After a rather acceptable spaghetti bolognaise with green salad, courtesy of today's chef (me), and a quick look at the scintillating news of the day in Holland, it's time for the Saturday night broadcast. This evening's topics: books.
I'm always reading something and it's always a mixed bag of books perched on the end of my sofa or on the table where we eat. This week's selection includes the following:
Donde Cruzan Los Brujos by Taisha Abelar - Spanish translation of 'The Sorcerer's Crossing'. Quite a challenge to read as I've never really learned Spanish. Bud borrowed this book from a student, thinking it would interest me. Not sure how to take that... It's about witchcraft.
The Origin of the Romance Languages by Giuliano Bonfante. An Italian Jew, he wrote the book while in exile in New York in the 1940s, put it in a drawer at Princeton University and forgot about it until his daughter was helping him publish another book. He pulled the old manuscript out of drawer and asked if she could publish that too. So she did - when he was 90 or so. I like that story of how the book came together. (Found it out by reading the introduction - something I never used to do.)
The book itself is fascinating, though a lot of it's above me. It's meant for specialists who can follow all the details about the vowel and consonant changes. It talks, for instance, of how linguists used old Arabic manuscripts from the time of the conquest of Spain to prove that all 'c's in classical Latin were pronounced as 'k's - and how that gradually changed to an 's' sound before 'e' and 'i' in all the languages that sprung from Latin... OK, I'm boring you... I love knowing things like that...
It gets worse: next book that I've just started is Einfuehrung in die Indogermanistik - Introduction to Indo-Germanistics' - by R. Schmitt-Brandt. This looks at how comparative linguistics started - apparently when Jews followed the example of Arabic grammarians and published the grammar of Hebrew. Again, it's an academic book, so quite dull at first glance but I want to know more about how all European languages, plus Sanskrit and quite a few more, developed from one common tongue way back when. It's like a historical detective story and we're still using the clues in everyday speech today.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Picked this one up cheap at a book fair while sauntering through Amsterdam yesterday. Read it at school, of course. To be honest, I haven't really looked at this one much. Just read the first page or two and noted that it's much easier to read Old English (or Middle English, not sure which it is) once you know a bit of Dutch. Bud disagrees on that point...
Invisible Acts of Power by Caroline Myss. Sub-title is 'Personal Choices that Create Miracles'. I think that must have been what made me buy it. There's definitely food for thought in there. I am a bit disappointed, though, to find that she's divided the whole book up into chapters relating to the seven chakras - as she did in an earlier book. Find this approach a bit boring but we'll see. I have to confess to being a compulsive book buyer (different from a book reader, by the way), particularly for this type of esoteric-ish book. My shelves are full of them and I've still not reached nirvana.
Maybe the answer's in the witchcraft book...
Are you a book addict?
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