Not your typical Disney fairy tale

So, having finished up the Applied Topology series with an adventure (The Lake of the Dragon, forthcoming later this year) that takes Thalia up into the Pamirs, I'm starting a new series that has some links back to the first series -- notably, the language of that remote village in the High Pamirs, which turns out to have some very interesting properties. And at the same time, I'm mulling over a third fantasy series built around Lake Shaimak and its Dragon.

Reading the folklore of a region often feeds my fantasy plotting with new ideas, so I went hither and yon on the Internet in search of Pamiri folk tales and found just one book: Tales from the Roof of the World. 333 pages. In German. No translation that I could find. "Oh, well, it'll be good for my vocabulary," I groaned, and ordered a copy.

I've been relieved to find that it's not very difficult reading. The stories are written for a general audience, not a scholarly one (Thank you, God) and I can get by with looking up maybe 4 to 5 words a page if my dictionary's handy, or I can wing it making context-based guesses if the dictionary's in the other room. And the stories are starting off on an unexpected note.

I knew I was going to enjoy the first group of stories when I saw that the table of contents listed them under the sub-heading "The Power of Women." What I didn't see coming was...

The first story opened as all such tales always have. The king whose daughter's beauty shone like the light of the moon, check. Task for the princes who woo her,check. Prince after prince after prince fails, check.

Then, just as I was about to go to sleep, there entered the Hashish Smoker and his Water Pipe.

Not only that, the Hashish Smoker gets the girl because he tells the best stories!

Oookay. We're not in Walt Disney World any more, and I can't wait to find out what the next folk tale is about!

But if you want to look at traditions before they were Disneyfied, you might note that the Victorians wouldn't necessarily have been as surprised as I was by the entrance of the Hashish Smoker. Just look at the illustration to this post; it's one of Tenniel's original illustrations to Alice in Wonderland.

Scrambled languages

Yesterday, still slightly dazed from finishing a book, I took the day off and watched an old musical. And it's a good thing I didn't try to watch Csardaskiralyno while I was writing, because this version totally scrambled my brains.

See, I have a theory about brains and language development -- totally unscientific, but mine own. It stems from the fact that I myself seem to have only two places in my brain to stash languages. One is labeled, "English" and the other, "Everything Else." The second box is just a stack: whatever non-English language I last used is what it will give me next time I reach into the box.

Most of the time this isn't a problem; I've only noticed it when moving rapidly across Europe, where on one morning I may need German, on the next Italian, and the next day I want all one hundred words of my pitifully small Greek vocabulary. (It gets even worse when you figure that twenty of those are numbers.) Trips like that involve a lot of pulling out and discarding languages before the box finally starts delivering what I need.

But I've been around a number of people who were raised bilingual, and they're not just more fluent in their second language than I ever hope to be; they also juggle multiple languages with aplomb. They can have a conversation with a German, a Hungarian and a Russian without ever getting tongue-tied or stammering as they switch languages.

My theory, then, is that people who spoke two or more languages from the time they learned to talk have constructed better and more sophisticated language boxes than I have. Maybe they've actually got a separate box for each language they learn!

So how did the operetta mess over my language boxes? Well... I've listened to highlights from this operetta so often that despite not being very good at picking out words with music, I seem to have memorized the songs. In Hungarian.

Now, this production was being sung in German, and sometimes the words didn't mean anything at all like the original lyrics.

And since my German's no longer good enough to follow the story unaided, I was heavily dependent on the English subtitles. Which sometimes had little or no relationship to either German or Hungarian lyrics.

So... you try remembering in Hungarian, listening in German, and reading in English for a few hours! Go ahead; I'll wait. And then I'll wait some more while you try to compose a coherent sentence.