Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi Japan
Janita Locklin
Dana, do you do heating system design/consulting, or are you open to it?
Wanting to do radiant heat, and the panel rads are the emitter that I am gravitating towards. Seems like you are incredibly familiar with how these systems work.
On a more serious note, i also have to thank you Dana about your input on this forum,
i have been an avid follower of you and Martin since i started reading on this forum.
Both you guys complete each other vey well.
Jin: The silly-slalom clips were taken on 31 May 2013, at the Mt. Wachusett Ski area in central MA, a 30 minute drive from my home. (Some years I will ski that hill more days after closing than I do during the lift-served season. This wasn't one of those years.)
I was hoping to do it on 1 June with one of my old racing buddies but there was a heat wave in progress, didn't think it was going to make it (it didn't.) Drive-by "silly skiing" events long after the lifts had closed for the season, have become a tradition amongst a handful of my backcountry & ski-racing comrades. The latest I'd ever "skied" it was 6 June 2005, on a patch even smaller than that:
A few days prior on 1 June 2005 conditions had been a bit "better" on an outing with one of my racing team mates. He skied it on a randonee (backcountry fixed-heel) race setup, I was on steel edged cross country gear- the first skier in this clip:
Skiing (particularly bad skiing :-) ) & ski-racing is one hobby, green building & energy/carbon-policy issues are another. Linquistics might be a distant third I've been picking up a smattering of Hindi watching Bollywood movies on NetFlix this year- just enough to get myself into trouble at this point... I was surprised at the German-like syntax and the large overlap of similar/same sounding common words between Hindustani & western European languages- much more similar than I'd previously thought. This Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi stuff is starting to grow on me- much more accessible than I thought it would be.
I looked but didn't find a clearer/more recent face pic on this machine or the web. Best I can do is this clam-digging shot (@ Copalis,WA) from 8 years ago. (I'm the big kid on the right in the purple windbreaker. ;-) )
Yep- the hairy nerd is me, and that's my kid, although he's a lot bigger now than when that was shot. That was in my home state of WA, visiting relatives at the time. My mother managed to borrow a beach house for the weekend so we went for it. I've lived many places, but MA has been my home continuously since about 1990 (and for much of the 1980s too.)
I have no reason for learning Hindi, I just can't help it (must be a brain defect :-) ) My wife & sister-in-law (who stayed with us for several months last year) got into watching Hindi movies on NetFlix, and became enamored of the actor Shahrukh Khan. (IMHO he's a pretty good actor with quite a range of roles & talent covering several genres from romantic comedy to action thrillers to horror. He can actually dance too, and can fake some of the martial arts stuff without using a body double.) The regular German-like syntax and the many many similarities in vocabulary with European languages had it sinking in by osmosis during the first Bollywood movie we watched- it seemed WAY too easy.
The points of similarity aren't with any one European language- there seem to be as many Latin-isms as there are German-isms, but they're steeped deeply into the language. eg: the Hindi word for "what" fits somewhere between the French "qua" and Spanish "que", pronounced "kya". Hindi for "hand" is simply "hand", "one two three" is "ek do teen", the two common words for "yes" are "ha" which rhymes with the germanic "ja", and "ji" , which rhymes with the Italian/Spanish "si". "No" is the same as the Scandinavian/Dutch "nee" or English "nay", "name" is identical with the Dutch "naam", "I" or "me" is pronounced like the Spanish "me", "you" is the same as the Latin "tu", which rhymes with the germanic "du", and the similarities just keep going & going- the vocabulary is rife with it. It's a far more closely related language than I had been aware of - despite knowing it was a "Indo-European" language, I hadn't previously experienced how deep those connections are. (Yes, there really IS a common root lanquage! And how is it that people who look like Nepalis or Bengalis have a common ancestral language with people who look like Saxons or Swedes? There are some fair-featured Punjabis, but not a majority. That proto-tribe of Indo-Europeans just got around a lot, played the field, I s'pose.)
Hearing it spoken while reading English subtitles the syntax gets garbled. But treating is as a pidgin-German or something and open up your liquistic auditory filters it all starts making sense, or at least sort of... With a smattering of nouns and verbs embedded in the auditory brain the rest starts to come together, including the rules of syntax. The verb "to be " is "hai", (not very similar to any European version that I'm aware of) but as in German the verb goes at the end of the sentence, eg: "My name is Dana." would be "Mera naam Dana hai", literally "My name Dana is." Not a tough syntax to get used to, if a bit odd for English-only speakers. Hindi seems devoid of the complexities of Slavic lanquages, and even streamlined compared to western European languages, but nowhere near as pared down as the elegance of Mandarin or Cantonese. I can't really tell if Hindi Urdu and Punjabi have more than an accent or dialect difference, but to my none-too-familiar ear they seem more alike than different (and distinct from Bengali or Tamil.)
Another aspect of Bollywood movies is that many educated people in India will flip between English and Hindi regularly in normal conversations, sometimes mid-sentence It's usually pretty clear by context which phrases or words are adopted Anglicisms into Hindi vs. just saying it in English for emphasis or expression or just for the hell of it. Many Indian high schools teach most or all subjects in English, and fluency is high amongst the urban Indian middle class, but not so much in the remote villages, at least as reflected in the movies. I have no fear of English taking over Hindi, just as there's no chance of Hindi overwhelming Tamil or Bengali, etc, but it's commonly heard in the movies.
Enough with the Hindustani lesson. Bottom line, it's just not all that hard to understand with a bit of exposure. My wife thought I was making it up- Hindi makes no sense to her beyond a few expressions, but I can't watch a Hindi movie without picking up vocabulary. She keeps watching them, and if I'm parked on the chesterfield with her I'm stuck learning it whether I mean to or not, though on some of the really predictable movie plots I'll concentrate on the linguistic aspects just to keep it entertaining. Like a said- it's another hobby that deepens my appreciation of the interconnectedness of human civilization. The cultures of south Asia used to seem somewhat "firang" (Hindi slang for "foreigner", used in a similar manner as "gaijin" in Japanese) to me, but in the past year Hindustani culture has started feeling a bit more "desi" (Hindi meaning something sort of ike "part of us" or "one of ours", akin to urban-US "my homey".). I guess you really CAN export culture via cinema. But just the view of US culture from Hollywood is through a distorting lens, I'm sure Bollywood skews it's subjects just as badly.
BTW: Kazama is a Japanese family name, "sifu" is Cantonese for (the Mandarin) "shifu", "jin" is Mandarin for "gold" and a common Chinese family name as well as a fairly Japanese & Korean first/second name. Is there an Asian history there, or did you just borrow the handle from the Japanese video game character? (I've never played the game, only seen the character.)
i am of french canadian origins, will probably change my name to real one later on here,
i just like the anonymat when i am on a new place..but i guess that GBA starts to feel more like a regular site/community to me ..
Hell, I wish I could type as fast as Dana. Forget about the physics, mathematics and linguistics. Still my physics hero and one of the few I follow on any blog, anywhere. A nerd every boy wishes to become and every man wishes he was.
Jin's family probably looks a little bit like one my brother's young grandkids (he has four, all of whom are learning or already speaking Mandarin but only one with grandparents in China.) She has grandparents and great-grandparents from Poland, Lithuania, Israel, China, not just the US.
My own heritage is 'Merican Mutt from the Pacific Northwest going back several generations. They're mostly western-European types- a few Celts & Angles, some Germans of both swamp & mountain types, but I've never bothered to chase it all down or chart it (a combination of ignorance & apathy.) The town where I went to high school was probably about 10-15% 2nd & 3rd generation Japanese, some of whom had a handle on the language. My other brother married a Japanese citizen- learned a fair amount of Japanese while living with them one summer, when her non-anglophone friends came over for a visit. I've spent some time in Japan, and I've worked in Korea (where I can at least read the menus) and briefly in China (where I can't), as well as the Netherlands (which is much easier for English speakers to learn.) My kid has recent ancestors from central Mexico to central Poland tp central Vermont- he speaks French better than me (he actually studied it), but my Spanish is (for now) better than his.
I'm hardly a master at any of these- the best I can currently do with any fluency is bad-Dutch (about 3 biertjes into it), but I can also muster bad-Spanish when pressed. Understanding the gist of a conversation or catching phrases here & there isn't exactly the same as mastery. I can read them better than I can speak them- not enough practice, I guess.
I don't know pho about Vietnamese (other than a collection food or place names. :-) ) While there's a small Vietnamese population in my current home city, there a bigger population of Khmer speaking Cambodians, and an even larger population from west Africans- mostly from Ghana (don't know any Twi myself, but it's offered as a night class in the public schools), and a large contingent of Caribean-Spanish speakers. I can't go to the store without hearing other languages, even I can't tell if it's Serbian or Bulgarian and next door neighbors are Russian-speakers from Belarus. English with a US accent is still the most common language heard, but not by a huge margin.
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