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Sweetness, and memories...
You'd think that, with a title like that, this would be an intensely personal post.
Nope.
It's Rosh Hashanah — shanah tovah, chaverim — and it's traditional to eat sweet things, because the new year should be sweet. Specifically, it's traditional to eat apples and honey together. Well, there are apples in the fridge, and I did buy some honey just for the occasion, but I was pulling out the roasted unsalted pistachio nuts from Trader Joe's when I had a terrible idea: what has honey and pistachio nuts in it? Baklava!
So, it so happens I don't keep phyllo dough lying around in case I suddenly decide to make baklava at midnight on Rosh Hashanah. But there is sliced whole-wheat bread lying around. So... baklava toast!
Baklava toast consists of bread, honey, chopped pistachio nuts, and cardamom. Toast bread lightly. Spread with honey. Sprinkle cardamom. Sprinkle nuts. Drizzle some more honey on top (on the theory that it will help hold the nuts on — this theory is false). Toast again. If you want the nuts to stay on, chop them really fine and shake off the excess, or make it a sandwich.
Speaking of pistachio nuts, I had a wonderful experience in Israel when I was there (which was in 1995, with a synagogue youth group). We were visiting an Arab village in the Galil, and on the way to where we were going to eat lunch (and get food poisoning), we passed through the souk (marketplace) and I thought, "If the next few weeks are like the last two weeks, I'm going to spend hours on tour buses and get really munchy. I should buy some nuts."
By the time we finished lunch, the souk has closed up, but there were a couple of middle-aged men hanging out, and they pointed me up a side street to a corner grocery store. Inside, there was a whole family — three or four generations — taking refuge from the mid-day sun. And none of them spoke English.
Now, I know about five words of Arabic, and while I know a lot of prayers in Hebrew, "I'd like to buy a pound of mixed nuts" isn't one of them. That left gestures, through which I was able to convey that what I wanted was something that you eat, which doesn't really distinguish nuts from everything else in a grocery store.
After a few minutes of trial and error (and looking around the store), one of the children finally presented me with a small bag of roasted pistachio nuts. I nodded assent, and paid my shekels, and the grandmother pointed to the bag and indicated, "[Those are called] gar'inim (kernels)." To which my instantaneous reaction was, "What is that sound?!"
So I looked, at the package I was holding, and sure enough, I saw the word she had just said: gimel, resh, ayin... The ayin is silent in modern and Ashkenazi Hebrew, but in Arabic — her first language, of course — it's a pharyngeal fricative, a phoneme almost completely unknown in the West. And I had spotted one in the wild! I thought this was really cool.
Speaking of linguistics, I was IMing with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fiddledragon the other day, and made a number of egregious linguistics puns which I will now present in the form of riddles:
Nope.
It's Rosh Hashanah — shanah tovah, chaverim — and it's traditional to eat sweet things, because the new year should be sweet. Specifically, it's traditional to eat apples and honey together. Well, there are apples in the fridge, and I did buy some honey just for the occasion, but I was pulling out the roasted unsalted pistachio nuts from Trader Joe's when I had a terrible idea: what has honey and pistachio nuts in it? Baklava!
So, it so happens I don't keep phyllo dough lying around in case I suddenly decide to make baklava at midnight on Rosh Hashanah. But there is sliced whole-wheat bread lying around. So... baklava toast!
Baklava toast consists of bread, honey, chopped pistachio nuts, and cardamom. Toast bread lightly. Spread with honey. Sprinkle cardamom. Sprinkle nuts. Drizzle some more honey on top (on the theory that it will help hold the nuts on — this theory is false). Toast again. If you want the nuts to stay on, chop them really fine and shake off the excess, or make it a sandwich.
Speaking of pistachio nuts, I had a wonderful experience in Israel when I was there (which was in 1995, with a synagogue youth group). We were visiting an Arab village in the Galil, and on the way to where we were going to eat lunch (and get food poisoning), we passed through the souk (marketplace) and I thought, "If the next few weeks are like the last two weeks, I'm going to spend hours on tour buses and get really munchy. I should buy some nuts."
By the time we finished lunch, the souk has closed up, but there were a couple of middle-aged men hanging out, and they pointed me up a side street to a corner grocery store. Inside, there was a whole family — three or four generations — taking refuge from the mid-day sun. And none of them spoke English.
Now, I know about five words of Arabic, and while I know a lot of prayers in Hebrew, "I'd like to buy a pound of mixed nuts" isn't one of them. That left gestures, through which I was able to convey that what I wanted was something that you eat, which doesn't really distinguish nuts from everything else in a grocery store.
After a few minutes of trial and error (and looking around the store), one of the children finally presented me with a small bag of roasted pistachio nuts. I nodded assent, and paid my shekels, and the grandmother pointed to the bag and indicated, "[Those are called] gar'inim (kernels)." To which my instantaneous reaction was, "What is that sound?!"
So I looked, at the package I was holding, and sure enough, I saw the word she had just said: gimel, resh, ayin... The ayin is silent in modern and Ashkenazi Hebrew, but in Arabic — her first language, of course — it's a pharyngeal fricative, a phoneme almost completely unknown in the West. And I had spotted one in the wild! I thought this was really cool.
Speaking of linguistics, I was IMing with
fiddledragon the other day, and made a number of egregious linguistics puns which I will now present in the form of riddles:- What team of superheroes have giant minimal meaning-bearing robots that combine to form a Word?
- What super-villain is their arch-nemesis?
- What kind of defensive systems do their giant robots have?
- A British syntactician, fed up with arguing with a French colleague, tells him that he has his head up his butt. What is the Frenchman's retort?
- The Mighty Morpheme Power Rangers
- Lex Luthor
- Inflector shields
- "But, I am head-initial — it is you who are head-final!"
no subject
#1 should be a Ling Dept T-shirt.
no subject
Also: woo! Pharyngeal fricatives!
no subject
Also, shouldn't it be 'ayn! Pharyngeal fricatives!?