From the Narrow Desert

William Wright's May 22 post "What is even more amazing than a talking dog?" included a picture of a worksheet where you have to do sums to solve an anagram, the answer being "a spelling bee."

The red and green boxes are my own addition. I first noticed that the second column of letters -- ABIL -- suggested the French word for "bee," abeille. Then I noticed that the missing letters are right there to the right, and that if you take all the letters in the green box, you can spell abeilles, "bees."

What about the remaining letters, in the red box? The only phonotactically plausible way of stringing them together is peng. My first thought was that this might be an abbreviation for pengolodh, "lore master," an Elvish word which has come up on William's blog before. Then I realized that it was awfully close to the Mandarin for "bee" (or "bees," as Chinese nouns are not marked for number) which is transliterated feng. Linguistically, it's usually a fairly safe bet that any word with /f/ evolved from an older form with /p/, and such proves to be the case here as well. The Old Chinese for "bee" began with a /p/ sound, and this is still preserved in some non-Mandarin dialects. Unfortunately, the vowel has changed, too, so no modern or historical dialect of Chinese actually has peng for "bee." Still, it certainly suggests that Chinese word in its various forms.

In writing this post, I also noticed for the first time that William's son actually misspelled spelling on the worksheet as speiling. According to Google Translate, that's the Norwegian word for "mirroring." Not sure if that means anything. My first thought in connection with a "mirrored bee" was Thérèse de Lisieux, whose autobiography I recently bought and whose name contains a mirrored deseret.

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

Boiled egg and soldiers! Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers! Do you know what soliders are, apart from being men in the army? Well, they are little thin strips of bread and butter, and they are smashing for dipping into your egg. Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers!

People like Hillary Clinton call me a traitor and a Russian asset or a puppet of Putin.

Q: 我問你，阿拉丁有幾個哥哥？

A: 三個：阿拉甲、阿拉乙、阿拉丙。

Q: Let me ask you, how many elder brothers does Aladdin have?
A: Three: Alajia, Alayi, and Alabing.

Belgian comic-book character Tintin is called 丁丁 in Chinese.

Tin is not a possible syllable in Chinese, and Ting sounds like a girl's name, so the best they could do was Ding-ding. You know, like a bell. A tin bell. Like a tinker would make.

The character 丁 is the fourth Celestial Stem, and as such is used to translate the letter D when used in an ordinal sense -- that is, when A, B, C, and D are used in the sense of "one, two, three, four," as in an outline or on a multiple-choice test. For example, Serie D football is rendered 丁級 in Chinese. So if you wanted to go Backstroke of the West on poor Tintin and translate his Chinese translation back into English, he'd be called DD.

After a long period of inactivity, Richard Arrowsmith of Black Dog Star has recently started posting again. Last night I checked to see if he had posted anything new. He hadn't, but while I was there I clicked on a link in his most recent (May 18) post to his old 2009 post "Keeping Track of the Cat." One of the things he mentions in that post is the connection between cat and caterpillar -- in, for example, the two forms of the logo of Caterpillar Inc.

That was last night. This morning, my wife was feeding the cats some sort of treats, and all the cats were gathered around her. She said (in Chinese), "What a lot of caterpillars! I call them caterpillars, you know." The Chinese for "caterpillar" is 毛毛蟲 (máomaochóng, "furry bug"), which is unrelated to  貓 (māo, "cat").

Not until I wrote the above did I notice that, in Roman transliteration, "cat" (māo) is the first syllable of "caterpillar" (máomaochóng) in Chinese just as it is in English. It only appears that way in transliteration, though; in fact, the tone is different, and therefore the two syllables sound entirely different to Chinese ears; it would never occur to a Chinese speaker to connect the two words. Puns on otherwise similar words which have different tones are quite uncommon in Chinese. There's the well-known superstitious connection between 四 (sì, "four") and 死 (sǐ, "death"),  but otherwise, tone-deaf puns are pretty much limited to jokes about tone-deaf foreigners, like the one about the American who got slapped by the dumpling shop owner when he tried to say, "How much for a bowl of dumplings?" but got the tones wrong and said, "How much to sleep with you for the night?" It's like s/th puns in English, which are also largely limited to jokes about foreign accents -- like when an American sea captain radioed the German coast guard and said, "We are sinking! We are sinking!" only to receive the reply, "Vat are you sinking about?"

Writing the above paragraph -- in which I mentioned puns, the number four, and the words cat and sink -- made me think of the story my mother taught me when I was very young and learning to count in French: "There once was a cat called Undeutrois Cat. One day Undeutrois Cat saw some fish swimming, and he wanted to swim, too. But when Undeutrois Cat jumped into the water, Undeutrois Cat sank!" (un deux trois quatre cinq).

(Googling this, I find it is more often presented as a joke in which a French cat named Un Deux Trois loses a swimming race with an English cat named One Two Three. I learned it as a mnemonic story, not a joke.)

The story involves a pun on cat and quatre, "four." Last October, with no thought of Undeutrois Cat, I made a pun on caterpillars and quatre piliers, "four pillars" (the pun being that pavilion is similar to papillon, "butterfly").

Looking up caterpillar in an etymology dictionary, I find that the similarity to cat is not a coincidence.

"larva of a butterfly or moth," mid-15c., catyrpel, probably altered (by association with Middle English piller "plunderer;" see pillage (n.)) from Old North French caterpilose "caterpillar" (Old French chatepelose), literally "shaggy cat" (probably in reference to the "wooly-bear" variety), from Late Latin catta pilosa, from catta "cat" (see cat (n.)) + pilosus "hairy, shaggy, covered with hair," from pilus "hair" (see pile (n.3)).

So the pillar element in caterpillar ultimately derives from the Latin for "hair." This is a link back to my November 2020 post "Hair and pillars, and pills."