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A little incident in folk grammar, funny to me at least. I wrote a sentence containing

. . . which led to reconstructing in my mind . . .

because

. . . which led to mentally reconstructing . . .

seemed wrong: everyone knows you don’t put an adverb between to and a verb form! (You’ll note that to reconstructing is not an infinitive, so the ‘rule’ does not apply.)

When I became consciously aware of that confused subconscious reasoning, I changed it to the latter.

I wonder how many now-standard grammatical features we owe to such extensions of misunderstanding.

Someone considered this passage, in “The Night of the Legion of Death” (an episode of The Wild Wild West), worth quoting on IMDb:

You’re not the Governor. Your one of the down faith, commandor present, your value silver voice! Your a howl chain faint fraud Brubaker! I am the Governor, I made you, I put you in office, I create your faint legion, I writing speech for you, tell you what to said, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward or execute your greek mass! It’s I speak proof and don’t ever forget that.

Ya gotta wonder about the person who transcribed this: did they think it made sense, or find it an admirable piece of nonsense?

Well, I hope I improved it some:

You’re not the Governor. You’re a wonderfully endowed face, a commanding presence, a bell-like silver voice. You’re a hollow tin-plated fraud, Brubaker! I am the Governor. I made you. I put you into office. I created your Black Legion. I write your speeches for you, tell you what to say, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward, who to execute. You’re a Greek mask that I speak through. Don’t ever forget that.

Friday I happened to pass a bookstore (believe it or not!) and found A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo. It’s a few years old now; I wonder how I missed it.

After overviews of the history and writing systems, there’s a list of 248 sound-shifts from proto-Elvish to Common Eldarin to Lindarin (Telerin) to Old Sindarin to Middle Sindarin to Classical Sindarin to the Third Age and various dialects. Wow. The accedence paradigms are surprisingly complete, though Salo remarks that no second-person verb endings are attested (he used a reasonable analogy to invent them).

Criticisms: Breaking up the word list into common words and three lists of proper nouns (echoing the index to LotR) is a strange choice. I would like to see some discussion of Salo’s methodology.

— My handle on Wikipedia and a few other places is Tamfang, intended to mean copper beard. The first root is attested only (so far as I know) in an early version of The Chaining of Melko. The canonical words for copper (according to Salo) are urun (metal) and rust (color), but these don’t appeal to me; so I postulate that a form related to tambe survived in some language east of the Misty Mountains.

All of the Cyrillic spam I see has Moscow phone numbers (495). How come no one in the rest of the Slavic Orthodox world is getting in on the game?

Next day: What d’ya know: I got one with (3435), which may be Sverdlovsk.

My hearing is just poor enough that I usually turn the subtitles on when I play a DVD; I could mostly do without the help, but it’s good to have when someone mumbles. It’s often clear that whoever made the subtitles did not have access to the script. A phrase in a foreign language almost always shows up as “[speaking foreign language]” (or, if we’re lucky, “[Speaking Italian]”).

So it’s a pleasant surprise that the subtitles of Schindler’s List are in English, German, Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew — though the Polish diacritics are missing, and the transliterations of Hebrew and Yiddish appear to be nonstandard.

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