cloudsoup's posterous

What sort of a language is Hungarian for God's sake?

We've started planning our trip round Eastern Europe this summer and
I've just learned about Hungarian. Well that's us done for.

So most Hungarians today are Magyar - and the language isn't Indo-
European , I believe, but Finno- Ugric, distantly related to Finnish
and Estonian.

Go to a bar and make a stab at ordering a wine by asking for a 'vino'
and you'll get a blank look. The Hungarian for 'wine' is 'bor', I
believe.

I once worked with an Indian guy who knew some Sanscrit and I
discovered that counting 1 to 10 in that ancient language wasn't too
dissimilar to couting 1 to 10 in Welsh. Don't know how much I can rely
on a vague familiarity with rudimentary Welsh to help me through the
strange languages of the East...

The dimmer of my two cats still hasn't worked out how the catflap works

She tries to pull the flap - which should be pushed - toward herself
first, pulling the frame of the flap outwards from the door; then she
wriggles underneath the clear part that's now dangling between the
door and the frame. This is how far she's got in three years of
puzzling about it.

In John Wyndham's book, 'Chocky', the child, who's sort of channeling
an alien intelligence, asks his father why cows in a field can't
figure out how to open the gate; however dim they are, he thinks, of
they considered any problem long enough they should be able to come to
the correct answer.

Not my cat.

The BBC's forgets to mention Helen Thomas's wish that Israelis should 'go home to Poland'

The BBC reporting on the Helen Thomas affair describes the recent hoo-haa thus:

Helen Thomas, 89, retired under a cloud on Monday - caught on camera saying Israeli Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine".


Which is somewhat accurate..and somewhat not. This is the actual exchange with Thomas:

Thomas : Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, not Poland."
Interviewer: So where should they go?
Thomas: Home. Poland. Germany. America. And everywhere else.


The BBC seems to have forgotten to mention that Thomas said Israeli's should 'go home'. Of course, they'd jump all over a right-winger who said, for example, that blacks should 'go home'; but left-wingers like Thomas apparently get a free pass. The Beeb goes on to say: 'Her questions also brought criticism, particularly from conservatives who believe her reporting is biased'; they didn't mention that her remarks have been roundly condemned by the White House, whose spokesman called the remarks, 'offensive and reprehensible'.

I might be getting paranoid.