Darkoshi

Manipur - one of the eastern-most states of India, on the border with Myanmar.
Meitei - a language and ethnic group of people in that region.
Sanamahism - a religion in that region.

The history of India is so extensive. I don't remember learning any of it in school, except perhaps a brief mention of the East India Company and Gandhi. I wonder if they teach much more of it in British primary schools?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_integration_of_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princely_state
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire


Manipuri dance, a traditional dance form, has some quite unusual-looking dresses:



Video title: Manipuri classical dance Basanta Raas
Posted by: WildFilmsIndia
Date posted: Feb 3, 2016

It occurred to me to wonder in what year Wikipedia was started. So what do I do? I look it up on Wikipedia!

2001, by the way.

This chart is a reminder that Wikipedia is not only an English-language resource:
Article count of European Wikipedias by language family

There have only been a few times I recall seeing or reading articles in a non-English language Wikipedia. I wonder if you look up something on one language version of the site, if the results ever include articles in the other language versions? Or are they completely separate. Are there completely different articles in different languages on the same subject? That would be interesting to see, sometimes. They ought to link to each other.
But I only wonder, not wanting to take more time of my day now looking up about that.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abugida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

"a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary."

I'm still not clear on the difference between an abugida and a syllabary or alphasyllabary. But no matter. I'm posting this mainly in case I forget the word, as I suspect I will.

It feels like a Spanish word to me... abogada/abogado, that's what it reminds me of. Lawyer.
And that sure is similar to avocado, now that I think of it.

Although I'm vegan, I don't often buy much fresh fruit and vegetables. Doing so results in needing to wash, peel, cut, cook, (etc.) as well as eat them, and to do so before they go bad, regardless of whether I have the time that day or week. Background stress. Not buying them avoids that. Usually I'll only buy a few easy things here or there. Avocados are good. Occasional fruit. Carrots; they last almost forever in the fridge without going bad.

I felt like cooking something this weekend though, and that fruit would be nice too. So yesterday I bought:

a passion fruit
2 oranges
blueberries
blackberries
jicama (pre-cut sticks, ideal for munching on! such a great convenience even though it comes in a plastic container)
fennel
dandelion greens

The fennel didn't have a bar-code on it. At the self-check-out station, it wasn't listed in the item look-up menu. A Kroger store employee came over to help, but we couldn't find it on their physical cheat-sheet either. Then I said, "It's also called anise, but I don't think it would be listed under that..." Yet it was listed as "anise / fennel".

.

My erstwhile flu or cold still lingers a bit. Last weekend, my upper right chest area ached for a day; might mean a slight lung infection. My throat has been phlegmy; I still have a slight cough and occasional runny nose. Otherwise, I've still been feeling ok. Still much better than the usual kind of colds I get, where my nose is runny and/or congested non-stop for days or weeks.

.

Kleenex has renamed their "Cool Touch" tissues to "Cooling Lotion". In the store yesterday, I wasn't sure if it was the same product. The ingredient list included polyethylene (plastic!?), which I hadn't remembered it having. So I took a photo of the label and didn't buy any. But comparing that now to a "Cool Touch" box which I still have, the ingredients are the same.

.

While walking, I passed a hickory tree and thought of that children's rhyming song, Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock. Except I thought the rhyme must be like "Tickety tickety tock, the mouse ran up the clock" (since clocks go tick tock). I recall thinking, well if I *did* put in the word "hickory", how should it go, "Hickory hickory hawk?" I played around with other variations in my mind, "clickety clickety clock", "clippety clippety clop"

Looking it up today, I was surprised that my brain's initial word association of "hickory" with the rhyme was correct. It's interesting that those words "hickory dickory dock" may have come from Cumbric numbers.

Counting Numbers in Korean - there are 2 different sets of number words, used for counting different things. That explains why the numbers we learned in TaeKwonDo class don't always match the Korean numbers I hear in other contexts.

I was reading a German webpage about St. John's Wort (Johanniskraut) and didn't understand a part, so I translated the page into English. On the translated page, I came across the term "anti-baby pills". Amused that the word for birth control/contraceptive pills would have been mistranslated like that, I checked the original page and was surprised to see that the German word actually is "Antibabypillen". The term doesn't seem to be used in a negative sense either; apparently that's just what it's called over there.

I recently discovered Google's language translation tool. It seems to translate better than BabelFish, at least for the pages I tried.

What would be really useful would be a browser plugin/button, which would let you translate the current page you have open, and have it automatically determine the language so that you don't have to select it from the dropdown. Just one click, and it would open a new window with the page translated.

Nebraska's child abandonment law - somewhat related to one of my recent posts. Now they want to set a lower age limit, because people have been dropping off older kids. But if the parents really don't want the kids, aren't the kids better off without them? Or is the problem that there are really a whole lot of people who'd be glad to be relieved of the work and responsibility of having to raise their children? And that the government doesn't have the resources to handle them all?

There are 3 large trees next to each other, with flaming-red leaves, at work. They are beautiful; striking. Against a blue sky. Against a dark gray sky. Just striking. It always makes me wonder, people going to the northeast to see the colorful autumn trees, when there are colorful trees everywhere. The bright yellow leaves on my tulip-tree have mostly fallen.

I recently watched Brokeback Mountain on DVD, from Netflix. It was a pretty good movie. I asked Q if he wanted to watch it, and he said, "Nah". Why is that? Is it that straight guys aren't supposed to show any interest in things with gay themes, as otherwise they could be suspected of being gay themselves? Or that a straight guy can't conceive of a movie with a gay theme being of any interest to themselves? Admittedly, the movie didn't seem of particular interest to me either, when it came out, which is why I only got around to watching it now. I had a vague curiosity about it; but a couple of cowboys on a mountain finding out they have homosexual feelings... just didn't seem *that* interesting.

I sound like what in Japanese?

"Grammar and syntax aside, Japanese men generally speak in shortened huffs, while women tend to speak in artificially high octaves, elongating their word endings in an almost coquettish attempt to flatter the listener."

Shortened huffs certainly describes how men speak in old Japanese movies. That's one thing I don't like about watching some of those movies... the characters seem grim and serious, and it sounds to me as if they are shouting at each other throughout the whole movie. That can leave me feeling stressed. In one movie I was watching, I was amused that the men kept uttering what sounded like short trembling groans, but the subtitles were translating it as "Yes, Sir". I thought it would be funny if at future BDSM group meetings, the subs were to utter short groans like that in place of saying "Yes, Sir".

I don't like that there are cultural associations of short, gruff, monotonic, non-emotional or angry-sounding speech with masculinity. Although that does give people who want to down-play their masculinity a relatively simple way of doing it - by speaking differently. Which is the reason perhaps, of why some gay men tend to speak differently from straight men, even in English.

I think I tend to be short/monotonic myself, when I speak. It's not something I do purposefully/consciously in order to sound masculine, though. It seems to me to take more mental and physical effort to use expressive intonations/inflections. And it seems fake, somehow... like an actor reading their lines as opposed to someone speaking straight from their heart. It's hard enough verbalizing the things I want to say, without adding extra inflections on top too. For example, if I compose and write down a few sentences to use as my answering machine message, I can then add extra intonations to it when recording it. But it is hard to do that in regular conversation.

So perhaps one's method of speech may be related to how one's brain has developed. Perhaps males in general would tend to speak differently than females, even without cultural/social influences.

While reading the above article, I wondered why speaking in a high-pitched voice would be interpreted as a form of flattery. But if it is a woman speaking to a man, maybe it is because that makes it sound as if the woman finds the guy attractive, and is excited to be speaking to him, like a teenage girl who has a crush on a boy. Which begs the question, do Japanese women also use a high-pitched voice when speaking to each other? But then I suppose a woman could be happy and excited to be speaking to another woman too... it would give the impression she thinks highly of her, which is what flattery is all about.

Come to think of it, when someone says "Hi" in a long drawn-out, high-pitched voice, that does give the impression that they are happy to see you (in person) or to be speaking with you (on the phone).

i'm finding myself more and more attracted to the beauty of Chinese calligraphy... especially when seeing it actually being done, with the brushes and paint or ink.

if it didn't sound so daunting to learn Chinese, i'd want to.