LAP
Wild Word Friday! I’ve had an incredibly busy and productive week, but no time to write a blog post for Wild Word Friday, so this is a re-run. I hope it makes you smile! LAP is a very ancient word that can be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language (think 5 thousand years…
ANIIDAM TUGIDAA
Wild Word Friday! ANIIDAM TUGIDAA is the Aleut designation for our month of July. ANIIDAM TUGIDAA means Month When Sea Mammal Pups are Born. When I work within a Native American language, I always love to see how words and names are so connected with nature. That’s not unusual considering that the survival of Native…
GREASE
Wild Word Friday! Our word today is GREASE. When I think of the word GREASE, sensory images bombard: the yucky feel of cold bacon grease as I try to scrape it out of a pan, the taste of bear meat (which is very tallowy), and the sight of GREASE congealed on a serving plate. Hope…
GARAGE
Wild Word Friday! I’m up to my eyeballs in getting everything ready for a GARAGE sale, so I decided to visit the ancient roots of the word GARAGE. I absolutely love to find that one of our wild words harkens back to Indo-European times, (That means about six thousand years ago!) and guess what? GARAGE…
IGUUGUM TUGIDAA
Wild Word Friday! I thought it might be fun on the first Friday of each month to highlight the Aleut name – and translation – for that month. The Aleut word for June is IGUUGUM TUGIDAA. The second G in that phrase should have a circumflex accent (ˆ) over it, but I couldn’t get my computer…
LUTHIER
Wild Word Friday! This past week has been wonderfully hectic for me. It included the release of my 6 Alaska books in Ebook format by Open Road Media. (Hooray!) We also had a houseful of company over Memorial Day weekend. (Yay!) Now we’re helping our daughter move into her new apartment. (WooHoo!) I’m telling you…
ALASKA
Wild Word Friday! Linguists agree that the name ALASKA comes to us from a Native word. There’s some disagreement about which word and even which language. Generally, the consensus is that ALASKA means The Great Land, derived from the Aleut word alyeska, which also means “that which the sea breaks against.” I’m not here to…
GGOL, GGAAK
Wild Word Friday! I thought we might have a short lesson in the Ahtna Athabascan language today. Athna is the language of the Ahtna ethnic group in the southwestern area of mainland Alaska. The original Native speakers lived in central Alaska. Today there are less than 100 Native speakers of the 4 dialects of the…
SALMON
Wild Word Friday! When I hear the word SALMON, I don’t think of Latin. As a matter of fact, Latin doesn’t enter my mind, but our English word SALMON does come from the Latin word salire, to leap. At least that’s the consensus of many linguists. And…I’m happy for those linguists, but today on…
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