Today starts the weekend before a whole week off. I had last week off but it was filled with Christmas stuff, although the last 3 days of the week allowed me a good amount of free time. But today I’m going out on the deck with the middle two volumes of Nakhimovsky and Leed’s 4 volume Russian series, the first a continuation of book I and the second the story 12 Chairs. I started looking at them b/c they are jam-packed with info on idiomaticity (as well as everything else) and Terry Waltz wants lots of Russian phrases for her card game. I want a nice list for her, but then I have to figure out how to communicate it in cyrillic (why Word thinks this is the wrong spelling is beyond me).
Then I have the Harry Potter books, English and Spanish. I’ll be done soon, which is good b/c I just ordered them in French and Russian. That worked out well (despite the fact that reviews of the translations in both are bad) b/c those two are the languages I can read most easily. Next would be……..? Latin, for sure, and perhaps Italian. After that, Norwegian and Greek. I already have the Urdu version but it is VERY slow going. One line a night. I’m using a notebook when reading H.P. in other languages, to keep track of what I learn.
I also am using a notebook (stenopad) for —— holy crap! Word doesn’t like stenopad either! a reread of John McWhorter’s What Language Is; it is crammed full of fantastic examples of all sorts of things from all sorts of languages, but esp English. His dissection of the se- element in Latin sed and secret and how Gk idiom derives from it—– say what?! yes, idiom from se; go figure. Those Indo-Europeans!!!
I have a book I borrowed from my school library last year. I’m reading only one story. It’s by Gertrude Stein, the great. It is very racist but I want to finish it to see if it has any redeeming features. I wonder when college lit profs teach her they have a way of approaching this or do they just ignore it.
And that’s just the morning read. Yea! And in 5 months, I’ll be doing this every day for the rest of my life which I hope is long; that’s why I went to the gym yesterday.