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Can you find the error in the following sentence? “The bells chimed dong, dang, ding.” Don’t dally-dilly thinking about it — you probably felt the offending phrase zag-zig through your gut with the intensity of a pong ping ball. Who in their right mind would say, “dong, dang, ding”? Everyone knows it should be, “ding, dang, dong.” Why? Well ... ‘cause. It’s just one of those secret English rules you didn’t know you always knew.
While there’s nothing grammatically wrong with calling your mom for a quick chat-chit or blasting your favourite jam on the hop-hip channel, you will be rightly mocked for uttering any of these flop-flipped phrases. And for that you can thank the rule of “ablaut reduplication” — a hidden formula all native English speakers know implicitly despite having never heard of it before.
If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O.
Interior vowels of a word which are altered in repetition are called "ablaut reduplications". They give us phrases like tick-tock, riffraff, mishmash, sing song, King Kong, ping pong, dilly-dally, and shilly-shally.
And while you may not consciously realise it, almost every example of ablaut reduplication in the English language follows the exact same pattern, namely, “If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O." As to why this I-A-O pattern has such a firm hold in our linguistic history, nobody can say.
If you are a native English-speaker, you've known this rule your entire life — and never heard of it before now. Now you have, courtesy of a "wog", who had to learn it the hard way. But then again, life might have been simpler knowing that you know the rule without knowing it.
Read this wonderful little book at www.archive.org (better still, buy a copy and keep it in your backpocket)
It's said that it's better to give than to receive, but a gift you buy yourself lets you do both, which is what I did when I picked up this slim copy of Hermann Hesse's novella "Knulp" at Vinnies. They must not have known what treasure they were giving away because its sticker price was one lousy dollar.
Someone recently gave me the ultimate compliment by saying, "I wish I had met you sooner, but I'm glad it happened at all." Back then I was not the person I am now, and that person may not have liked me, just as I may not have appreciated Hermann Hesse's "Knulp" as much as I do now.
The pleasure of 'Knulp' isn't in the plot, which is slight, but in the weight of truth and human understanding that thickens the writing. It makes for a remarkable and deeply affecting reading experience, as it asks
the big questions: What should we do with our lives? What is a life well lived? How do we resolve the tension between duty and freedom?
"The most beautiful things, I think, give us something else beside pleasure; they also leave us with a feeling of sadness or fear."
"Why?"
"I mean that a beautiful girl wouldn't seem so beautiful if we didn't know that she has her season and that when it's over she'll grow old and die. If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I'd be glad, but all the same I'd look at it with a colder eye. I'd say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn't have to be today. But when I know that something is perishable and can't last for ever, I look at it with a feeling not just of joy but of compassion as well."
"I suppose so."
"To me there's nothing more beautiful than fireworks in the night. There are blue and green fireballs, they rise up in the darkness, and at the height of their beauty they double back and they're gone. When you watch them, you're happy but at the same time afraid, because in a moment it will all be over. The happiness and the fear go together, and it's much more beautiful than if it lasted longer. Don't you feel the same way?"
Knulp is always on the road, never quite belonging anywhere. He wanders from town to town, touching people's lives only briefly and then quietly disappears again as if in a puff of air. What he leaves behind is nothing more than a memory; a small recollection, like a melody we once heard years ago and somehow forgot. The novel reaches a final powerful climax when God reveals to Knulp that the purpose of his life was to bring a little nostalgia for freedom into the lives of ordinary men:
"Let well enough alone," said God. "What's the good of complaining? Don't you see that whatever happened was good and right, that nothing should have been any different? Would you really want to be a gentleman now, or a master craftsman with a wife and children, reading the paper by the fireside? Wouldn't you run away again this minute to sleep in the woods with the foxes and set traps for birds and catch lizards?"
Again Knulp started off, unaware that he was staggering with weariness. He felt much happier now and nodded gratefully to everything God said.
"Look," said God, "I wanted you the way you are and no different. You were a wanderer in my name and wherever you went you brought the settled folk a little homesickness for freedom. In my name, you did silly things and people scoffed at you; I myself was scoffed at in you and loved in you. You are my child and my brother and a part of me. There is nothing you have enjoyed and suffered that I have not enjoyed and suffered with you."
By the time you have read this, you're on the second-last page of this 113-page-thin triptych divided into "Early Spring", "My Recollections of Knulp", and "The End", and you wished it wasn't the end, because this lengthy metaphor has so much to teach you. It taught me a lot about myself. I was, like Knulp, the eternal drifter, never belonging anywhere, consistently refusing to tie myself down to any job, place or person.
I have often suspected that by bringing 'a little nostalgia for freedom' into the lives of some of the people I met, I may have upset them and not been the kind of person that deserved the aforesaid compliment.
It's difficult to read Camus when you are married and your day is filled with trivialities. Today was different because today Padma went to join the 'Stitching Bitches' in the village hall where she learns the latest crochet knots, and I was left alone in the house.
I hadn't read Camus' "The Stranger" for what seemed like ages. I don't even know if I still have all his books in my somewhat messy library, and the only online copy was in Bahasa Indonesia. And so I did the next-best thing and relaxed on the verandah and listened to the audiobook.
I could've listened to it in French - click here - but this was my day off from domestic challenges, and the English translation was just fine.
When you get to a certain age, trying to stay awake during the day and trying to fall asleep at night become one and the same. Trying to fall asleep to Albert Camus' complete philosophy may make a difference. It works for me! Tomorrow I might surprise you with Camus' "The Stranger".
I have no idea what Trump's next cunning plan is; I just hope he's not doing another Baldrick. After he had extended the Iran ceasefire overnight, all indications were that the stockmarket was going to nosedive. Yes, all the banks took a beating, but the big miners went up, and then down again, and then up again.
(Did you know that Australians now torch - at a minimum - over $31 billion a year on gambling across pokies, betting, lotteries and casinos, which is roughly the annual profits of ALL the four banks combined?)
The market simply doesn't know what to do — well, except for a certain clique in the US who are making billions with their insider trading. Very soon, though, there will come that Gorbachev-moment — remember December 25, 1991? — when the Iranian regime will finally collapse. I just hope it'll happen long before the whole world economy collapses.
I am holding on to my BHP shares, and just now bought a few more Liontown (LTR), after having sold my previous holding for a tidy profit only yesterday. Lithium is all the rage, and will be for a long time to come, now that electric cars are in higher demand than ever before.
Remember when Blackadder told Baldrick, "You wouldn't know a cunning plan if it danced naked on a harpsichord singing 'Cunning Plans are Here Again'"?
Let us just hope that Trump doesn't solve the problem of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by only cutting off everyone's head.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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