English: I keep my money in a “bank”; A river has “banks”. Not the same.
Dutch: I keep my money in a “bank”; You sit on a “bank” to watch tv (couch). Not the same.
Greek: I (could, if I were in Greece) keep my money in a “τράπεζα”. You eat dinner at the “τραπέζι” (table). Not the same.
(Yes, the last one isn’t actually lexical ambiguity. So sue me. Also, Micha tells me that German has the first three: financial institution, ground abutting a river, and bench. Whee!)
Googled “suppression task”. Looking for this. Found this.
I’ve got some kind of bizarro mental block going on with “Spain” in Greek. I confuse it with Israel and Japan.
There are reasons, but they’re kind complicated. First off, it’s pronounced roughly “IspanEEa”, which I visualise as “Ispania” (yup, visualising the Greek sounds in Latin letters, you can see where this is going to go wrong). And if I haven’t had my morning coffee, Ισραήλ just looks too similar. Getting to Japan depends on two additional little problems: I have trouble remembering that it’s spelled with omega instead of omicron, and the font our textbook uses makes sigma, omicron and alpha all look really similar, especially before pi. So I can see Ισπανία and read Ιαπονία which really should be Ιαπωνία.
Also I, like several of my classmates, have a tendency to read ρολόι (roloi, watch or clock) as poli (very), or on a bad day when my accent slips, pouli (πουλί? however it’s spelled, it makes everyone laugh). “Πόσο κάνει τον πουλί σου, Παυλο;”
(Whatever was wrong with Firefox and Greek input seems to have fixed itself. Maybe it was the KDE updates the other day?)
I wanted to write a post explaining why I consistently confuse Spain with Israel and Japan in Greek, but for some reason Firefox won’t let me enter lowercase Greek letters. Anywhere. (No more searching youtube for rebetiko songs either, until I figure out what’s going on. Anyone got a clue? Weird thing is, uppercase works fine. Pasting gives me the kind of junk you’d expect putting multibyte chars into a single-byte environment, but the character encoding is utf8. Confuzzled, me.)
Bah. Bah and humbug. You’ll have to try to figure out what links those three countries yourselves. (Hint: some Greek letters look like different Latin letters. Second hint: I’m an idiot.)
That’s a spoiler for the punchline of this comic strip.
Beth should ditch the jerk, says I.
I just learnt the Dutch verb verstenen, “to fossilise” (used in the context of grammatical fossilisation, so it’s really a close parallel to the English). The lovely thing is that this is nearly compositional meaning: steen is “stone” (so stenen as verb would be “to stone” [don't know if it's actually used that way?]), and ver- is a prefix that typically has something to do with reaching a goal or endpoint.1 So you’d expect it to mean something like “going to stone”… which it does! Lovely!
Also, here are three words used as cheery farewells, in three languages: ciao, doei, γεια (”geia”, pronounced sort of “yah”). Evidence of common origin? Surely!
Notes:
Another story collection as CC-licensed download. It’s The Ant King and Other Stories, by Benjamin Rosenbaum (it’s been up a month or so, apparently, but I just came upon it now).
I haven’t read any of it yet, but he’s pretty good at snappy first sentences. “Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs.” “An orange ruled the world.” “I have bought the elephant a new green suit.” (It’s not all surreal slap-in-the-face, but those are the intros that stand out.)
I can’t vouch for its efficacy (once one cow goes I suspect the others will follow, unless the head man has his fidgeting gestures down), but this Method For Sorting Cows is certainly beautifully written.
Hat tip to Mike, who pointed me at the same site’s pdf facsimile of The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. Also see “The first thousand numbers classified in alphabetical order”, which is exactly what it sounds like.
I’ve spent a bit of time organising my LaTeX setup for maximal dissertatory efficiency. Mainly I want a system that lets me put definitions somewhere sensible (a thesis.sty package), but also makes it easy to typeset chapters individually to hand around, without duplicating definitions or having to hand-edit files for book or single-chapter output.
I’ve got a basic system that works pretty well, and now it has its own page on my site. Any suggestions would be welcome.
Possibly the best band name ever to come to me in a dream.
Bonus for the eagle-eyed: I’m not sure if the dream original was singular or plural. I’m also not sure which would be better.