and the rain fell down

[ambiguwaste]

damn. it rains. alot. i hear this is rather unusual for this time of year, and the locals say this is what mid-winter is usually like. damned changing weather patterns. it's irritating. i'd like some sun, please. for atleast a week. one week would be nice. of course, if i get that, i'll ask for more, so the weather is taking a stance of '

Comments

[savadkhu]

well, complain enough about missing home, and God does do His best to aleviate this problem. In your case He chose rain, this way you won't feel lonely for Oregon anymore....
Luv ya...
Dad

[letter15]

Learning a different language and/or culture is fascinating to me. In my Music in World Cultures class today we had four mbira players. Yes, mbira. The same instrument Eric plays, only I think Eric's is a kalimba vs. a mbira. Regardless, it was fascinating to me to hear the players speak in Shona/Bantu. The cascade of phonemes was...beautiful. The cascade of interlocking mbira players was even more so.

Looking at the Slovene you've posted here, I can almost hear it pronounced because, strangely enough, sung a couple pieces in Polish and the languages may be related. So hear's my stab at figuring out how the oddball letters are phonated. I'd like to know how close I am:

j = "y" , e.g. jaz = "yaws"
j at the end of a word = aspirant
š = "sh" , e.g. pišem = "pee-shem"
č = "ch" (I think), e.g. čaj = "cha-h"

[ambiguwaste]

correct for the most part. however, 'j' at the end of a word is still 'ye'. čaj = chai, well, actually, more like, chay. there's a lot of languages that have similarities in pronunciation and vernatcular, it turns out. with so many slavic languages in the area, and so many countries so close together, theres bound to be cross-overs. turns out letters, and pronounciations of those letters, are one of the most common cross-overs. even though yugoslavia's language, serbo-croatian, shares very little with russian, the cyrillic is extreemly similar. they don't use much cyrillic any more, though it is still taught in schools, but to a smaller degree. about as often as latin is taught in school in the states. wow. i've been here a month, and i'm already able to give a mini-lecture on some aspects of the evolution of the baltic languages. nifty.

[anholt]

Interesting. I had the impression from before you left that the language was going to be much more similar to Russian than it sounds like you're finding it.

/me <3 consistent pronunciation. I was able to get the right pronunciation, according to O's suggestions and your correction, from just a bit of experience with (turning head, mumbling) esperanto.

[ambiguwaste]

the grammer in slovenian is exactly the same as russian, save for the dualism structure. that, and common day usage doesn't use the genetive case much, which is odd, considering it provides possesion of objects. instead, they appearantly use the accusative structure, which means they are constantly saying 'to' someone. for example, instead of saying 'josh's mouse' or, 'the mouse of josh' (joštov miš, or miš joštov) they say the 'mouse to josh' (miš jošto). this is a very poor example, and it wouldn't really look this way, but it's as simple as i can do. i'm not quite complex enough with the language just yet.

[letter15]

The rain is falling here, too. And I hear that it's NOT unusual for this time of year--in fact, it's darn near expected.