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Post by jean on Aug 12, 2011 16:41:23 GMT
Saw this the other day, and thought of you:  |
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Post by Weyland on Aug 12, 2011 18:54:10 GMT
Saw this the other day, and thought of you: Ephesus? |
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Post by jean on Aug 13, 2011 8:43:29 GMT
No, it's not Ephesus - far too Nordic!
Try adjusting some spellings.
(I had completely forgotten I was supposed to give you some Ephesus information. I'll have to start thinking about it again.)
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Post by Weyland on Aug 13, 2011 9:26:37 GMT
No, it's not Ephesus - far too Nordic! Try adjusting some spellings. What spellings? . . . Ephesus? . . . OK, I'll try Enköping. Am I warm? Ebeltoft? Helsingør? |
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Post by jean on Aug 13, 2011 9:35:28 GMT
No - remove Ephesus from your consciousness entirely for the time being.
Choose another significant proper noun from this thread to re-spell (it's not over-supplied with them!)
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Post by jean on Aug 13, 2011 9:42:25 GMT
According to my further researches, you may even manage without any respelling at all.
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Post by Weyland on Aug 13, 2011 9:59:44 GMT
According to my further researches, you may even manage without any respelling at all. Ah! You mean Wayland! As in smithy. Also Weyland, Weiland, Volund, and Weland. And Vulcan, you might say. I shall print it and frame it. Thank you. "A smith God and consort of the Triple Goddess." Ooh, I do like the sound of that. Lives inside the White Horse hill in Berkshire. But I generally live in orbit. It's safer.  _______________ [Apparently Ephesus means red herring in Old Anatolian.] |
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Post by aubrey on Aug 21, 2011 10:13:29 GMT
A song set partly in Ephesus:
On the night of July 21st,
Three hundred and fifty six BC,
I, Erostratus
Burned to the ground
One of the wonders of the world:
The fabulous temple of Artemis,
Here in the great port of Ephesus.
I did it to get famous.
To thwart me,
The authorities stupidly forbade my name on pain of death ever to be mentioned again.
The fools!
That was my guarantee
Of immortality!
Some tool,
In the 21st century,
Even as we speak,
Is singing about me.
And even in your day I have many imitators and admirers:
My name endures, said Satre,
Like a black diamond.
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Post by riotgrrl on Aug 25, 2011 7:47:33 GMT
This board is getting way too highbrow for me. lols.
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Post by Weyland on Aug 25, 2011 8:02:33 GMT
This board is getting way too highbrow for me. lols. Big deal. You're never here.  |
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Post by Weyland on Aug 25, 2011 8:25:56 GMT
Thanks for the poetry, Aub. There's hope for this board yet.
Having looked into it a bit more, and grasped the scale of Turkey, it looks like we won't be going to Ephesus this time. It deserves a separate trip. So we'll be concentrating on Istanbul and environs. There's more than enough there for a few years, never mind two weeks.
We'll be landing at the airport on the Asian side *, and the best way from there to the old city is by train and then ferry. So my first view of what is alleged to be "the finest urban skyline of all" will be from a boat. Can't wait.
...
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
...
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
From Sailing to Byzantium, by WB Yeats (the lad from my ancestral home, Sligo).
_____________
* Sabiha Gökçen Airport, named after Turkey's first woman (fighter) pilot.
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Post by Weyland on Aug 25, 2011 9:13:15 GMT
I was looking at the pronunciation of Turkish according to a website and came across this nonsense:
"A, a short 'a' as in 'art' or 'star'"
To me, that's a long 'a'. A short 'a' is as in 'apple'. Anyone disagree? (My phrasebook says 'ah'. So long.)
And this:
"the name Mithat is pronounced meet-HOT, not like the English word `methought'."
Can't make head or tail of that, even if it was American. (And I think it's a British site.)
All in all, it doesn't look that hard, largely on account of the alphabet and diacritics having been set up by Germans, I believe, when Atatürk converted Turkish from Arabic script.
But that's just the pronunciation. The language itself is a whole nother mountain to climb.
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Post by jean on Aug 25, 2011 10:21:12 GMT
To me, that's a long 'a'. A short 'a' is as in 'apple'. Anyone disagree? No. But 'long' and 'short' aren't specific enough when you're talking about vowels.. You need to make these people use the International Phonetic Alphabet:  |
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Post by Weyland on Aug 25, 2011 10:59:05 GMT
To me, that's a long 'a'. A short 'a' is as in 'apple'. Anyone disagree? No. But 'long' and 'short' aren't specific enough when you're talking about vowels. Agreed, but specific enough in this case, I think, and they got it badly wrong. I'm too busy learning Turkish, so I delegate the task to you. You'd have a much better chance of succeeding in any case. I thought the rotated e – Ə – was a schwa. Does anyone pronounce America with a schwa at both ends? Which one is the IPA symbol for the 'a' in apple? I suspect it's the one they've assigned to "but" rather than "cat". On the face of it, it's yet another case of Irritable Vowel Syndrome, and therefore not of much use to the likes of me. I could rant at length, but I won't. ¡No Pasarán! |
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Post by aubrey on Aug 25, 2011 17:03:39 GMT
Another classically inspired lyric:
Heliogabalus:
The deaths he caused were accidents
He committed no murder
Oh yes, some died of fright when they woke up in the night
To find a leopard in the room where they'd been lain after the feast
They should have known, those silly fools, the beast was tame
Heliogabalus wasn't to blame
For the deaths I'm illustrating in this quilt
Heliogabalus cannot share any guilt
Cannot share any guilt
Some lived to suffocate under the suffocating weight
Of a thousand fresh-cut blooms
He sent cascading from the ceiling of his room
Upon a crowd of his admirers
How was he to know some sybarites
Would drown beneath the flowers?
If a parasite can't swim should we blame him?
He was blond, he had blue eyes, he was completely without guilt
As I intend to demonstrate in my Heliogabalus quilt
They condemn his four year reign, his naked chariot team
The deadly snakes released in the forum at the climax of the games
His nights of gay debauchery, rushing through the slums
Disguised as tavern potboys, perfume sellers, barbers
Such exaggeration, such slanders!
If you'd been emperor of Rome at the age of just 15
Wouldn't you have done the same?
So why then does his name
Retain the mantle of the evil always claimed by joyless vultures
To explain the strange allure other cultures?
Heliogabalus wasn't to blame
He was beautiful and sexy and completely without guilt
As I intend to demonstrate right here in this quilt
Condemn me freely if you wish
But when my quilt is finished
I intend to sleep as soundly and as well
As Heliogabalus in hell
This is an audio version:
(The Erostratus song is by the same bloke, but it isn't on any LP and also not on You Tube, else I would have put that as well.)
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Post by Weyland on Sept 3, 2011 9:07:26 GMT
There was a letter in the i paper last week signed by one Wayland van Hildyck-Smith*. She says she's a holder of a Royal Warrant and an admirer of Mohamed al Fayed.
If ever there was a case of you-just-couldn't-make-it-up . . . . .
______________
* The paper printed -Mith, but further research seems to squash that.
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