landscape photographer, though I take plenty of pictures of nature. My nature shots tend to be more about details, close-ups — and yet it's not macro photography.

It occurred to me to begin thinking of my nature photography as portraits, intimate portraits in a way. Some quiet natural detail or moment -- often out of context.* I came up with this blog entry's title, meant as a play on words and also as a characterization of many of my nature images.

Rather than spend more words to try to describe what I mean, here is a selection of fifteen images to show you.

Portraits of an Intimate Nature

All of these pictures share a quiet, contemplative feeling that I can only describe as "intimate".

o - o - o

* "Out of context" is itself a running theme I apply to more than my nature photography.

Advent Is Coming!

On the eve of Advent, a little exploration of things to come...

A few weeks ago, a friend was wondering what the German word Sonnabend means. The answer is "Saturday", but it's not the normal word for Saturday (that's Samstag). Hence his wonderment.

I started musing on why there's this second word for Saturday, and where that word might have come from.

My departure point is usually to think of other words with one or more of the same roots as my object of investigation. In this case:

• Abend ("evening")
• Feierabend (basically, "the end of the work day")

The latter adds to "evening" the concept of feiern (the verb "to celebrate"), which makes a lot of sense at the end of the work day. But why have a word that literally translates to "celebrate-evening" but designates the part of the day before the evening? Similarly, the Sonnabend designation of Saturday as "Sun-evening" seems to put the cart before the horse.

In both instances, -abend is used to designate a moment now, but before the other part of the word ("celebration" and "Sunday").

Maybe, I thought, I'm thinking of "evening" as too limited, as a specific evening part of the day. Maybe there's some more original idea in the word "evening".

Then it hit me how similar German Abend is to English (and others from Latin) advent! I don't know why it took me so long to get here... Because advent means, loosely, "something coming" (L. ad-venire = "to come to"). And then it also hit me how French avenir ("future", as in "something to come") also comes from the same L. root.

So "evening", Ger. Abend and the Fr. word for "future" are all related, and we can see that in our English use of an expression like "on the eve of..."

With this understanding, it becomes very clear why Germans might say Feierabend or Sonnabend, because they're talking about the thing to come, or in these cases, "celebration" and "Sunday".

And with that, if you hadn't already thought of it, I direct your attention to the first line of this entry.

Happy Holiday Evenings!