"Sinterklaas [sɪntər'klaːs] (or more formally Sint Nicolaas or Sint Nikolaas; Saint Nicolas in French; Sankt Nikolaus in German) is a traditional winter holiday figure still celebrated today in the Low Countries,
including the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as some
parts of Germany, French Flanders and Artois. He is also well known in
territories of the former Dutch Empire, including Aruba, Suriname, Curaçao, Bonaire, and Indonesia. He is one of the sources of the holiday figure of Santa Claus in North America.[1]"
My opinion as a hobbyist in linguistics, is that the name Santa Claus name does not come from a child's mispronunciation of Sinterklaas or Saint Nicholas.
Where it's coming from? I have no idea but if you take the letter n from the middle of the word and put it at the end, guess what's resulting? Too much of a coincidence especially when we try and switch the spelling of the name Claus, which i never heard in US, to the more common word claws.
Don't know about the creation of the name or the character but the use of it and the taking of the main stage at Christmas after so many years raises questions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Blog Has One Year!
One year since i started the blog. 277 posts. Never thought i would get here. It helped me a lot organizing my memories. Most of the posts contain old ideas triggered by daily facts but lately there are many posts regarding my daily life. With this occasion i also changed the name and address of the blog. One year from now and i will still find reminders of the old address and broken links. (:
:) Happy anniversary blog and thanks to all who ever read anything of it!
:) Happy anniversary blog and thanks to all who ever read anything of it!
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Romanian - Sanskrit Comparison
Cristian Ioanide - In Memoriam
"In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems are expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics
The generally accepted Indo-European theory in linguistics states that all languages in Europe and India have a common ancestor, the hypothetical PIE or Proto-Indo-European language.
However there are major disagreements regarding this hypothetical language and the reconstruction attempts so far lay in the domain of bizarre. No serious academic attention had been directed into reconstructing this hypothetical language. In dictionaries so far (like the Romanian Explicative Dictionary or DEX) though there are many basic words deemed as of unknown origin, generally attributed by some authors, mostly biased nationalist, to the Dacian language or the language we all assume it was spoken in Dacia before Romans arrived, there is not on single etymology given as PIE. In French i haven't seen a single word given of unknown etymology or as PIE but in both languages i found words that certainly remind me of Sanskrit. The English lexis may be also as rich as Romanian in Sanskrit roots. Interestingly enough, the words are distributed in different languages, as if Sanskrit divided or distributed separate chunks or lists of words to different inheriting languages though many are overlapping, like from English and Romanian.
It is almost impossible to believe that Romans did not keep or no archives are found regarding the different aspects of life in Dacia during their direct administration period which lasted some 165 years including basic lexis or pieces of written language. No written records are to be found in any archive about the Dacian language (with some dubious exceptions).
The subject of such records being hidden in archives for political reasons or even destroyed is a completely different story i won't start to dig in right now.
So personally following an intuition triggered by an anecdotal information i found in an article i read in early 90s which stated that a numbered a Romanian basic words are matching with perfectly similar Sanskrit ones like apa-apa (water), gand-gandiva (thought) etc. i tried to look in current online dictionaries like spokensankrit.org (formerly .de) just to verify. To my surprise they all seemed to have a Sanskrit corespondent, almost identical, down to pronunciation.
So i took the list of Romanian words of unknown origin (Wikipedia version) and started to look in that dictionary for more matches and found an abundance of words of undoubtful (to me) Sanskrit origin.
I assume the online dictionary mentioned above that is based on the widely recognized Monier Williams Sanskrit dictionary which is also available online from the University of Koln is still not complete though it numbers over half million entries. There are in there words that have obviously too many entered meanings [by volunteering contributors] of which some being even opposite, many probably coming from only one occurrence in an isolated text maybe used as metaphors. No one can tell. But i was pretty conservative in building this list and picked correspondences only from the roughly first 10-20% of meanings confirmed by the most redundancies (or close meanings) in the rest of the entered meanings staying mainly in the Monier Wiliams safe area. Interestingly, there are words, like gata that have the same corresponding many meanings both in Romanian and Sanskrit and this is obvious only for those who know Romanian as i cannot add more entries for words with different meaning in Romania being beyond the current purpose of this modest work.
Never finished checking that list because while browsing the dictionaries i started to find more and more words that where not on that list having a greater resemblance with Sanskrit words than with Latin or Old Slavonic (the precursor of all modern Slavic languages) of which etymologies are officially given in Romanian dictionaries and i started to build a list on a spreadsheet with all the words i could find that seemed to me closer to Sanskrit than Latin and Slavonic which are the officially accepted by academics main ancestors of Romanian language, besides the still largely unknown Dacian language. All words from the basic or day to day usage Romanian language lexis.
I also added verbs that seem similar in writting, pronunciation and meaning with nouns and adjectives in Romanian. https://sanskritstudio.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/the-sanskrit-past-passive-participle/. I am not a linguist but i assume in a few thousands years of separation some past participles may have morphed into adjectives and even nouns. Same thing happened in the dictionary itslef, noun from Sanskrit are translated like verbs in English.
Also while browsing this online dictionary i had the surprise to also come across many English words that seem to have a direct corespondent in Sanskrit of which some i added in a smaller list that is also included in this blog post.
My conclusion so far is there are many Sanskrit words in Romanian, maybe as many as 50% of the lexis of Romanian, but when they match, some of them identically as pronunciation, most of the time they do not coincide as first meaning. This indicates a strong but very old connection.
Could the reason for finding so many Romanian words of possible Sanskrit origin be the Dacian language was closed to Sanskrit which was also close to PIE. It is up to linguists in the future to follow these hypotheses. This work is by far not complete and i strongly believe what i found is intriguing enough to requires their attention. But i am also afraid many already knew about all these complex and contradictory issues, since i don't know, the first contact of modern western civilization with the eastern one, probably since German linguists Franz Bopp built the first known grammar of Sanskrit and for some obvious political reasons they chose to delay their findings until people of the world will be able to better deal with the Indo-European linguistic theory that if was to be applied would probably require extensive rewriting of dictionaries and why not, maybe history itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Bopp
When i first started to study the lexis of Sanskrit i started to ask myself how i will pronounce the words. In the end i realized the pronunciation follows pretty much Latin, as the several existing transliteration types use mainly Latin alphabet.
However there is an alternate way to figure pronunciation. Since Google Translate cannot translate Sanskrit and there is no other site on the internet that i know of that can pronounce any typed words in Devanagari script one can trick Google Translate to pronounce Sanskrit as Hindi since Hindi uses the same alphabet and almost the same pronunciation.
So i added links to every word in the list (done with Google Spreadsheets) written in Sanskrit with Devanagari script so you can click on then on the little speaker icon under the box where the word appears to hear the pronunciation. Most of those words do not even exist in Hindi.
There are also links provided for every Romanian word to Google Translate for both translation in English to eliminate any doubt and pronunciation for comparison of pronunciation with the paired Sanskrit words and also links for every Sanskrit word transliterated with Latin characters to different dictionaries where i found that word. There are more than 700 links in total.
Google Translate is not particularly good with Romanian phrases although lately it got much better. However, for individual words it is acceptable. The computer generated pronunciation in Romanian is kind of rough, compared to the one in Hindi, but good enough for the purpose.
For Devanagari script pronunciation of each separate letter here is an easy to use interactive page.
http://www.digitaldialects.com/Hindi/alphabet.htm
For comparing the words i used the following on-line dictionaries and lists:
"In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems are expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics
The generally accepted Indo-European theory in linguistics states that all languages in Europe and India have a common ancestor, the hypothetical PIE or Proto-Indo-European language.
However there are major disagreements regarding this hypothetical language and the reconstruction attempts so far lay in the domain of bizarre. No serious academic attention had been directed into reconstructing this hypothetical language. In dictionaries so far (like the Romanian Explicative Dictionary or DEX) though there are many basic words deemed as of unknown origin, generally attributed by some authors, mostly biased nationalist, to the Dacian language or the language we all assume it was spoken in Dacia before Romans arrived, there is not on single etymology given as PIE. In French i haven't seen a single word given of unknown etymology or as PIE but in both languages i found words that certainly remind me of Sanskrit. The English lexis may be also as rich as Romanian in Sanskrit roots. Interestingly enough, the words are distributed in different languages, as if Sanskrit divided or distributed separate chunks or lists of words to different inheriting languages though many are overlapping, like from English and Romanian.
It is almost impossible to believe that Romans did not keep or no archives are found regarding the different aspects of life in Dacia during their direct administration period which lasted some 165 years including basic lexis or pieces of written language. No written records are to be found in any archive about the Dacian language (with some dubious exceptions).
The subject of such records being hidden in archives for political reasons or even destroyed is a completely different story i won't start to dig in right now.
So personally following an intuition triggered by an anecdotal information i found in an article i read in early 90s which stated that a numbered a Romanian basic words are matching with perfectly similar Sanskrit ones like apa-apa (water), gand-gandiva (thought) etc. i tried to look in current online dictionaries like spokensankrit.org (formerly .de) just to verify. To my surprise they all seemed to have a Sanskrit corespondent, almost identical, down to pronunciation.
So i took the list of Romanian words of unknown origin (Wikipedia version) and started to look in that dictionary for more matches and found an abundance of words of undoubtful (to me) Sanskrit origin.
I assume the online dictionary mentioned above that is based on the widely recognized Monier Williams Sanskrit dictionary which is also available online from the University of Koln is still not complete though it numbers over half million entries. There are in there words that have obviously too many entered meanings [by volunteering contributors] of which some being even opposite, many probably coming from only one occurrence in an isolated text maybe used as metaphors. No one can tell. But i was pretty conservative in building this list and picked correspondences only from the roughly first 10-20% of meanings confirmed by the most redundancies (or close meanings) in the rest of the entered meanings staying mainly in the Monier Wiliams safe area. Interestingly, there are words, like gata that have the same corresponding many meanings both in Romanian and Sanskrit and this is obvious only for those who know Romanian as i cannot add more entries for words with different meaning in Romania being beyond the current purpose of this modest work.
Never finished checking that list because while browsing the dictionaries i started to find more and more words that where not on that list having a greater resemblance with Sanskrit words than with Latin or Old Slavonic (the precursor of all modern Slavic languages) of which etymologies are officially given in Romanian dictionaries and i started to build a list on a spreadsheet with all the words i could find that seemed to me closer to Sanskrit than Latin and Slavonic which are the officially accepted by academics main ancestors of Romanian language, besides the still largely unknown Dacian language. All words from the basic or day to day usage Romanian language lexis.
I also added verbs that seem similar in writting, pronunciation and meaning with nouns and adjectives in Romanian. https://sanskritstudio.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/the-sanskrit-past-passive-participle/. I am not a linguist but i assume in a few thousands years of separation some past participles may have morphed into adjectives and even nouns. Same thing happened in the dictionary itslef, noun from Sanskrit are translated like verbs in English.
Also while browsing this online dictionary i had the surprise to also come across many English words that seem to have a direct corespondent in Sanskrit of which some i added in a smaller list that is also included in this blog post.
My conclusion so far is there are many Sanskrit words in Romanian, maybe as many as 50% of the lexis of Romanian, but when they match, some of them identically as pronunciation, most of the time they do not coincide as first meaning. This indicates a strong but very old connection.
Could the reason for finding so many Romanian words of possible Sanskrit origin be the Dacian language was closed to Sanskrit which was also close to PIE. It is up to linguists in the future to follow these hypotheses. This work is by far not complete and i strongly believe what i found is intriguing enough to requires their attention. But i am also afraid many already knew about all these complex and contradictory issues, since i don't know, the first contact of modern western civilization with the eastern one, probably since German linguists Franz Bopp built the first known grammar of Sanskrit and for some obvious political reasons they chose to delay their findings until people of the world will be able to better deal with the Indo-European linguistic theory that if was to be applied would probably require extensive rewriting of dictionaries and why not, maybe history itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Bopp
When i first started to study the lexis of Sanskrit i started to ask myself how i will pronounce the words. In the end i realized the pronunciation follows pretty much Latin, as the several existing transliteration types use mainly Latin alphabet.
However there is an alternate way to figure pronunciation. Since Google Translate cannot translate Sanskrit and there is no other site on the internet that i know of that can pronounce any typed words in Devanagari script one can trick Google Translate to pronounce Sanskrit as Hindi since Hindi uses the same alphabet and almost the same pronunciation.
So i added links to every word in the list (done with Google Spreadsheets) written in Sanskrit with Devanagari script so you can click on then on the little speaker icon under the box where the word appears to hear the pronunciation. Most of those words do not even exist in Hindi.
There are also links provided for every Romanian word to Google Translate for both translation in English to eliminate any doubt and pronunciation for comparison of pronunciation with the paired Sanskrit words and also links for every Sanskrit word transliterated with Latin characters to different dictionaries where i found that word. There are more than 700 links in total.
Google Translate is not particularly good with Romanian phrases although lately it got much better. However, for individual words it is acceptable. The computer generated pronunciation in Romanian is kind of rough, compared to the one in Hindi, but good enough for the purpose.
For Devanagari script pronunciation of each separate letter here is an easy to use interactive page.
http://www.digitaldialects.com/Hindi/alphabet.htm
https://www.google.com/search?q=Cuv.+autoht.+site%3Adexonline.ro%2F,
https://www.google.com/search?q=Et.+Nec.+site%3Adexonline.ro%2F
http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%C4%83_de_cuvinte_rom%C3%A2ne%C8%99ti_mo%C8%99tenite_probabil_din_limba_dac%C4%83
Sanskrit dictionary linkable per word and meaning
www.sanskritdictionary.com/ (default IAST transliteration)
Sanskrit dictionary linkable per word
http://spokensanskrit.org/
http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/indexcaller.php
Dictionary not linkable per word (need to manually input the words below)
http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de
For Devanagari script pronunciation of each separate letter here is an easy to use interactive page.
http://www.digitaldialects.com/Hindi/alphabet.htm
Here is also a link to a Google sheet that holds the same table with the table itself framed below in this blog post.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rFNHh0hUZoX05HMLQmA041H2pGj3fAPdmwAoGkkkJMk/edit?usp=sharing
[On August 18 2017 i discovered spokensanskrit.de has changed to spokensanskrit.org. I am currently working to restore all broken links below. Already re-established first 100 links. For the new links you have to scroll right.]
Also here is a link to a much shorter list that probably could be much longer with English words that could have direct sanskrit etymology and also the table.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z30OzrhFN6aiqmK_cra0rv8z_wfRr0WJd9LxS5tsKrQ/edit?usp=sharing
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Dacian_POW_IMG_6358.jpg
Roman Statue of a Dacian POW in 2nd century AD
Monday, December 10, 2012
Sunset
Sunset just ended. A few minutes ago it was really glorious. Grabbed my new little camera, remove the mosquito net at the small window above the sink in the kitchen and took a few shots. While at it i hear this diesel engine sound. A school-bus full of children just under the window. It's not the first time i see it. It probably comes from Eagle Crest from one alley and goes back to it on other. It's not picking or leaving anybody.
 |
| From the kitchen window, posting time. click to enlarge. |
76
Talking about jobs. I remember my last one. Between April 06 and July 06 i had a brief job at a 76 gas station in Beaverton, OR. At that time it belonged to ConnocoPhilips and owned at least partially by Lukoil of ... Russia. I didn't know until after the orientation. Then, i also found out that Chevron uses additives in gasoline that are almost as good as 76s. And the fact that not all gasoline is created equal. And why we should never buy gasoline from store stations because they accept in their tanks the lowest quality, the one that all major gasoline suppliers refuse.
At the intersection of Cedar Hills and Walker Rd. Also as told at orientation, the busiest 76 and generally the busiest gas station in the NW.
12 pumps. 2 or 3 guys per busy shifts. Convenience store.
Curiously enough that job was between two major dental works. And i was on antidepressants at the time since the last time in the hospital in 75. Mirtazapin. My prescription was 30 milligrams, as agreed with the doctor, to be cheaper for me at copay and officially i was supposed to break them in two. But i was breaking them in 4 and getting only 7.5 milligrams. And i think that was too much as well. Now i think the only benefit of that was the antihistamine action of Mirtazapin. And i was not feeling myself. I was living like in a dream.
Dr. Jeff Call of Gentle Dental did a root canal and a crown. The crown was supposed to be ceramic only but then he switched to metal and ceramic. It still has some galvanic reaction if i touch the exposed metal part of it with a fork it starts hurting really bad.
Dr. Douglas Boyd of Portland did and apicoectomy. The apparent necessity of it was an overfill to a root canal done by dr.Negru of Aloha, OR. On July 27 2006, the same day when Mr. Băsescu, the President of Romania did a visit in Washington DC and the ex-Prime Minister Mr.Tăriceanu fell from his motorcycle. The surgery went wrong and i had to quit the job. I couldn't eat solid food for several month.
Later i found out that in fact the pain to that tooth was due to an insufficiency of vitamin C and probably a periodontitis. No surgery necessary. In fact i would not be fair if i wouldn't tell Dr. Boyd tried to convince me not to do it.
But what happened in between is more interesting. Job was officially part time. But due to the very busy nature of the place and the fact that they couldn't keep nobody to work there for long time because of being so busy and hard to run all day from one pump to another, it became full time and even over time.
The only guy who was working there for a long time before and after me was Charlie. Charlie the communist with the crooked teeth. He said he was communist but had no idea of what that was. He said he was an alcoholic, he would get pissed if he didn't have his beers every day.
After job i started chatting with other Romanians over the internet out of being so homesick and lonely. Started drinking Cuba Libre in top of antidepressants and started a blog which i later abandoned.
I caught a few days with temperatures over 100 degrees. At 46 and out of shape, i thought i was going to die but i didn't.
Each pump had a printer and most of the customers were asking for a receipt. But some times the printers were jamming or running out of paper and we had to run inside to get receipts from the cashiers. And had to stay in line with the other customers, that had priority. And one day, shy at first then more bold i started fixing the printers and refilling them with paper. Soon i became unofficially the guy who did that on my shift. It was like a promotion and it gave me an ascendance over the younger guys.
They were a couple of black guys, can't remember their names now. When i was coming to my shift, around 11 AM, i was almost every time finding them with half of the printers not working and with their tongs out from running inside to get receipts. So i was fixing those first thing.
One day i decided i should try and make them fix those for themselves. So i showed them how to do it when nobody was around so many times until they got probably annoyed and started doing it themselves. But only when i was there.
But when i was coming at my shift, again they were broken.
One day one of them got fired for no big reason.
I never realized why the thing with printers was happening. But lately when i realized the impossibility of me getting a job according to my experience and qualifications, i think i started to understand.
Some categories of people are not allowed around here to do certain "more qualified" types of works which are reserved for insiders.
At the intersection of Cedar Hills and Walker Rd. Also as told at orientation, the busiest 76 and generally the busiest gas station in the NW.
12 pumps. 2 or 3 guys per busy shifts. Convenience store.
Curiously enough that job was between two major dental works. And i was on antidepressants at the time since the last time in the hospital in 75. Mirtazapin. My prescription was 30 milligrams, as agreed with the doctor, to be cheaper for me at copay and officially i was supposed to break them in two. But i was breaking them in 4 and getting only 7.5 milligrams. And i think that was too much as well. Now i think the only benefit of that was the antihistamine action of Mirtazapin. And i was not feeling myself. I was living like in a dream.
Dr. Jeff Call of Gentle Dental did a root canal and a crown. The crown was supposed to be ceramic only but then he switched to metal and ceramic. It still has some galvanic reaction if i touch the exposed metal part of it with a fork it starts hurting really bad.
Dr. Douglas Boyd of Portland did and apicoectomy. The apparent necessity of it was an overfill to a root canal done by dr.Negru of Aloha, OR. On July 27 2006, the same day when Mr. Băsescu, the President of Romania did a visit in Washington DC and the ex-Prime Minister Mr.Tăriceanu fell from his motorcycle. The surgery went wrong and i had to quit the job. I couldn't eat solid food for several month.
Later i found out that in fact the pain to that tooth was due to an insufficiency of vitamin C and probably a periodontitis. No surgery necessary. In fact i would not be fair if i wouldn't tell Dr. Boyd tried to convince me not to do it.
But what happened in between is more interesting. Job was officially part time. But due to the very busy nature of the place and the fact that they couldn't keep nobody to work there for long time because of being so busy and hard to run all day from one pump to another, it became full time and even over time.
The only guy who was working there for a long time before and after me was Charlie. Charlie the communist with the crooked teeth. He said he was communist but had no idea of what that was. He said he was an alcoholic, he would get pissed if he didn't have his beers every day.
After job i started chatting with other Romanians over the internet out of being so homesick and lonely. Started drinking Cuba Libre in top of antidepressants and started a blog which i later abandoned.
I caught a few days with temperatures over 100 degrees. At 46 and out of shape, i thought i was going to die but i didn't.
Each pump had a printer and most of the customers were asking for a receipt. But some times the printers were jamming or running out of paper and we had to run inside to get receipts from the cashiers. And had to stay in line with the other customers, that had priority. And one day, shy at first then more bold i started fixing the printers and refilling them with paper. Soon i became unofficially the guy who did that on my shift. It was like a promotion and it gave me an ascendance over the younger guys.
They were a couple of black guys, can't remember their names now. When i was coming to my shift, around 11 AM, i was almost every time finding them with half of the printers not working and with their tongs out from running inside to get receipts. So i was fixing those first thing.
One day i decided i should try and make them fix those for themselves. So i showed them how to do it when nobody was around so many times until they got probably annoyed and started doing it themselves. But only when i was there.
But when i was coming at my shift, again they were broken.
One day one of them got fired for no big reason.
I never realized why the thing with printers was happening. But lately when i realized the impossibility of me getting a job according to my experience and qualifications, i think i started to understand.
Some categories of people are not allowed around here to do certain "more qualified" types of works which are reserved for insiders.