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And it makes me rather giddy both because I like that gardening implement, and because I like the fact that English has a special word for it. Aaaand I named a dwarf character in The Peridan Chronicles that for both those reasons.


In other news regarding English and my language nerddom, I took a random test that purports to assess the size of your English vocabulary and to my surprise it landed me in "Top 0.14%, You are Shakespeare! You can even create new words that will expand the English dictionary."
It calculates, in a process I have no idea about, my vocabulary size at 29886. Why that particular number, I also have no idea.

Which is all quite funny to me as a native Czech speaker, and can probably be entirely laid at the door of:
A) My language nerddom and my family's language nerddom.
B) The fact I probably read a lot of writers (both "official" and in fanfiction) who use big words well.
C) Okay, and the fact I studied English and read a lot of big word books for school I never would have read otherwise.

I ended up not really "using" my studies (I work in the textile industry now which never occurred to me as a possible career path at the usual decision-making times of life but I love it because it combines lots of things I like in a productive whole AND challenges me and pushes me to keep learning). But... I also did end up using them because at my previous job they specifically hired me also because I had good English and could play occasional interpretter and translator.
So, yeah. I suppose it is possible I have a really big vocabulary in English also because I can tell you, for example, what a heddle is...?
(It's this implement in a weaving loom - kind of a wire, can be made of wire in simpler looms but modern power looms have specifically made heddles - that the warp yarns go through, and it's part of the mechanism that moves the warp yarns up and down, so that the weft yarn can be inserted, and then the warp yarns go over and under the weft yarns and that creates the fabric.)

And I'm a language nerd so I also know what a dibble is.

But also I'm a lazy English user in a way and don't use my presumably large vocabulary all that much, actively. It mostly manifests in the way that... I will casually throw words like "manifest" into a rambling post about my life where others would probably say "show"...


Father sends us daily e-mail updates on his life. Just little tidbits, just so we can be sure he's okay and hasn't fallen down from a tree or something. (It was my sister's idea about two years ago, and in this whole coronavirus mess it's become a pretty nice feature because he often sends us news about ships in the Baltic, and videos of locomotives in Wales, and stuff like that.)

And sometimes language nerddom manifests. So this one time recently he goes:

"Cymraeg (he actually used the bohemised Czech word for it but I need to press the point he pointedly uses that language's word for itself, not the English word for it) usually puts adjectives behind the noun except for the word for old so:

hen tŷ - old house
tŷ newydd - new house

But then I realised that just like "haul" is "salt", "hen" is "sen"."

And I go, wait, what? (Because "sen" is "dream" in Czech.)
And father goes "like senior".
Me: Oh, right. I actually don't speak Latin and the Italian word is different, so it didn't click.
Father: I don't speak Latin, either.
Then he proceeds to give me a rundown of the two Latin words for "old" and various words in other languages they are related to.

I present to you: My father who claims he's not good at languages.

Father also:

• Visited Wales on a holiday with friends and then went and bought himself a Welsh textbook in London on the way home. That's the souvenir he brought home. That, and a picture children's dictionary for us. Like it never even occurred to him to think the way some other parents might, that maybe he should bring us an English dictionary from Britain since that's definitely the language we'll get more practical use out of? (I believe the only other souvenir he brought was a bunch of pieces of slate.)
• Come to think of it, the thing he brought us from his first trip to Germany immediately after the Velver Revolution was, you guessed it, a picture dictionary. It never occurred to me until now but, folks, this was the time when everyone was bringing all the cool stuff we could not have behind the Iron Curtain, and he bought us a dictionary. It says a lot about the collective language nerddom in this family that we loved that book and never once questioned that choice.
• Many years ago bought a classic etymological dictionary of the Czech language when it was published anew, and then would reach for it a lot when I was growing up to read up on the etymology of random words. (We still reach for it, and one of my regrets in life is that I don't have my own copy.)
• Studied Tibetan for about 14 years (the crazy amount of years was a recent discovery of mine) basically just for the kicks. And because a Czech authority on Tibetan was kicked out of his job because Communists, so a group of friends got together to take private lessons in Tibetan from him to support him, and invited father along, and father's reaction to said invitation was basically "yeah, sure, sounds like fun". I cannot vouch for this, but I have a strong suspicion that he may have stuck to it the longest in the end. (It's now been nearly thirty years since father did anything with the language, but he can still write in it at the drop of a pen.)
• Happens to own a Greek grammar textbook for no particular reason.
• Read the entirety of Pan Tadeusz in the original Polish. (I mean, I own the book in the original Polish because why should I read my favourite book in a translation when I found the original in a secondhand bookshop, eh? But this is my father who doesn't really read fiction we're talking about here.)
• Will also read me passages from Latvian news (usually something pertaining to his interest in trains or trams) and be surprised that I have zero idea what he's talking about.
• Can read English Wikipedia articles with no big difficulty.
• Will point out the various words for "heart" that can be found in popular songs in different languages.

:D


... there was this one time during our Grammar School years when my sister and her friends threw an "egg party" over the Easter holidays, and my sister's contribution was to look up the word for "egg" in all sorts of languages and make up a game of matching the word to the language.

This is the sort of stuff it never occurred to me to question before an online test told me I have a bigger vocabulary in my second language than most native speakers.

I knew I was a language nerd because it's a sure-fire way to get me going and also it annoys me to no end when people use Tolkien's Elvish plurals for individuals.
I also knew I came from a family of language nerds because yeah, it kind of gets us all going.

But this trip down the memory lane suddenly made very clear to me how much it's just part of life for me and how weird it probably would be for a lot of other people.
The other thing I turn out to be good at, and have known for some time I'm good at, is colour differentiation.

It was, in fact, one of the things I did in my previous jobs, and one of the things I miss about it in my current one. (The current one wins on many other fronts, though.)

It suddenly occurred to me now that I use colour differentiation (or, rather, the lack of it) as a method of recognising Photoshop (colour) jobs. I thought other people can be more susceptible for taking Photoshop jobs for the real thing because they'd never tried their hand at it themselves (which I have, mostly for fun), and don't have any background in art and no experience with how colours change in shadows or with distance, and thus don't have my eyes for it. I can spot where someone just coloured a whole area, by how it's the same hue, and how at the edges of said area there will often be these sharp delineations where in a real photo it would be more of a colour gradation. But it suddenly occurred to me now that maybe one of the reasons could simply be because they literally don't have my eyes for it. Huh.

Well, that sounds like a very pretentious title for what's going to follow.

I've written about this a few times already in various comments on other people's blogs and possibly also stories, but I've wanted to make a post out of it. There is all the talk about representation of women going on - female fanfiction writers trying to tackle it in their stories, myself included (goodness, Twinkletop happened kind of accidentally, but I've very quickly become very fond of her...), and inevitably you come to the point that there just aren't that many female background characters in Narnia. Lewis, for his time and age and life experience, does remarkably well on balance between protagonists, in my opinion, and I suspect that was because he really was doing a conscious effort - because almost every time a slightly less important character pops up, Lewis defaults to male.

The fun part of this I wanted to discuss is the fact that I've only become aware of this when I started reading the books in English. The reason why that's so is that Czech, unlike English, is a gendered language - everything has a gender, masculine, feminine or neuter, so some animals naturally default to female in Czech. And in some cases, the translator - I'm speaking of Renáta Ferstová here, because I've never read the second Czech translation - defaulted to female even where Lewis used a male pronoun in the original.

And sometimes, in Narnia, this means a female Glimfeather and a whole Parliament of female Owls, because "sova" - "owl" is default feminine. (Goodness, was I disappointed when I found out that both Glimfeather and Owl-Wol in Winnie-the-Pooh are male...)

It means that when the Jackdaw in The Magician's Nephew becomes the first joke, the Jackdaw is female.

It means that when the giant in Prince Caspian steps on a Fox in his distress and the Fox bites him, the Fox is female.

In fact, it means that you probably automatically assume some of the Mice are female, because "mouse" is a femininum.

It means that the Squirrels at the end of The Silver Chair default to female.

EDIT: The most striking example that didn't occur to me at first - in The Boy and His Boy, the cat that comforts Shasta and is actually Aslan is default female.

So, for your enjoyment and contemplation, I'm enclosing a non-exhaustive list of default-female species in Czech. Many of these, even where English only seems to have a complicated or Latin genus name (at least to be found online), would have a simple Czech name that a child moderately interested in the natural world (which many Czech children are, or at least were when I was a child...) and visiting zoos would come to recognise.
( The list )
So, as you can see, you get a fairly encompassing range of "female Beast" characteristics in this default list, even if it often does tend towards the smaller (most of the larger animals are default male). But you also get the hugeness that is a whale, you get beasts & birds of prey as well as the peaceful dove and sheep, you get swans and crows, you get both the "bad" and "good" snakes, you get the chatty and the quiet, the fast and the bouncy and the flying and crawling and swimming and earth-dwelling and nest-building and tree-climbing, you get day and night. Have fun with it if you're writing Narnian fanfiction. :-)

(Interestingly and as an aside, "child" in Czech is grammatically neuter but "children" is feminine, to the confusion of many a student.)