The American Cowboy Myth

[Chuck Naill]

Here is another thread totally sidetracked by some kind of personal animus between posters.

Like I said.

Like I said like I said.

You would have done the same, Ted.

[Chuck Naill]

Bunn guy might be looking for guns and ammunition as we speak. Or, perhaps a shovel!!

What kind of person allows themselves to get their panties in a wad over rail road history.

This is the world we live in. Crazies abound!!

[Chuck Naill]

Sometimes all you need is a hickory stick
https://youtu.be/eyjrUAimzZg

[calamus]

[Chip]

Barf!

[ethernautrix]

Y'all have lost your goddamned minds....

[TSherbs]

. ....

[Chip]

According to Google Translate, the Polish equivalent of Y'all is Wy wszyscy.

How are things in Wroclaw?

[ethernautrix]

The forecasted storms with hail did not visit this city, at least not in the parts I was in. Took a night walk (nocny spacer) (z psem, Łapa). Było ładne. Był ładny wieczór.

Widok z Mostu Piaskowego:
20220608_013728.jpg


Seems like the forum software resized the photo.

ETA a photo from a bike ride in the city, along the Odra, from the other day. That's Łapa.

20220602_140308.jpg

ETA: I don't know why the software flipped the photo, and it's much too late to figure it out. (I swear... every simple computer task that begins with my thinking, "Oh, I'll just do this easy thing before I go to bed" turns into a ... just a ridiculous and frustrating time-suck.)

[Chip]

Looks like a sweet spot. The night photo's grand.

[TSherbs]

those trees have eyes

makes me think of Pan's Labyrinth

[Chip]

Love the doggo! Is that his cycle caravan?

For some reason, smartphone pics seem to get flipped and are hard to fix.

The initial character in Łapa (paws?) is common in my graduate language, Diné (Navajo) in which it's pronounced with the tip of the tongue on the top teeth, through an exhale: sounds like an English hthl.

Łlíí is horse.

[ethernautrix]

those trees have eyes

makes me think of Pan's Labyrinth

Or baboon butts, maybe. I can't help myself, but this tree makes me laugh.

20220407_144905.jpg

Drat. Can anyone teach me how to rotate a photo? Och.

[ethernautrix]

Love the doggo! Is that his cycle caravan?

Thanks! This is her second przyczepka (cute way of saying przyczepa to imply, in this case, small size; both words mean "trailer").

My friend (Łapa's OG, original guardian) and I tried baskets on our bicycles to give Łapa breaks on longer bike rides. She learned to jump out of them. I'd like to share a video of Łapa in the bike basket (I'd have to find it and figure out how to upload it).

When we and another friend decided to tour Poland by bike (not all at once, heh), I got a great deal on the trailer (intended for a young child), and I had to train Łapa not to be afraid of it and then to sit in it (in the apartment) and eventually how to stay in it for rides (using a harness, not her will) and then had to endure her screaming-monkey protestations on the bike tour where she could not run on the narrow two-lane "highways" in some parts of the country, cos... obviously.
That first tour, I was the screaming-monkey dog hauler, cos my then-bike couldn't be fitted with a pannier rack.

Now, when she wants to run, she barks once and waits. Barks again if her wish isn't granted. Sometimes I stop and let her out, sometimes I tell her she has to wait ([I]poczekaj![/I)].

She's a smart dog. She hops in and out (when I say so). Sometimes she takes a minute to decide about hopping in. She seems to respond positively to "Down hill!" and "Traffic! Bad traffic!" But hops out immediately when I say "proszę bardzo."

When she's trotting alongside me and I say, Chodnik, she moves onto the sidewalk. I have to admit to preening a little bit when she goes to the sidewalk and pedestrians notice and get excited about it, but I KNOW that she doesn't ALWAYS go to the sidewalk. Hahaha. Usually. Maybe 80, 85% on the first "chodnik... chodnik."

And she's not THAT smart. Or she is but she's also stubborn, either way, not always a "good girl." Hahaha. So I don't let the occasional impressive moment confuse me about that.


[Quote]For some reason, smartphone pics seem to get flipped and are hard to fix.[/QUOTE}

ARGH.

Sigh.

The initial character in Łapa (paws?) is common in my graduate language, Diné (Navajo) in which it's pronounced with the tip of the tongue on the top teeth, through an exhale: sounds like an English hthl.

Łlíí is horse.

Łapa is paw, łapy is paws. For feminine possessive, the a (in most cases) becomes a y. Thus: Łapy łapy is Łapa's paws. Also, łapy Łapy, cos in Polish, grammatical case more than sequence determines the meaning, which is why I've theorized that mathematicians and pre-computer-era programmers invented the language while tripping on acid, as a joke. Those bastards.

Also, Ł is more or less the English W. The Polish W is the English V, or F depending on where it is in the word. Wiadukt (viaduct), it's a V; Wrocław (frots-waf <-- F).

Is Diné also so complicated?

[Chip]

Is Diné also so complicated?

Fiendishly so. Not only are the basic sounds very hard for an English speaker to pronounce (took me two weeks of practice to say the words for snake: tł'iish pronounced klesh, or na’ashǫ́’ii: naah-ah-show-eeh), but the verbs follow what's called an aspect pattern in which the subject and/or object of a sentence determine the verb (there are around thirty possibilities).

So, to say I picked up my dog (animal) requires a different verb than I picked up my mail, or I picked up some Chinese takeout. A rigid, hollow object (cup) uses a different verb than a soft fluffy one (pillow).

Navajos take great joy in making verbal puns by popping in the wrong verb. For instance when a plump person sits down, they might use the verb for a large, soft object (sack of wool) being put in place.

Diné is incredibly precise about time, duration, direction, location, and similar terms for movement and place, as befits a tribe of nomads.

I also studied Mandarin, to better understand classical Chinese poetry. Diné is way harder. But I enjoyed being around my students and their families: good way to learn more quickly.

[TSherbs]

those trees have eyes

makes me think of Pan's Labyrinth

Or baboon butts, maybe. I can't help myself, but this tree makes me laugh.

20220407_144905.jpg

Drat. Can anyone teach me how to rotate a photo? Och.

NSFW!

[Chip]

Trees can be scary.






The psychological phenomenon that causes some people to see or hear a vague or random image or sound as something significant (e.g. a face) is known as pareidolia.

I see faces in the tweed carpet in our bathroom, or the textured paint on the ceiling, and they shift. Weird.

[ethernautrix]

I also studied Mandarin, to better understand classical Chinese poetry. Diné is way harder. But I enjoyed being around my students and their families: good way to learn more quickly.

Pronunciation -- Polish sounds use different muscles in my mouth and tongue. Took me six months to pronounce Wrocław. I just couldn't hear it. (Polish must use different muscles in my ears, too. Ha!)

Diné sounds -- super complex. How long did it take until you were fluent?

I'm still not fluent in Polish, but my last lesson was at least five years ago (and lessons were spotty). I'm better at writing and reading and can say my part of a casual conversation while guessing at the other's part, straining to hear familiar words and guessing the rest by context.

If people speak English, they automatically switch to English. I continue to say my part in Polish (until the flicker of "What?" in his or her eyes, then I clarify in English, but at least try to use Polish as much as I can. This doesn't help my "hearing" Polish, though.).

How long did it take to learn Mandarin? Sounds like Polish would be a cake walk for you!

[Chip]

Diné sounds -- super complex. How long did it take until you were fluent?

I was never fluent. I'd have needed to live among Diné speakers for years to become so. But older folks kept asking me if I was a Mormon ex-missionary, a compliment as it turns out. The LDS church has the best Diné language program on earth.

A friend (John Mionczynski) speaks some Polish. It's hard to pick up from the English literation: his name looks like My-on-zin-skee, but is pronounced Mee-awn-chin-skee. What was your first language?

How long did it take to learn Mandarin? Sounds like Polish would be a cake walk for you!

I studied Mandarin as a linguistic exercise, to get a grasp of how ideograms were used in poetry. Books (Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method, two volumes) gave definitions and also some cultural resonances. I took an entry-level conversation class but didn't get much out of it. Met a grad student, Pin Li, who'd written a thesis comparing translations of the T'ang poet Han Shan (Cold Mountain) perhaps my favorite. She was a great help. Another friend, Masahiro, was translating the Tao Te Ching to both Japanese and English, and loved to talk about his process (with lots of jokes and wit). Yet another friend, poet Arthur Sze, helped my pronunciation and talked at length about the different qualities of Chinese and English poetry. He was married to a Hopi weaver, Ramona Sakiestewa and had learned quite a lot of her tongue, Tewan I think.

Anyhow, I messed about with it for ten or fifteen years and did some interlineal translations of poems. Don't recall if I published them.

What I most love about learning a language is the way it lends such a different view of the world we share.

For instance, in Diné, The horse kicked the boy is not a grammatical sentence. In the Navajo hierarchy of being, humans are superior. For a horse to initate an action against a person is absurd. So one must say, instead, The boy caused the horse to kick him. Which is probably closer to the truth.

Pretty cool!

[TSherbs]

Cool indeed!