I just found these pictures of Vesla. It says they are from last Whitsun, or pinse as they call it in Norway; Pfingsten in German.
I’d certainly forgotten about them.
And, if I posted them last year, I hope you have too.
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A Bad Guide 
What’s the difference between Whitsun and Pentecost?
Same thing, Whitsun’s more British, apparently (I’ve never used the word Pentacost in my life & had to look it up). It’s a big national holiday in Britain, the Whitsun bank holiday, although by now they probably call it something more bland like “Late Spring Holiday”.
Grunnmanuskriptet:
kvitsunn utan
kvit-sunn kristeleg høgtid til minne um at den Heilage Ande vart send (“kvitsun” Tel, “kvissun” Tel, Hal, Va o.fl.). Òg i formi “kvissinn” (Snm, Ndm), Å. Jfr. kvitsunndag; gn. hvítasunna.
kvitsunnaftan m
kvitsunn-aftan m. dagen fyre fyrste kvitsunndag, Å. Jfr. gn. hvítasunnaptann.
kvitsunndag m
kvitsunn-dag m. ein av helgedagane i kvitsunnhelgi; oftast um den fyrste av dei, Å. Gn. hvítsunnudagr; jfr: gsv. hvitisunnudagher; sv. målf. hvitsöndag; frå ags. hwîta sunnandag. Upph. um fyrste sunndag etter påske, då det var stor dåpsdag, og dei som skulde døypast hadde kvite klæde; den ags. kyrkja flutte dagen til 1. pinsedag, T.
kvitsunnhelg f
kvitsunn-helg f. den tidi då ein held helg ved kvitsunn, Å.
kvitsunnvike f
kvitsunn-vike f. den vika kvitsunn fell inn i, Å. Jfr. gn. hvítasunnuvika.
We have “Pentecost”, but I’m not sure if that’s American or just my denomination.
I’m not big on Fool’s Day, so today’s holiday will probably (and hopefully) just pass me by, but I suppose I’ll go downtown tomorrow for Good Friday. The weather is supposed to be perfect. If anyone wants photographs of anything special, I’m taking requests. I sort of want to photograph the juvenile detention center. Also I’ve heard the Rookery is nice, but have no idea if there’s public access.
Trond, what is that? It looks like spam.
Google translate says kvitsunn means “white healthy”.
Trond, what is that? It looks like spam.
Kvit White
Sunndag Sunday
Kvitsunn Whitsun
Kvitsunnaftan Whitsun eve
Kvitsunndag Whitsunday
Kvitsunnhelg Whitsun holiday (=feast)
Kvitsunnvike Whitsun week
I never have heard anyone use the word Kvitsunn. From Wikipedia: Navnet pinse kommer av det greske ordet «pentekoste», som betyr femtiende…Første pinsedag er alltid 49 dager (syvende søndag) etter påskedagen.
It’s archaic now, all right, but not too archaic for me too have encountered it. The dictionary shows that the name used to be common all over the country, and even in Swedish. The name was coined for the first Sunday after easter, when the many who were to be baptised wore white, but the feast was moved to Penticost by the Anglo-Saxon church. The early Norwegian church owed much to the Anglo-Saxon.
Our liturgical colors change to white (or gold) on Easter Sunday.
Whitsun shmitsun. SHE’S SO CUTE!!!
Yes she is, isn’t she?
You just want to take her home and prop her up on your pillow until you see those square pupils in the last photo and wonder if she’s really planning to take over the world…
btw, AJP, you should pop over to Canahan’s blog, he has a mystery picture he wants you to solve.
Thank you. I wasn’t able to help., though.
So, so, cute! I want a Vesla for myself!
Is she taller now?
Why do all creatures have to grow up?
Let’s all go back to Neverland!!
No, she’s still the same size. She is one year older than the other two, but even when they were three months old she was smaller than Holly & Misty. Now they are all older, she has much softer wool than they do.
Vesla might be interested to know that on a whim the other day I looked up Norwegian havre “oats” to see if it’s cognate with Lat. caper “goat”. And according to Bjorvand and Lindeman it is. Or might be; it takes some folk etymology to get there. They suggest that the original Germanic word for oats had -gr- (and such forms exist in Scandinavian dialects), metathesized from the *kork- known from Celtic, and was reinterpreted as, uh, goatmeal.
By no way at all: Is it only me who can’t read Language Hat today?
That’s interesting. Does grøt and graut figure into this anywhere? Hat is on the blink, apparently.
“Is it only me who can’t read Language Hat today?” Me too.
Yo tampoco puedo leer L.H.
So Vesla is that small even today… ¿would she like to come to our home some days??
I miss LH. Maybe if he isn’t too busy trying to get his blog back up, he’ll grace us with his presence. When I got home last night there was a post that had come through the feedreader already asking about usage of “a wide berth”. Or perhaps he has developed a goat phobia and has decided to give us a wide berth.
She’s a bit wider, because her wool is long. I’m sure she’d be delighted to visit Argentina; she loves meeting new people, so does Topsy the dog.
Perfect! I’ll be waiting their visit whenever they want! :-)
Yes, LH is down; my domain registration has expired. This same thing happened three years ago, and I’m going through the same sort of exchange with Gandi (my domain name provider) that I did then. The problem is that when I registered with them, I was using an e-mail address @languagehat.com, which quickly became unusable because of spam and was replaced by my current gmail address, and they’ve mulishly kept sending reminders (“you need to renew your domain name”) to that address despite my requests for them to update it. Hopefully it will get resolved today.
On April 04, 2007, I wrote on LH:
While I’m here, let me apologize for the outage this morning; my domain had expired (warnings were sent to a defunct e-mail address, it’s a long story), and I had some anxious moments before gandi.net, my domain name provider, fixed things, excellent fellows that they are. I was terrified some internet vulture was sitting around just waiting to scoop up my helpless domain and I’d never get it back; I had to contemplate the horrible prospect of Life Without Languagehat. It made me realize how much a part of my life you are, Gentle Readers, in your capacities as charming players of conversational badminton as well as providers of nuggets of elusive fact—and I seek those nuggets as eagerly as my cat Pushkin seeks lost corks and artificial mice, I claw at Google and reference works as assiduously as he claws at the gap under the refrigerator (where such things so often wind up), and I am as grateful to those of you who provide them as Pushkin is to my wife when she fetches the broom, sweeps the handle under the fridge, and pulls out the ardently desired playthings. And if in aught I have given offense, I do heartily repent me. I seem to have lost at least one internet pal of whom I was inordinately fond, owing to some pronunciamento I don’t even remember pronouncing, and I’ve had enough friends and acquaintances drift away in the course of my life not to want to lose more. I grew up arguing with brothers and friends, and self-assured ideamongering is the stuff of lively conversation to me, to be enjoyed as sportier folk enjoy a good game of handball; I tend to forget that when the ball bounces wrong, people can get hurt. If bluff and bluster be a fault, God help the wicked! No, my good readers; banish Kos, banish Wonkette, banish Instapundit: but for sweet Languagehat, kind Languagehat, true Languagehat, valiant Languagehat, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Languagehat, banish not him your company!
And I stand by those sentiments.
I discovered LH was inaccessible today and came here looking for you, and sure enough, here you are! (AJP, thank you for your hospitality – a friend in need is a friend indeed). If the power-that-be don’t reinstate you, we will have to deluge them with requests.
That was a very nice thing to write and we feel the same way about you, of course. Our legs begin to flageolate when you aren’t there.
If anyone were due for a change of name it might perhaps be “gandhi”.
One thing about blogs is that the interior space is fairly large; Language Hatters are welcome to use as much space here as they need for Language Hat in exile during this difficult time.
I’m with M-L and praise AJP’s hospitality!
If there’s anything we can do just let us now, LH.
I thank our host for the offer and all of you for your good wishes; I’m afraid all we can do is sit tight, cross our fingers, and wait for Gandi to get back to me.
Can Vesla do the tango?
That’s interesting. Does grøt and graut figure into this anywhere?
No. Those have to do with ‘grit’ and (probably) ‘grind’. And e.g. grus “pebbles”.
Hat is on the blink, apparently.
Of course, my whole comment was a badly disguised excuse to ask for him in a nonchalant fashion. Hope it will work out soon.
Do groats (not the coin, but as in kasha = buckwheat groats) have anything to do with this?
Grøt must be cognate with groats and grits (that you eat), surely.
I would have thought groats & oats might be related, but I’ll take Trond’s word for it that they aren’t.
I would have thought groats & oats might be related, but I’ll take Trond’s word for it that they aren’t.
Oh, was that your question? I don’t think so, not through a regular process anyway, but I’ll have to look it up. If I were to venture a guess I’d say that ‘oat’ is cognate with Norwegian åte “bait”.
That wasn’t my question, it was your answer.
That wasn’t my question, it was your answer.
Quite likely. I just redefine the dialogue until I have something I think I understand.
Well, do you know if “groats” (some kind of food, apparently) has anything to do with grøt?
Oh, that’s a question I do understand.
Yes, it is. And to old or dialectal words as grøt “steatite” and gråt “sandstone; sharpening stone”. I’ll give a better account when I get home to my books.
Grøt and gråt are obviously both grjót “stone, rock”. There’s a lot of words for stones, pebbles and ground cereals that are related, apparently, but the connection to ‘grind’ may be my own.
What about å gråte, to cry? Is that related to pebbles and grøt?
Gråte has no known etymology, says Bjorvand and Lindeman. Another word for “cry” is grine, meaning “laugh” n Danish, related to ‘groan’. They think this is related to grein “branch” and first meant “spread, keep apart (e.g. lips)”. The r may be intrusive by association with e.g. “grunt” or “grind one’s teeth”.
These gr-words (and gn-words) are quite messy. There seems to have been a lot of onomatopoetry going on.
related to ‘groan’.
Misediting. That relation is not approved by my source. I meant to suggest it. not present it as truth.
Heavens. Then maybe grein -> grine is cognate with zu weinen, in tysk (to cry) and to whine, in English.
No that’s a pretty regular word.
Nynorsk: kvina/e
Eastern dialect: gvina/e
Bokmål/Danish: hvine
English: whine
German: weinen
It seems to be onomatopoitic, too, though. The word whistle/hvisle/kvisle is formed on the same or a similar base.
The eastern dialect form may well have influenced the semantics of grine.
Well… is kvina in nynorsk related to kvinne (meaning woman), then?
No. Kvina has kv- from hv-.
Kvinne is cognate with ‘queen’. It’s originally a genitive plural form of kone, probably back-formed from the genitive plural in compounds. The word was largely lost in Norwegian before making its way back from officialese. Note that it’s usually a masculine.
Oh, wonderful. I never thought of queen. To me, nearly everything in Norwegian’s either masculine or neuter (brain almost full).
Thank god there’s somebody around to deal with these questions while I slave away at the historiography of Latin America (it’s no fun editing a book where not only do footnotes take up half of each chapter but the authors make liberal use of words like “problematize” and “Foucault”).
“What about å gråte, to cry?” It’s “greet” in Scotland, as in “that bairn’s aye greeting” = that child is forever crying.
Dearie would never say Foucault or problematize.
jajajajajaja, L.H. es verdad que eso es tan pero tan latinoamericano (al menos de los ensayos “eruditos”).
Digo, con dedo acusador, mientras borro rápidamente esas palabras de lo que estoy escribiendo en este momento (mentira)
¿Qué libro estás editando?
Excuse my language… ;-) , but I want to comment this, and I can’t say it in English)
The wee birdies sing, and the wild flowers spring,
And in sunshine the waters are sleeping.
But the broken heart it kens nae second Spring again,
Tho’ the waeful may cease frae their greeting.
Kvina has kv- from hv-
That doesn’t sound right, it should be the opposite according to the “1st Germanic sound-shifts” (also known as the first half of Grimm’s law), and both would be from earlier *kw-.
It’s a later change in the opposite direction, affecting Western Scandinavian (Western Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese). The feature even survived in the English of Shetland, Orkneys and parts of Caithness in Scotland.
He’d come close to “Foucault” when recommending sex and travel. But never “problematize”, not even with the z essed.
Julia: It’s The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History. It’s got chapters by different scholars on The Historiography of Early Modern Brazil, Sexuality in Colonial Spanish America, Race in Post-Abolition Afro-Latin America, etc. etc. Half of each chapter is bibliographical footnotes. What fun!
LH: I see…
¡Mis sinceras condolencias!
A mi me parece muy interesante; I remember devouring the library at the language institute at Cuernavaca (Mexico) one winter. It was a whole new world: the history of land grants of equal lengths along the east coast of South America (especially Brazil), stories of one epidemic after another–smallpox, etc–similar to our own continent, sugar cane and national dependence on one agricultural product, the huge class distinctions brought from Spain. And then the conquistadores. In those days history was all about which army won and who was the most recent King Of The Mountain–now it’s more about social factors and much more interesting.