Of grapes and language

A while ago, I wrote about my theory on grapes and raisins, and plums an prunes and how the names for the dried fruits were (probably) stolen from French and why. I’ve been wondering if the same can actually be said for the word “grape” itself, if we go further back into the linguistic evolution of English. Why? A “grappe” in French, is a bunch (most commonly a bunch of grapes). So here goes my corollary to my theory on dried fruits: we  (anglos) stole names for some wet fresh fruits too. Here’s what I think happened…

English guy: What’s that?
French guy: What? zis?
English guy: Yes, that. What is that?
French guy: Zis in a grappe.
English guy: A grape?
French guy: No, a “grappe”.
English guy: May I try one?
French guy: But of coorse.
English guy: Mmm, these are tasty…Hey guys! Check out these grapes!
French guy (rolls his eyes): Seelly Eengleesh.

And thus, the raisin became the grape, only to become a raisin once again, but in a different form.

For researched information along these lines, please check out this paper from someone who found my first post, and left this link. I particularly enjoy the part of about names of meat versus names of animals (it always comes back to food with me, I guess).

Crazy snails

No, this one isn’t about food; as I mentioned before, I’ve tried snails, and I didn’t like them…frog’s legs are tasty though!

Anyway, the snails in our aquarium our out of control. There are at least 14 egg pouches (times like 10 snails each) in the baby box alone. I wonder how many snails will be too many, and what we will be able to do about it if we reach that point. In the meantime, I’m happy that they’re doing a great job of keeping the bottom of the baby box clean though! Speaking of which, one more baby in the baby box as of tonight, and at least one other hiding somewhere… the procreation continues…

Rotisserie chicken

I haven’t talked about food in a while, but with the whole chicken currently thawing for dinner, it seemed like a good time. After having an oven that had a rotisserie a while back, I made it a criterion for the selection of a new one, when we started looking. Little did I know, I would have had a harder time finding an oven that didn’t have one. In fact, I didn’t see a single one that didn’t! I guess there’s a reason that the word in English comes from French. To be honest, you can buy a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken just about anywhere for less than it costs you to make one, but there’s something satisfying about making your own rotisserie chicken (I guess that’s how what’s his face makes money on the shopping network). One thing I learned the hard way, though, is a stuffed turkey is not a good choice for rotisserie cooking. A couple of Christmases ago, the plan was to through a bit of North American tradition into the French Christmas, so a stuffed turkey seemed like a good idea (especially for me: stuffing is the best part of Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner, as far as I’m concerned). So the turkey was stuffed, and expertly sewn closed (not by me) before being speared, and beginning it’s juicy rotation. Probably two thirds of the way through cooking, a strange noise emanated from the kitchen. Upon closer inspection, we found that most of the stuffing had exploded out of the turkey, and was soaking up all of the grease in the pan at the bottom of the oven. Fortunately, we had waaaaay overplanned the quantity of food necessary (in addition to mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and I can’t even remember what else, we had several courses, in proper French fashion, and by the time we got to the turkey most people were already (ahem) stuffed. So, note to self: no stuffed turkeys on the spit. That said, I found a great recipe for rotisserie chicken, with onion and apple inside before cooking, but since the thing isn’t stuff full, no explosions or other messes resulted (thankfully!). Happy cooking!

Hmmm, about those keywords

Apparently writing about keywords doesn’t include any useful keywords, because after a significant (all things being relative) spike yesterday, today’s traffic has been nil (and no, I don’t mean almost). I am, more than ever, intrigued by this unexplained traffic (since WordPress doesn’t seem to know where any of these people came from, except for 1). Weird. Maybe it was Vianney…

It’s all about the keywords

This blog is hardly a major traffic intersection, and frankly I have had no plans to make it big, so I am always amused by traffic “spikes” (I say “spikes” in quotation marks because while it looks like a spike on the traffic graph, once you look at the absolute numbers, it’s considerably less impressive) and always curious what provokes them. Last week is was the fact that my friend and coworker, Vianney, found the site and accessed it several times from different browsers/computers to make it look like a “lot” of traffic. This week it was apparently the simple fact of naming languages. In less than 12 hours, yesterday’s post got as many views as Dried fruit and other linguistic marvels from a few weeks ago has since it went up. It’s interesting to see what brings people to an otherwise virtually unknown site (a call to my dad, who I suspect stops by every day, is pretty much the limit of my advertising). Vianney probably has some tricks up his sleeve too though, so I’ll advertise a bit for him: Viann.fr, Viann.net, Viann.com and Viann.org are just a few of his sites. Anyway, it’s all about the keywords (not exactly news to me) and I’m enjoying watching which ones.

Social networking and language learning

So, I still haven’t taken the leap to Group Recipes (see my earlier post) (in fact, I haven’t really thought about it at all). I have since found a new addiction – a social networking site for learning German, Spanish, Italian, and French (or perhaps a language learning site with social networking capabilities?). Personally, I’m not sure about the social networking aspect, and even less sure since I got a message in the site inbox from some guy asking how I was doing and whether I had a boyfriend. A bit sketchy, if you ask me. However, the fact that there is a point system to show how much you’ve learned, and a ranking (“last 7 days” and “all time”) has pushed me to spend more and more time on it. I first launched into it this just over a week ago, when I was sick and unable to go to my German class. I ended up spending all weekend learning German, so I figure it was a good trade off (not to mention a few lessons a night when I can). My first goal is to get through each of the 53 lessons at least once (basically each lesson has 10-20 words to learn plus 10-15 phrases, but once you’ve done a lesson what you’ve learned gets added to your personal vocabulary list, and you can refresh either the lesson or a bit of everything from your vocab list, so I usually do a lesson, and then refresh a random sampling of my vocabulary). My second goal will be to do the same for Spanish, all the while doing refreshers of German…by the end of May. Nothing like tight deadlines to get things moving!

Thanks to Zoey from TheLanguageTravelCompany for asking (I completely forget to mention it): the site is called Babbel.