Carmarthen

Greyfriars Bobby is a 1961 Disney film, based on the tale of a Skye terrier who became famous in 19th century Edinburgh because he slept on his dead master’s grave for 14 years. I must confess that I watched this mostly because I happened to see a preview and sighed, “Oh for the days when the dogs in movies were real dogs.”

And indeed the movie is just full of shots of a real Skye terrier doing absolutely adorable things, so well worth seeing if you simply want to watch a dog being a very good dog.

But even aside from that, quite an enjoyable film. Obviously the beginning is a bit of a downer: Bobby’s master, an old shepherd, has been dismissed from his last position and dies of pneumonia in a cheap lodging house in Edinburgh, with Bobby at his side. Tear-jerking stuff. But although Bobby does indeed insist on sleeping on his master’s grave, he also accidentally becomes a ray of sunshine in Edinburgh, befriending the crusty old restauranteur Traill, facilitating Traill’s budding friendship with the local tenement children (who adore Bobby), and even winning over the cemetery keeper who initially tried to keep Bobby out.

At the climax of the movie, the Law tries to force Traill to pay Bobby’s licensing fees. Traill refuses, not because he doesn’t love Bobby, but because Bobby very clearly is not his dog: he belongs heart and soul to Auld Jock beneath the sod in the cemetery. The cemetery keeper comes to court, prepared to pay Bobby’s fees, and then the tenement children rush in, having collected the necessary seven shillings in farthings and ha’pence…

The judge gives Bobby the freedom of the city. Happy end!

The general language-filled atmosphere of Inventing Languages has once again filled me with enthusiasm for language learning. Aside from my adventures in Esperanto, I have also once again made a resolution to practice Spanish.

I started studying Spanish when I was eleven or twelve. I knew that the critical window for second language learning was closing (this tells you a lot about what kind of child I was) so I wanted desperately to start a second language, and my friend Micky’s mother was offering Spanish lessons (the family is originally from Argentina), so I asked my parents to sign me up.

I did indeed squeak the beginning of my Spanish studies into the critical window, which means that Spanish continues to knock around in my brain even though I neglect it disgracefully. However, since I chose Spanish because it was the only available option, it was something of a marriage of convenience. And as often happens in a marriage of convenience, I’ve achieved respect and esteem for the language, but not passion.

But, on the other hand, in college I studied Russian, and that did arise out of a passionate interest in the Russian language and history. But I still neglected it disgracefully thereafter, and because I started it so much later, I’ve forgotten almost all of it. So maybe passion is overrated! Arranged marriages and love matches tend to succeed at about the same rate, 50%, which is really no better than chance anyway.

Anyway, I’ve decided that maybe I was attempting too high a reading level with the translations of the American Girl Josefina chapter books, so I’ve knocked myself right down to picture books. I asked my friend Micky (we’re still in touch) if she had any recommendations for Spanish-language picture books (she’s raising her children bilingual), but she told me that there isn’t a strong children’s literature tradition in Spanish, which honestly goes a long way towards explaining why Spanish and I were never a love match.

However, there are a fair number of English picture books that have been translated into Spanish, and conveniently the library just got a shipment, which I helped process to put onto the shelves. So naturally I snagged a couple that looked particularly charming, starting with Palona Angelina Lopez’s Popo el Xolo (translated from English by Carlos E. Calvo), illustrated by Abraham Matias, whose rich jewel-tone colors caught my eye.

Xolo is short for Xoloitzcuintle, a breed of Mexican dog which often serves as a psychopomp in legends. Popo is a Xolo who belongs to Abuela, and one night he leads her on a journey… The rare (very rare) picture book about death which doesn’t make me want to scratch my eyes out. Actually quite liked the quest structure, and the bit at the end where she briefly sees her family again and understands what has happened, and that it is sad but also time to move on.

I also read Jacqueline Alcántara’s Tíos y primos, also originally written in English but translated into Spanish by Yanitzia Canetti. Again attracted by the colorful illustrations, drawn by Alcántara, who in fact is chiefly an illustrator - this book is the first she both wrote and illustrated. A little girl feels nervous about visiting her father’s family in Honduras because her Spanish is limited, but her aunts and uncles and grandmother embrace her, and she discovers that she can communicate with her cousins in the universal language of soccer/fútbol.

In Inventing Languages this week, we’ve started work on phonetics. I have a list of names in Ravenna Zacar, so my next step will be to go through and work out which phonemes I’ve already used, and then extrapolate from there which sounds will probably also be in the language. For instance, Marc Okrend (creator of Klingon) notes that if a language has a voiced stop, it will probably also have the unvoiced counterpart. (Unclear if this is also true of, for instance, voiced and unvoiced fricatives. Do the linguists in the audience have an opinion?)

The phonetic goal for Ravenna Zacar - for all the potential languages in my fantasy world, honestly - is to create names that will strike readers as (a) distinct from English, (b) distinct from the other languages in the world, and (c) still pronounceable to an English-speaking audience. So I won’t stray too far from the English path with the sounds themselves, but I hope to create distinctive sound patterns. There’s nothing phonetically challenging about a name like Faranu, but it’s also just not an English name.

However, although I’m tinkering at the phonetic side of things, my main focus this week has been our assignment to write a paper about an invented language of our choice. I chose Esperanto and got maybe a little too excited about my voyage along the coast of Esperantujo (Esperantoland).

Did you know that there was an Esperanto cabaret in 1920s Paris called La Verda Kato? (The Green Cat.) Did you know that during the Spanish Civil War, Esperanto was used in newspapers and radio broadcasts to keep the International Brigades informed about the war news? Did you know that there are over 40,000 works of original Esperanto literature, not counting translations? And that one of them is an incredibly raunchy sonnet sequence called the Sekretaj Sonetoj, published in the 1930s?

(You know an invented language has made it when people start using it to write porn.)

ALSO did you know that Esperanto still has an active global community today, and that Esperantists will frequently host other Esperantists on their travels?

By this time I'm already imagining a trip to Japan to stay with my Esperanto penpal (Esperanto has a strong community in Japan), this vision only very slightly marred by the fact that, one: I do not yet know Esperanto. Two: as such, I don’t have a Japanese Esperanto penpal, and in fact don’t know if Esperanto even has a penpal network, although frankly it should.

And three: I’m not exactly sure if the Esperanto movement, in general, is still trying to make fetch (Esperanto as a widely-spoken international auxiliary language) happen. I think it’s fairly clear that the chances for that passed after World War II, and Esperanto is now a fun niche hobby. I love a fun niche hobby! I can’t with a fun niche hobby that a significant portion of the hobbyists think is ACTIVISM. (See also people in fandom who earnestly believe their ship is ACTIVISM.)

However, I decided that I might as well jump off the boat onto the beaches of Esperantujo, in the form of a little light language practice. I started with Duolingo, before remembering (a) Duolingo is now infested with AI, and (b) I hate the owl with a fiery burning passion. In fact, the owl has become even more annoying than I remembered. I did one (1) day of Duolingo Esperanto, and the next day when I wasn’t prompt enough to do my lesson, I got an email from Duolingo ominously entitled, “No one ignores me… for long.”

Also, the little owl icon on your phone now turns red with rage if you haven’t practiced that day. I do not need to be in a relationship with an emotionally abusive pixel owl.

Fortunately, the Esperantists have my back. They have their own site, Lernu!, which features a free Esperanto course.

In the first lesson, Filippo is sitting in his dorm room in 1983, with his bed, chair, desk, books, guitar, and computer, when a strange cabinet appears. In the second lesson, the strange cabinet opens, and there emerges… Filippo from the future. 1983 Filippo faints. Now this is the key vocabulary that I need up front and center in my language lessons!

We return to the most neurotic captain in the Royal Navy! At the beginning of Commodore Hornblower, Hornblower everything he ever hoped and dreamed. His heroic exploits are stories on land and sea. He’s made a vast fortune. He recently married the woman he loves, who just happens to be the sister of the soon-to-be Duke of Wellington, and they have just bought a vast estate, which is how you show you’ve reached the pinnacle of success in early 19th century Britain.

Naturally, Hornblower is miserable. He hungers for success, but hates almost everything that comes with it, and although he is a brilliant out-of-the-box thinker at naval strategy, he appears genuinely incapable of imagining the possibility that you could win great wealth and, like, just not buy a country estate that will oblige you to be sociable in the neighborhood and go foxhunting with the neighbors and generally live a life that is everything Hornblower hates.

Fortunately for Hornblower, his influential brothers-in-law find him a new command: he will be commodore of the Baltic fleet, tasked with keeping Sweden neutral, enticing Russia to the British side, and generally causing problems for France. Will Hornblower take Lady Barbara along, like the Admiral and Sophy Croft in Persuasion? Absolutely not. Genuinely does not appear to occur to him for one single moment that this might be an option.

Instead, he takes along Bush, now a captain as a result of his part in the capture of the Witch of Endor, to be the captain for his flagship. Hornblower gets on deck and shakes hands with all his officers and reaches Bush last and the two of them shake hands and then just stand there grinning at each other like idiots.

Hornblower then looks at Barbara’s presents for his voyage and gets annoyed because they’re too thoughtful (truly this man cannot stand to be on the receiving end of love and care), but stops himself when he sees his thoughts trending toward regretting his marriage. And then he has breakfast with Bush and thinks Bush is “better than a wife.” HORNBLOWER. SIR.

If the book had gone on like this I might have simply expired, but in fact this is the slashy high point of the book. Most of the rest is naval warfare in the Baltic, the siege of Riga, and talking the Prussian army into turning on Napoleon (!) before collapsing as a result of typhus. Bush doesn’t even get to nurse Hornblower back to health. He sails the fleet home to England, leaving Hornblower behind to convalesce.

I have long been a fan of Ruth Goodman’s books, and for almost as long a time I’ve wanted to watch her various historical reenactment television shows. At long last the stars aligned, and I borrowed Edwardian Farm from the library.

In Edwardian Farm, Ruth and her co-conspirators Alex and Peter set up shop in an Edwardian-era farm building in Devon, where they try their hands not only at farming skills like plowing with horses but also cheesemaking, charcoal burning, capturing and training an Exmoor pony for light hauling, making a proper clotted cream (which looks nothing like modern clotted cream), and so forth and so on.

I LOVE this sort of thing. Watching people who are good at making stuff make stuff is one of my very favorite genres. See also The Great British Baking Show. (Arguably, many of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books are a literary version.) While Ruth and company are not experts at most of these skills, they all clearly bring a lot of craft experience to bear, so although, say, Ruth’s attempt at clotted cream is not Great British Baking Show level, it’s also far above Nailed It.

One of Devon’s traditional industries is bobbin lace, and I decided to save the lacemaking episode to watch with Julie, as we recently did a bobbin lace-making class together. Julie was enchanted with the show and sought out more of Goodman’s shows on streaming, which resulted in Secrets of the Castle, narrated by none other than Certified Hottie Paul McGann.

After a brief pause for screaming, we went on to watch the show, in which Ruth (joined again by Peter, and also by Tom) spends a few months helping build Guédelon Castle, a castle in France which is being built entirely using medieval techniques. We hammer with a blacksmith! Smooth stone with a stonemason! Make the local clay into paint to paint the walls in the fashionable medieval “rocks and roses” pattern! (“We’ll repaint it after they’re done filming,” one of the castle’s artists murmurs to another in French.) Once again a fantastic time.

Eagerly awaiting the opportunity to watch the other historical farm shows. I believe we have Tudor Monastery Farm on tap to watch next.