okay, but *technically*...

In Chile I lived with one of the Language Arts teachers--who was teaching Shakespeare in the original Spanish--and when I asked what she taught, she included the word ortografía. I could readily translate this into "orthography," which neatly illustrates the pitfalls of translation, because I didn't know what that meant. We eventually worked our way around to something like "making sure the word has the right letters," so I got to explain that it would be an unusual native English speaker--certainly the rarest kind of American--who would hear "orthography" and know what it meant.

The approximation we found was "spelling," but it actually means "the list of mistakes you pay your professional editor to tell you about." English is justly notorious for this (though there are far worse possibilities), but I finally noticed the lyrics to this Swedish Christmas song I keep listening to (only because I didn't grow up with it, can't understand the words, and the music is thoroughly European and yet also thoroughly unfamiliar).

(See here if you're wondering what instrument the lead singer is playing.)

1. I Österland, där en stjärna uppgick, ovanligen hon månde brinna. Tre vise män efter Guds allvisa skick Gud sände det barnet att finna. Från Midians land kom de löpare tre, Som ville den nyfödde kungen se. De offrade håvor och ära. De offrade rökelse mirham och guld. Det heliga barnet var oss så huld. Jesum, vår frälsare kära!

2. När konung Herodes fick höra det tal, att en konung var födder till världen, fick han i sitt hjärta bekymmer och kval och trakta därefter att mörda. Men Josef tog barnet och Marie hand Och flydde sen in i Egyptie land Ur fattigdom, köld och elände. De offrade håvor och ära. De offrade rökelse mirham och guld. Det heliga barnet var oss så huld. Jesum, vår frälsare kära!

You know if Anna, a gifted multi-linguist if ever there was one, raises her eyebrows, you're onto something good. It's okay up until the spot where skick is pronounced "fweek," and even the phrasing of ville den, but then kungen comes out as "kohni[n]gen" and De offrade håvor och ära is "dom offrwaduh hovor oh-waara" where that "rw" is a sort of French thing, and it can't really be healthy to stick that many consonants into your sinuses, can it?

There's a lot there to find familiar! You suspect that Österland is probably not Austria (Österreich). Just take Gud and guld on their face, since your friends don't know pre-Conquest Germanic any better than you do. Tre can be our trusty Indo-European "three," and if you watch enough BBC and squint hard enough, barnet looks like the Scottish bairn. I don't know the origin of the word, but it's a song about the Three Magi bringing gifts, and I know Bach wrote a suite called L'offrande Musicale (English "offer," Spanish oferta) so offrade seems clear enough. Okay, fine, just look at Google Translate.

What I really want is to pack a violin and spending a year learning folk songs in Scandinavia.

happy flu season.

We had a very exciting day today, as J has the flu, and this morning the thermometer reported 106°, so I had not gotten out of bed when the course of the day was set. Happily, since learning about the existence of "urgent care" clinics covered by my insurance, I've managed to avoid the ER. Most medical emergencies aren't actually emergencies, like my various foot or toe fractures, or that time my hand was infected the morning I was driving up to a campout party. Like, yes, having a throbbing infected wound on my hand was not great, but on the other hand, if I drove most of the way to the party, I could save myself at least 2 hours of time spent in traffic, and then I could find someplace to stop and get antibiotics. If I really have an issue that can't wait long enough for me to get a good night's sleep first, I'll know.

(Notable examples include "crippling gallstone attack" and "aikido accident where my lip gets chomped between my upper and lower teeth.")

California has been having an epically bad flu season, bad enough that I got a flu shot, and I've never gotten a flu shot (or, for that matter, the flu). I'll be pretty surprised if neither Anna nor I get it now, despite diligent hand-washing and surface-disinfecting.

Apparently there's also a somewhat lethal canine influenza epidemic that I need to call the vet about.

Life is fragile.

typologica musica.

[EDIT 1/Feb/2018: The Scandinavians have a different story about this instrument.]

I've been watching Scandinavian folk musicians on repeat for months now, so this singer's instrument, with 5 "courses" of 2 strings each, has been driving me batty.



(He sounds like Richard Thompson singing "The Times, They Are A-Changin'," but we'll run that down some other day. It is notable that this is a Swedish[?] Christmas song, the "Twelfth Night Carol," but since I first heard it yesterday, I don't care and I'm happy to play it on Repeat.)

The video description says Esbjörn Hazelius is playing the cittern, but then Ale Möller is on the mandola, so it's by process of elimination, and Google Chrome automatically translating Swedish Wikipedia tells us that yes, Mr. Hazelius is the singer. You might also, as I did a few months ago, say "What the hell is a cittern?", and then you could go to English Wikipedia and learn about something that is definitely not the instrument in that video.

This may be hard to appreciate if you didn't grow up with the state of the art being LexisNexis's infuriatingly odd query language, but one of the most important things about the post-Google era is that you can just type "difference between cittern and bouzouki and mandola" into a text box and get something really helpful.

The confusion is this:

1. The mandola and octave mandolin have the same relationship to the mandolin that the viola and cello respectively have to the violin: the cello is a full octave below the violin (G-D-A-E), and the viola (C-G-D-A) drops the high E and adds a lower C.
• The viola is usually described as "tuned a fourth below the violin," which is both more precise, and also, to my ear, more confusing.
2. Back in the 60s, some Irish guys introduced the four-course Greek bouzouki into Irish folk music, where it was sometimes custom-built with a flat rather than rounded back, just like the...flat-backed, four-course mandolin family.
3. English master luthier Stefan Sobell started custom-building mandolas/octave mandolins/Irish bouzoukis with five courses, and then he called that a "cittern" for some reason. He's been so influential that, with the original meaning of "cittern" having gone dormant, the name stuck. Sort of.

There's a bunch of stuff on that comparison site about instrument scale length and how that affects the gauge of strings you put on it to produce the kind of sound you want, but unless you play a stringed instrument, it's boring.

Best part: the Greek Greek bouzouki dates all the way back to...1900.