Some weeks back, in midsummer, I sat at my worktable as night drew to an end, when sunrise broke out magnificently in my window wall (see photo #1 in my 8/25 posting “Where I live”) and filled me with joy at the gift of a new day. Also triggering an avalanche of musical associations — conveying fresh beginnings (as here), or rebirth (both of them in Schubert lieder, to come below), or (as in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, also to come below), resurrection. (There’s more, lots more; I’ll list only a tiny sampling, from the odd trio of Haydn, Grieg, and Grofé — ok, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, they’re not))
A brief exchange on Facebook a while back (5/27/26) that I think is worth bringing to a wider audience. From Lynne Murphy (University of Brighton, in the UK), testily:
Hey, students who thought they could skip seminars after they “knew” what they were going to write their essay about.
You were wrong, and I’m taking some pleasure in pointing out all the connections you missed between different aspects of our module.
A pleasure I would have been happy to forego if you’d only come to class …
From Ryan Tamares, on a postcard arriving yesterday (8/21) at my place (it was mailed much earlier at Stanford, passed for some reason through San Francisco, and then shunted back down to Palo Alto; the ways of the USPS are sometimes inscrutable), this extraordinary artwork by a Redbubble.com artist using the name UkiyoCities:
“The Scholar’s Path at Stanford”
Yes, Stanford in the Floating World, simultaneously in the California of today and in the Tokyo of more than 200 years ago.
Encountered a while back via Facebook, this YouTube video:
[text:] Los Futbolitos, es un dúo de youtubers dominicanos, compuesto por Ángelo Valdés, alias “Will” y Vincent Peréz, en el que se dedican a hacer videos sobre fútbol y debatiendo sobre esto ultimo. [Valdés and Peréz make videos about soccer / football and debate about it]
So: we’ve got the noun (el) futbolito ‘football / soccer guy’, a derivative of (el) fútbol ‘football, soccer’, with the diminutive suffix –it-; immediately, there’s the question of how this noun gets this sense.
And I note that Spanish has another noun (el) futbolito ‘foosball’ — which, startlingly, is also alluded to in the photo: that’s a foosball game just under the title. How does this noun get its sense?
And then that Spanish has another derived noun denoting foosball: (el) futbolín, with another diminutive suffix, -ín (for the musically inclined reader, it’s the Spanish counterpart of Italian –ín-: from Marriage of Figaro, Se vuol ballare, signor Contino ‘if you want to dance, my little count, …’)
The Wayno / Piraro 8/12 Bizarro: “The Metromorphosis”:
metro- [the libfix, representing the noun metrosexual] + metamorphosis [the abstract noun meaning ‘transformation’] = metromorphosis ‘transformation to metrosexuality’ (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Two contributors:
Manalee [AMZ: accent on the middle syllable] Shukla, Director of Programs at Avant, gave a presentation at 1 on Friday 7/31, to an audience of most of the residents at Avant, where I now live: “Traveler’s Quest: Discover India with Manalee” (about her home and family, and about the culture and traditions of the India she grew up in — in Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh (‘central province’, smack in the middle of the country), before she embarked on a new American life, with two kids and a professional job).
I got some standing with the residents when Manalee introduced me as her special guest, saying I was a linguist who speaks many languages — not really true, but that was sweet of her — and adding that I wrote a PhD dissertation in Sanskrit (a slip: it was on Sanskrit, not in it, and it was about phonology, using Sanskrit data; also, that was 1965, 61 years ago, and I’ve mostly forgotten my Sanskrit — I don’t want to take credit for marvels that I’m entirely incapable of).
Obviously, MS and I were acquaintances, and I’ll tell the story of how we came to meet (but not in this posting). I also intend to tell you more about what she had to say, and show, about her India (but, again, not in this posting; there’s just too much here).
Instead, I’ll start with the glottonym Sanskrit (for a collection of language varieties, the oldest of which goes back to about 1500 years before the Christian era) and use it to riff on common descent with modification, a truly great idea of the 18th century that then became a core principle of Darwinian evolution.
