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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2Ep215h
Last night my guy and I went to a bar to have dinner. I wore heels, so he dropped me off at the door as he went to park the car in a snowbank somewhere. So I went in ahead of him, got a seat, and sat down. This meant that I was sitting facing the televisions, which was a bad idea; I’m really distracted by moving things on screens and such.
So all dinner I kept getting distracted by a basketball game. A man got hurt, an enormous white dude landed badly and fell clutching his knee. Very sad. I felt bad for him. After the game they kept replaying it and finally a caption came up, [white guy’s] injury: will it be decisive or something along those lines. I noticed that [white guy’s] name ended in an S.
Oh I bet he’s Latvian, I said out loud. Dude raised an eyebrow. White NBA player that just got hurt. Knicks? I hadn’t been paying attention so I had to read the front of his jersey to know.
Oh, yes, he’s Latvian, Dude said, without even turning around. He’s all over Latvian-language media. Every time he scores a point or whatever it gets mentioned. Dude never even turned to look, didn’t have me read the name off; he just knew. There aren’t that many giant white guys in the NBA actually.
I forgot his name already, except that his first name is, I shit you not, a real actual name, “Kristaps”, which if that doesn’t give you a phonetic picture into this corner of the Baltic nations I don’t know what does. (Other nations adopt that name with the F phoneme but Latvian doesn’t even bother. The P is plenty. To say it is the opposite of a guttural language does not even come close to conveying how it sound when spoken.)
Not to mock him or the culture or whatever, and I am genuinely sorry, it looks like the man tore his ACL and i know that’s no joke. That sucks. I hope he recovers quickly.
But therein lies a sort of funny artifact of Dude studying his mother’s native language. I’m reading the book, he says, and I’m practicing the pronunciations, and like. It’s not intuitive for an English speaker, but I have no trouble achieving the correct phonemes. I just have to think to myself, “Ok, how would a little old lady say this?” and i can say it correctly.
That’s the problem for him: almost 100% of the Latvian he’s ever heard spoken was spoken by little old ladies he was actively trying to ignore at the time. He has no phonetic role models for how the language is really used. It’s indelibly the part of his mind that thinks about being bored in grown-ups’ houses wearing too formal an outfit while his mother drinks coffee and makes polite conversation.
So he spent the rest of the meal saying things his great-aunt would have said. “That Kristaps, so good with the basketball. What a good boy. Such a shame.”
I mean. It’s both funny and not.
(Your picture was not posted)
Last night my guy and I went to a bar to have dinner. I wore heels, so he dropped me off at the door as he went to park the car in a snowbank somewhere. So I went in ahead of him, got a seat, and sat down. This meant that I was sitting facing the televisions, which was a bad idea; I’m really distracted by moving things on screens and such.
So all dinner I kept getting distracted by a basketball game. A man got hurt, an enormous white dude landed badly and fell clutching his knee. Very sad. I felt bad for him. After the game they kept replaying it and finally a caption came up, [white guy’s] injury: will it be decisive or something along those lines. I noticed that [white guy’s] name ended in an S.
Oh I bet he’s Latvian, I said out loud. Dude raised an eyebrow. White NBA player that just got hurt. Knicks? I hadn’t been paying attention so I had to read the front of his jersey to know.
Oh, yes, he’s Latvian, Dude said, without even turning around. He’s all over Latvian-language media. Every time he scores a point or whatever it gets mentioned. Dude never even turned to look, didn’t have me read the name off; he just knew. There aren’t that many giant white guys in the NBA actually.
I forgot his name already, except that his first name is, I shit you not, a real actual name, “Kristaps”, which if that doesn’t give you a phonetic picture into this corner of the Baltic nations I don’t know what does. (Other nations adopt that name with the F phoneme but Latvian doesn’t even bother. The P is plenty. To say it is the opposite of a guttural language does not even come close to conveying how it sound when spoken.)
Not to mock him or the culture or whatever, and I am genuinely sorry, it looks like the man tore his ACL and i know that’s no joke. That sucks. I hope he recovers quickly.
But therein lies a sort of funny artifact of Dude studying his mother’s native language. I’m reading the book, he says, and I’m practicing the pronunciations, and like. It’s not intuitive for an English speaker, but I have no trouble achieving the correct phonemes. I just have to think to myself, “Ok, how would a little old lady say this?” and i can say it correctly.
That’s the problem for him: almost 100% of the Latvian he’s ever heard spoken was spoken by little old ladies he was actively trying to ignore at the time. He has no phonetic role models for how the language is really used. It’s indelibly the part of his mind that thinks about being bored in grown-ups’ houses wearing too formal an outfit while his mother drinks coffee and makes polite conversation.
So he spent the rest of the meal saying things his great-aunt would have said. “That Kristaps, so good with the basketball. What a good boy. Such a shame.”
I mean. It’s both funny and not.
(Your picture was not posted)
