Saturday, October 08, 2005
Biblical Plagues
Since I have moved here we have had floods, toads and now locusts. They are big and all over the place, but don't seem to be too bothersome. However, I am worried that we are moving through the Biblical plagues visited upon Egypt. If I wake up covered in boils I think it will be time to really worry. Both my uncle and I are first born.
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Time to slaughter a sheep and paint the blood over your door! Just to be on the safe side, of course.
Unfortunately, Arivaca is cattle country. Our neighbors all have cows not sheep. How, about killing a lizard or a mini-toad? Will that work?
LOL @ papa Pohl :P
To Otto:
Killing never works!
While Kristin's English is quite good my father managed to mispell half of the Estonian names he tried in the last passage. My knowledge of the Estonian language is extremely basic. But, if anybody is interested the spellings are below.
Mari-Ann Rikken (now Mari-Ann Kelam)
Tunne Kelam
Arvo Otts
It looks like you got the others right. I am not sure if Opik is still alive. He was old in 1989, not 1990 when we met him.
:D Thanks you both, Otto and John! It's so nice to be noticed and approved ( you, guys, make me blush actually LOL) I have met both, Tunne and Mari-Ann Kelam, and I appreciate the work they have done for rehabilitated Estonia, they are both just nice people, too. The other names I guess I might only have heard of. By the way, Otto, you mentioned the CD of Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir before and I didn't comment it then but it's founder Tõnu Kaljust and his even more famous father Heino Kaljuste are my relatives actually. So it's a small world, as we say, isn't it. Well I know I like it the way it is :D
As for Estonian names - haha! - I wanted to correct you too, automatically, because there can't be an Estonian name like Opik, but then I remembered about your alphabet and you just don't have those letters. It's Öpik, of course. And in turn it's an abridged version of Ööbik which means "nightingale". Languages are fun! By thw way, Otto, your father was right about Arvo Ots, it's a lot common than Otts (if there is any with that name), and Ots means "end", btw. Oh, and maybe you didn't know but Tunne Kelam's name is actually partly chosen by himself, his real name is Tunne-Väldo Sink, his brother Kuldar Sink was a quite famous composer here. Tunne Kelam's first name is one that might seem very weird to people here, so i guess it was the reason he changed it. But actually it has a meaning, his parents were (or are, I'm not sure) earnest Christians and the name they gave their son meant Tunne(head)-ja-Väldi(kurja)- in English it would sound like Know(good)-and-Avoid(evil). Sink in turn means simply "ham". So Tunne Kelam's English name would sound like Know-Avoid Ham. Pretty funny huh?
But as for my translating skills - HAHAHA (excuse me!) I have translated some poetry and some common stuff, FROM English to Estonian, but I would never try to translate anything from Estonian to English because I really can't FEEL English, if you know what I mean. I may know some words (not many) but I still have big trouble with tenses and I am missing the TONE of certain words and expressions most of times, etc. etc. So I would prefer toad sheperding though ;)
THANK YOU ANYWAYS!
Kristin: Thanks for your message. I was trying to correct my father's mispelling of Ots first name and ended up mistyping his last name. For every two errors corrected I can expect to generate a whole new one. I do not know how to use umlauts on this computer. Hence alot of Estonian as well as German and Turkish words get written without the funny dots.
Tunne and Mari-Ann were the only non-technical people my father mentioned. There is no reason for you to have heard of the other people. They are involved in combusion research, mostly at Tallinn Technical University.
I like the Kaljuste CD I got at the library. I came across it by accident. Turns out there was a whole extra drawer of CDs I did not know about. Our librarian, Mary Kasaulitis showed it to me yesterday.
The translation job would be English to Estonian. The toads are now all going into hibernation. Now we have locusts.
Translation from English to Estonian would be OK by me, I'm really good in Estonian ;)
Otto, here is a page that provides some decent instruction on how to type umlauts and other special characters.
Also, you might be able to use html code. If you type &# followed by 214; (no space between the &#, the numbers, and the semi-colon) it should show up as a capital O with the umlaut. Here's what it will look like: Ö
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