Working On A Map Of Europe. I Finished Ireland, Did A Bit Of The Baltic Sea, Did The Faroe Islands, And

Querer & vouloir

In most Romance languages, the verb meaning 'to want' comes from Popular Latin *volēre, such as French vouloir, Italian volere, and Catalan voler. However, in Spanish and Portuguese, it's querer - which not only means 'to want' but also 'to love': te quiero and quero-te. Querer stems from quaerere, a Latin verb meaning 'to ask; to seek to obtain', which is related to the English words question and to require. Click my new extra large graphic for more information on the evolutions of these words.

new vegas gothic

you find a a safe in a wall that’s [Locked - Hard], but can’t unlock it yet because your lockpick skill is only 63. when you finally get it to 75, you return, only to find the wall is bare. had the safe even been there in the first place?

there is a red marker on your HUD, and ED-E is playing is playing battle music. you ready your weapon and spin, darting your eyes across the flat, barren expanse of brown, but nothing is coming to attack you.

this would be a perfectly normal hotel room, if not for the dried blood on the floor, the skeleton in the bathtub, and the teddy bears stuffed in the toilet.

something glints at the mouth of that giant dinosaur statue. binoculars, or a scope? either way, you’re being watched.

crucified degenerates line the craggy road like a picket fence. they smell dead, but when a crow lands on one of their shoulders to peck at the peeling flesh on his cheek, you could have sworn you saw him flinch.

ever the scrounger, you find yourself approaching an abandoned trailer. there’s graffiti on the wall bidding strangers to KEEP OUT, but that’s never stopped you before. you enter, only to discover it’s filled with high-tech broadcasting equipment. “johnny guitar” loops on the radio, despite the fact that the equipment isn’t even plugged in.

you sit by the fire after a tiring day, to rest your weary legs and chow down on some iguana bits. as your teeth tear through the juicy, rubbery flesh, it suddenly occurs to you that you’ve never actually seen a single iguana in all your time out here.

you should be pleased that you successfully hacked this terminal, but the fact that the password was HELPME left you just a tad bit unsettled.

you return to visit your grave in goodsprings cemetery one night. as you stare down in the hole, you hear a ghostly whispering in the breeze, and you get the strange, sudden urge to climb back into it.

Bro is tired

I just had the most finnish social interaction of my life.

For backstory, Finland has a bottle/beverage can recycling system where most drink containers have a return deposit of a few cents - from 10 to 40 cents depending on the size of the bottle or can. All grocery stores and most convenience kiosks have a bottle return machine (which english wikipedia apparenly refers to as "reverse vending machines", which amuses me) where you can return the empty containers and receive a receipt which the cash register trades for money. The return isn't much but they add up surprisingly quick, and it's pretty common for people who are in the need for such cash to seek for and collect bottles and cans for recycling money.

I was going on errands on foot today, and had gotten myself an energy drink as a little treat on my way. Once I had gone through it I naturally held onto the bottle instead of throwing it to the trash, because bottles are money and 20 cents is 20 cents. On my way I saw an old man with a long grey beard, in a dirty t-shirt, approaching slowly on a bicycle. As he got closer he looked at me, glanced at my bottle and then back to me, while I looked him in the eye, glanced at the scraggly plastic bag hanging from his bike handle, and then back to him. Had his bag been full of recycling cans like I had first assumed, I would have stopped him right there and asked him if he'd like to have my empty bottle as well.

However, he had other assorted stuff in the bag, and therefore it would have been rude of me to assume that he is gathering bottles, and in return it would have been rude of him to stop me on my way to ask me if the bottle is empty and whether I'd like to be rid of it. But I saw him glance at the bottle and he saw me glancing at his bag, so both had reason to assume that he had more use for it than I would. But stopping strangers to address them like that is rude, so we passed each other without saying a word.

However, I was a stride away from a bus stop (which he had just passed) and I paused for a second to put my empty bottle on top of the trash can attached to the bus shelter. Looking over my shoulder to look at the old man, I saw him turning to look over his shoulder at me. So I nodded at him and he nodded at me, turning his bike around to retrieve the bottle as I left it there and kept walking. Neither one had said a word, but with a few seconds of eye contact, two pointed glances and a few quick nods, we managed to communicate through mutual assumptions, context clues and vague gestures that we could both do each other a favour.

It's the end of a (very wonderful) era...

NOOOOOO, GURAAAAAA....

We will all miss you and we all hope you have a wonderful journey after this graduation

Thanks for the wonderful memories ❤️ ♥️ 😢 🫡

French verbs: all about stress

When learning French, I loved the verbs parler ('to talk') and aimer ('to love') because they were entirely regular. A thousand years ago, I wouldn't have been that happy. At that time, parler was irregular too: people said il/ele parole, not il/elle parle. And it wasn't aimer but amer, yet il/ele aime. Many more verbs that are now perfectly regular, used to have two different stems.

Click the video to hear a selection of these verbs evolve.

These irregularities were due to the regular sound changes that turned Latin into Old French. In Latin, word stress was different in the infinitive than in the third person, as indicated with an underline in the video. This stress difference had consequences for how the vowels developed:

a-MA-re > a-MER

A-mat > AI-me

On my Patreon (tier 1), I tell all about this phenomenon: how it affected vowels in a predictable way, the patterns that emerged (with a discussion of all of the forms in the video), and how the alternations were eventually eliminated. 1500 words, link in bio.