germanize epitome of incomprehensibility Lately people have given my name a German spelling: "Kerstin" instead of "Kirsten". And then "sch" instead of "sh" elsewhere. Language is change: ancestors had to anglicize from French "ch" to get that "sh" - same sound, as is "sch." So shhh with all this shushiness, Kirsten, you can't be fake-angry at the delightfulness of it all, even if you *are* mad at Certain German Prof for not giving you the bit of a job she gave you last term. You can't get paid for sitting in an office and doing nothing ALL the time. And then language genetics are not person-genetics: my first name appeared in a Scandinavian version just because Mom thought it sounded nice. Unrelatedly, it turns out there's distant Norwegian ancestors on my dad's side, because of course. Laundry load of pastel-pales but a bunch of different textures. signed, deine Lieblingslinguist, Kerstin Schule-ist-langsam-heute 240122 ... raze i sometimes wonder what my name (and life) might have been if i'd grown up in prague and weiss hadn't changed to west when my great grandfather fled to canada during the second world war, decades before i was born. maybe i'd be an architect named honza, with a secret passion for fire escapes. if germanized, i s'pose i would be johannes westen. not very elegant or expansive, but kind of catchy, no? 240122 ... e_o_i It sounds like the name of a classical composer! Or an orchestra conductor with wild hair. Someone in that milieu, anyway. I'm sure I heard your name story before too! It might have contributed to the dream I had in Glastonbury about two doctors with black_and_white names - Dr. Weiss and Dr. Schwartz - who turned from psychiatrists in my half-asleep thoughts into scientists of uncertain discipline being questioned by a wizard-alchemist about amulets to help with his spells...although the immediate inspiration for that was the character Isadora White Wing from Fear_of_Flying (her pre-marriage last name was anglicized from "Weiss) and all the mystical hippie-ish shops I saw that day, especially one with a complicated geometrical figure hanging from the ceiling near the door as a sort of amulet. Long sentences, pah! Anyway, I guess germanizing my last name by its meaning would get "Wasserfall." A little silly-sounding, but oh well. All's well that ends in water. 240123 ... e_o_i Pronouncing the "au" in French "autobus" like "ow" (it's "ah"). 240902 ... e_o_i Huh, I remember that dream. I don't think it appeared in blather's dream_conversations, though, so I could remedy that. 240902 ... e_o_i (I mean the dream about the doctors, not about me pronouncing the French word for bus wrong - *that* I did in real life.) 240902 what's it to you? who go blather from