Re: Verbal nouns

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> ><G>  I wish I knew Indonesian (or a great many languages, for that
> matter).>
>
>         Aren't you at Cornell? (Or am I mixed up?)  Take a course....one of
> the best (and probably the first) departments in the nation.  John Wolff,
> who may or may not still be there, wrote the grammar I learned from, as well
> as the dictionary.
(bitterly)  I can't.  I'm doing 2nd-semester German (2nd in a 2-course
intro sequence) this *fall* because last *spring* it conflicted with
*two* of my math courses.  I thought it would be pretty dumb to try to
take another language on top of German when I already get interference
with French (but never, interestingly, with Korean).  But the *only*
beginning courses offered in the *spring,* now that I only have 1.5
semesters left here, are Spanish, French and intensive Latin.  I have
qualification in French and am not too worried about continuing it
(there's no one with whom I can speak in it among my friends).  Spanish
is also a Romance language so I'm not in any hurry to learn it--I'm
hoping to learn a distribution of languages.  I suppose that leaves
Latin, which I do want to learn, but a 6-credit intensive course on top
of 2nd semester honors algebra and analysis may be suicide.

In short, I screwed up my Cornell career and didn't take advantage of the
many, many languages offered here.  Sometimes I hate my major.  :-/

> >> kerbau 'buffalo':  perhaps the old Halloween trick, ?mengerbau-i gereja
> >> '(they) put a buffalo on the church' >
> >Halloween trick?  <puzzled look>
>
>     Ah me.  In more innocent times (19th, early 20th cent.) when the US was
> still mainly a rural society, we are told that it was the habit of young men
> to do naughty things on Halloween like putting a cow in the local church, or
> on the roof (how???); or, dis-assembling a wagon or Model-T Ford and
> re-assembling it on top of City Hall.  Nowadays, at least around here, they
> just set fire to vacant buildings.
!

And here I was thinking, "Trick or treat"?

YHL