Semitic Circles

MY MIND is running anticlockwise and in circles. Well anticlockwise is circles; ya know what I mean. I have been reading and writing backwards (practising Hebrew). And because I don't have recurrent phlegm problems, the pronunciation of this Semitic tongue doesn't come naturally either. Not a single word of the 100s I've encountered yet not really learned is even faintly familiar to a native speaker of English. (Except for אוניברסיטה (university) and סטודנטים (students).) E.g. I constantly confuse taxi and hotel. So the chances are I shall arrive at Tel Aviv airport with an original language Old Testament in my hand that I still can't read, step into the road ~ nearly get run over because foreigners drive on the wrong side ~ flag down a car and say "Are you a hotel? Take me to the nearest cab!" At least I know the word for driver ~ נהג nehag ~ so I'll be able to tell the hospital who ran me over.

I must apologize for three days' nonstop hamsters. Did you know there are about 20 species worldwide? So only 17 left to go! At one a day we'll be finished mid-September. (Joking!)

I am reading an "absorbing" tome about the Royal Family. It says Prince Philip has (or used to have when he was younger and more "dashing") discreet affairs from time to time, but HM the Queen didn't mind, as she prized loyalty above fidelity.

Unlike the late Princess Diana, who's portrayed as mentally unstable. Partially because she couldn't accept it was merely traditional for the Prince of Wales to have a mistress. She wanted Charles all to herself ~ crazy lady! Camilla Parker Bowles's great-grandmother Alice Keppel, incidentally, was mistress to Edward VII. His wife, Queen Alexandra, even allowed her to be present at the old and ailing King's dignified, nonmelodramatic and very royal deathbed scene.

The local Morrisons have restocked up on butterscotch Angel Delight and sold me a whole (and not budgie-sized, unlike Tesco's) hot roast chicken for £2. I couldn't help noticing the man in front of me at the till was paying £3.97 for one that was smaller and raw! So anyway I'm eating well. In fact if I eat any more chicken I'll grow feathers and start cooing. The day before my £2 find I had purchased a pair of enormous breasts for £2.80. I gave them a good rub-over with curry powder and cooking oil and slammed separately in the oven. One for 45 mins 200F preheated; the other for the same time and temp but from cold. Both times I left the fillets in the hot oven to cool. The first was a little overdone but the second luscious and absolutely perfect.

Now I must go, I've an appointment with a Linguaphone tape and some more "spring" cleaning ~ with only a couple of days till September this is getting rather urgent.

Also I must dash to the launderette. I've not a clean stitch to wear. I don't take my clothes off these days, I peel them.

Must dash. Cheery-bye and till tomorrow, y'all!

New Cassette Player

I AM PROUD OWNER of a brand new cassette player from Argos the shop that sells everything ~ in order that my hardcore Hebrew
הכלב צ'יקו הגיע אל המרפאה בגלל בעיות קשות וגירוי חריף באזור פי הטבעת
can make some sense to me. The course is so oldfashioned it's on cassette only. Two of the books are exclusively in
לפני שבוע עברנו מסימילאק(טופ 3) למטרנה (שלב 3), היתה ליובל בשבועיים לפני כן קיבה רכה פה ושם, אבל גם קיבה קשה ולא שלשול.
So now I'm £23 lighter and (hopefully soon shall be) a one stately language of modernity and antiquity heavier.
So I sincerely hope, at least.
As I mentioned before, I have already familiarized myself with the Hebrew alphabet, both in printed and "script" forms. The printed letters are those in scribal forms, as used in most newspapers and books. "Script" letters are derived from 19th century Yiddish handwriting ~ they differ just as much (if not more) from printed letters as does the Russian alphabet than ours. It took me more than a week just to get a rudimentary reading knowledge of Hebrew but I'm glad I bothered as the course I'm now using barely troubles to teach the alphabet before launching directly into what appear to me to be quite sophisticated dialogues with no transliteration whatsoever. The one concession to the learner is that dialogues are printed out "pointed" # that is with vowel dots under the letters, rather than unpointed whch wd lk smthng lk ths but it's the way Hebrew-speakers have always preferred to jot down their tongue ... What I'm glad of is that this new alphabet book gives an accepted way of copying down Hebrew letters in standard printed form ~ the way you might wish to write on a public notice or poster for example. There are too many similar-looking letters to reliably invent one's own style of characters without fear of creating absolute confusion in the eyes of a native Hebrew-speaker (if they were unfortunate enough to clap eyes upon my notebook-doodlings.
Anyway it's past 2pm and I must dash. Busy busy busy! Never a moment to spare today. Which could put me in a very bad mood if I let it but I'm keeping positive. So cheery-o now y'all!!

Hardcore Hebrew. Because I'm Really Depressed...

I'VE FOUND A COPY OF THE MOST hardcore Hebrew course you can get. I want to learn the same language carved out by the finger of God on those 10 Commandment stones.

It's the now out-of-print Linguaphone course with cassettes. Of the three textbooks, two are exclusively in Hebrew print. The tapes are exclusively in Hebrew. No prompts or explanations in English.

The Handbook explains in English supposedly all you need to know.


I'm glad I troubled to learn the alphabet beforehand; otherwise it'd all be:
השם עבר מופיע בתנ"ך כשמו של סבו של אברהם אבינו. המושג "עברי" נזכר בתנ"ך פעמים רבות
to me ...

Now I just need to get a working cassette player so I can use the thing ..!

Yeah I'm tired and depressed but what's new? I'm psyching myself up for spending the rest of my forseeable life on methadone without any freedom OR a lovely hit of "B" on the horizon ...

Back to the faintly religious theme, I do believe this is what "faith" is about. The willingness to take a leap into seeming hopelessness of pitch dark, knowing it's the best thing and trusting all will come out right in the end...

Where or when-ever "the end" might be. That's what I've always found so hard about methadone, as I posted the other day. The whole experience feels like an endless pointless drag with no hope in view.

I don't know quite what else to say, but I'm giving it a shot ...



LINKS:

Linguaphone, Rosetta stone and other language methods compared, homepage ...

Rosetta Stone review ...

Top illustration: Dead Sea scrolls fragment ...

50 CENT: BALTIMORE LOVE THING

Here's a 50 Cent track about heroin. Thanks to Clarity In Muddy Waters who listed the words ...

A Stab In The Daylight

STEAK-KNIFE IN HAND, my assault on life's possibilities goes on.

Modern and Biblical Hebrew handbooks (and a few other languages besides) tower beside my TV like a modern-day Babel. I have Hebrew CDs coming out of my ears.

Add to this the Yiddish primer I borrowed "out of interest" (bear in mind Yiddish is a Hebrew-lettered Aramaicized offshoot of mediaeval German as spoken in Poland and Eastern Europe through the Ukraine and into Russia and I'm already quite good in German) ~ and this overflow of Hebrew symbols is spilling out my ears together with elementary dialogue about hotel reservations in the Holy Land.

Here's a comparison of Yiddish and German as transliterated:

Yiddish: Zey bleybn nit.
German: Sie bleiben nicht.
("They aren't staying.")

Spanish had to go (temporarily) by the wayside. No I've not given up on it. I've always wanted to speak Spanish and still do. I just had to re-prioritize. The library's restrictions on CD language borrowing put limits on my resources.

(Evidently the idea of studying more than one language at once is beyond their expectations (this is, after all, modern Britain)).

Apart from all this, the furry Mongolian Tubby Bum-Bum ~ aka Spherical Roborovski ~ perks her ears and says "hello!" from her Italian hard cheese tube where she's plonking her newspaper-chewed bedroom. Sometimes she up-ends the entire tube whilst nibbling on it, like a miniature polar bear with trashcan-on-head, which is hilarious to behold ...

All is fine with me, (I should say). But I don't feel very fine. Life feels gapingly void and fruitless. I always feel I'm doing something wrong ~ something ineffable, abstract... something I can never put my finger on.

I want to do things right. For once in my life.

I'm aiming (if I possibly can manage this) to give in a totally clear drugs screen next week. And that means pretty much no heroin between now and then.

And of course, if I could manage it voluntarily (that is, having money to pay for it and yet abstaining ~ that would set a vitally new slant on my entire future ...

Wish me luck!

DRUNK SQUIRREL VIDEO
This one's a classic...
... ever seen a SQUIRREL this rat-arsed? ;->...
... the furry entertainer's been bingeing on autumnally fermenting pumpkins ...

Middle Eastern Chic

I HAVE BEEN very slowly learning some Hebrew (yes on top of Spanish: I'm a sucker for punishment). Slowly being the operative word. I got 4 books from the library: 2 on Biblical; another 2 on modern. The Biblical Hebrew "grammars" (the one from the 1950s claims to be "simplified" ~ well I'd love to see a complicated version. What do they do there? Write the explanations in Arabic??)~~ these are totally impenetrable.

Only by poring over Teach Yourself Modern Hebrew did I eventually get somewhere. I can now read and write the script in both printed and handwritten variants with and without vowel pointings or "vocalizations" as scholarly types like to call them. Though I still make the odd howling error. E.g. mistaking a T for an M or an S. Compare Tet, Mem and Samech on the chart. It took me a week to get the 22 consonants plus a handful of vowel signs (which look so similar I have to take off glasses and peer at them from 2 inches away to read any distinction in the 1950s book, which appears to have deliberately picked the most arcane and confusing font possible, where entire groups of letters look just the same... I have always had a fascination with Near Eastern history and culture, ancient and modern...

& NOW FOR SOME MUSIC...
THIS IS a CLASSIC:
OFRA HAZA: IM NIN ALU
Famous in Israel and surrounding countries for years, this song became an international hit in 1988 after rappers Eric B and Rakim featured a sample on one of their tracks... The video is shot in Petra in Jordan. Ofra Haza died in 2000 of pneumonia, a complication of AIDS...
Im Nin Alu means loosely if the doors are locked ... Originally a Hebrew poem by a 17th century rabbi, some of the words were incorporated in Haza's 1988 hit.