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Thanks to the melting pot called America, Megan's heritage is full of colorful characters, all of which expected her to learn their native language along with English. Plus, she has the great ability to learn languages easily. Here I have English, Danish, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Russian.

Each week, I'll add more words, in the order listed above. There will not be a quiz.

So get ready to have your first, multilingual lessons!

March 2, 2007

Today is Texas Independence Day. That was when Texas officially claimed it's independence from Mexico's rule. Of course, Mexico didn't like that all too much and Santa Ana's army had already been fighting with the defenders of the Alamo at the time the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos on 2 March 1836. (The Alamo would fall only four days later.)
Although, many think the name "Texas" or "Tejas" is from a Spanish word, it's actually from the  Caddoan Language of the Hansinai, meaning "Allies" or "Friends" or "Those who are friends". The Hawsinai were Native Americans who lived between the Sabine and Trinity Rivers and the Spanish explorers knew them as "Tejas".
Caddoan language of the is a family of  five Native American Languages (Kitsai, Pawnee, Arikara, Wichita, Caddo-Hawsinai) and all but Kitsai are still spoken by Native Americans today.

Why is this important? It isn't, but being from Texas, it's just one of those little things we know about our state. I think it's interesting, especially since the book is set in Texas.

So there you go, you know a new word in Caddoan: Texas or Friend

March 26th, 2007

Yikes! It's been too long for a lesson not to be posted. Okay, let's get started. To celebrate springtime, I'm going to give you the word, in about seven different dialects, for a great little animal called the butterfly.

Spanish: Mariposa
French: Papillon
Italian: farfalla
Portuguese: Borboleta
Romanian: fluture

English: Butterfly
German: schmetterling
Danish: sommerfugl
Swedish: fjärilen

The middle group of languages are the Romance or Latin based languages (if you didn't know what they were--now you do for that Final Jeopardy question). The interesting thing about this is many times, one word is very similar in these five languages but butterfly isn't.
Now, look at the Germanic languages and see how the German and Danish are more similar but English and Swedish are off on their own plane.
Kind of cool how one little word about a tiny insect can be said so many ways. So, next time you're outside, you can point and say "Hey, there's a ______" in whatever language you so choose.

Cheers!