Horizon

Back then maybe it came across as a rhapsody. Farther east in the 'Thirties, people were naming their daughters "Elektrifikatsia."

But does "der elektrische Stuhl" mean what I think it does?

It does. Creepy way to end a paragraph.

The thing about the book is that it's actually really well done. You might think that because of its age, it would "smell brown" (as my German friends say), but it was written by someone at Hunter college with the name of Koischwitz, which I assume is Yiddish. He does an excellent job of working through preparatory texts before he introduces the reading selections, and is sensitive to the difficulty a selection of texts from different fields (each with their own vocabulary) presents to a "gradual reader".

I may quote more (and more seriously), and compare it to other chrestomathies if anyone's interested. Judging from Alan Hogue's Amazon wishlist, he might be.

And thanks for the "Elektrifikasia", by the way.

I imagine it almost carried the theological implications of "Anastasia" (resurrection) to a Soviet of that era.

You suppose the author had decided to risk a little sarcasm?

My high school Russian class was taught in part from a textbook that had a lot of fun flipping off the Soviet mentality:

"- What do tigers do?
-- They think.
- What do they think about?
-- Tigers in zoological parks think about Asia.
- What do tigers in Asia think about?
-- They think about life."

"- What do bezdelniki do?
-- They smoke on trolleybuses, they steal pencils at work, and they never wash."

("Bezdelniki," which literally means "without-task-people," was a Soviet-era term for shirkers/nogoodniks.)

"- What do capitalists do?
-- They lie on the beach in tuxedoes and listen to wild jazz."

There were also some bits about Superman that I don't remember so well.

Judging from Alan Hogue's Amazon wishlist, he might be.

What's with this fascination with my wishlist? Trying to figure out what's cool with the kids these days?

But sure, anyway, quote away. I guess the idea behind this excercise is that you learn the morphology of "Elektrizität". Seems reasonable, I guess. But then if this is scientific German, I'd think that the students already had such things down by then.

In Chinese we have "Expansion Drills". Hence:

Jī.
Chī jī.
Xiǎng chī jī.

...and so on. Similar idea.

雞

Hey, Horizon handles Chinese characters. That's good to know.

Hey, Horizon handles Chinese characters.

Horizon does, but readers' browsers might not.

In the browser/OS I'm currently using, your final text renders as a quotation mark. Viewing source, I see that whatever it is you wrote is actually the HTML-escaped Unicode character 雞. This is the friendliest conceivable way to display a character, but because I haven't bothered installing Chinese fonts on this particular machine, it won't work for me. Likely it would on my work or desktop box. Other people's mileage will vary depending on browser and OS settings.

Comes out OK on Mac G4 running Firefox. Fails however to convey meaning to this reader's brain.

I was almost as surprised by elektrisches Piano as by der elektrische Stuhl. Everybody's friend and whipping boy Wikipedia says electric pianos date as far back as 1929, but still. I guess the author was trying to be geek hip.

When I was first studying German one of the better students in my class said he was only interested in reading the philosophers, not in speaking, so he absolutely refused to cooperate with the oral exercises. Sort of like a terrorist at flight school who refuses to learn how to land a plane. For him a W would always sound like a dubya and never like a vee.

Hey, Prentiss -- it's been a dozen years since we last corresponded.

While I can't defend your German classmate's intentional mispronunciation, I do think there's a place for quibbling with pronunciation. The Biblical Hebrew class I too was taught by an Israeli -- so waw was pronounced vav, resh was uvular, and there was no pharyngealization of the emphatic consonants. A gimel that wasn't dageshot was prononuced no differently from a gimel with a dagesh. None of this is appropriate if you're studying how Hebrew was spoken two and a half milennia ago, though it is reasonable if you want to use your Biblical knowledge to travel in Israel. In retrospect, a clear notation of pronunciation differences — perhaps including the difference between Sephardic and Ashkenazic liturgical pronunciation — followed by settling on the Modern pronuncation would have probably been exactly the right thing.

The problem is more difficult in a truly dead language like Latin. You'll pronounce it differently for classical use ("ceasar" => kaiser), liturgical use ("caesar" => chay-zer), and legal use ("caesar" => sea-zr). I almost spit out my coffee when I heard a Catholic priest talk about Eusebius of "chay-sa-ray-a". I imagine I'd have the same reaction to "re-guy-na coily". I have no idea what the right solution would be for a mixed-use class.

Yes. I suspect there are even more variant strains of Latin pronunciation than the ones you've named. I don't know Latin but I remember being surprised when German friends (for whom Latin had been a compulsory subject) read Roman inscriptions and they seemed to have yet another scheme.

Isn't there a faint tradition of Latin as a quasi-living language in the Catholic Church? It may be no one's mother tongue at this point but there must still be a sizeable number of clergy who can carry on a conversation in it. I once briefly visited Assissi and the place was crawling with priests and nuns of all nations on holiday; I like to imagine them dusting off their Latin to gossip over bottles of wine after a thirsty day of sightseeing. Would diverging pronunciation be an issue at that table, I wonder?

Comes out OK on Mac G4 running Firefox. Fails however to convey meaning to this reader's brain.

Glad to hear it. That character is pronounced jī ("jee" with an even, high tone), and it means chicken.

You can't tell with the font so small, but it's a fun character because it combines a feature of the character meaning "love" with a radical which is supposed to represent bolts of silk, and then the main part on the left is the radical for "bird". It's a complicated character, but I have no problem remembering it when I think of "silky love bird".

liturgical use ("caesar" => chay-zer)

I wonder if the liturgical use is perhaps a holdover from medieval pronunciation.

"Silky love bird"? Had the author personally met any chickens?

Well, this is just my way of remembering how to write the character. With Chinese characters, you have all kinds of radicals showing up in characters that have nothing to do with their meaning. They may represent etymological relationships, but if so these relationships 80% of the time are not semantic. Or if they are, then they go so far back that the meaning is lost.

For instance, the bird radical is extremely common. You find it in words like "should/ought", "who", and "permitted/allowed to". No possible link to birds that I can think of.

I've been told that characters usually have one radical which relates to the sense of a character and another that relates to the sound. If so, even this relationship must be very circumspect in most cases, as none of those words sound remotely alike either.

I've been reading up on doaist philosophy a little bit lately, and although I know such connections are usually stupid, I can't help but wonder if the way Chinese philosophy works is not related to the nature of their writing system. The books I'm reading are constantly drawing connections between things that I have a very hard time understanding, not unlike the structure of characters.