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[side_show]

On Thursday afternoon, I came home from the office and noticed strange markings in the snow - I followed the markings and found the source - a pigeon cowering in the corner between my fence and the neighbor's house - the marks were wing marks and cat paw prints - he can not fly, there's no blood.  The pigeon looked at me and I looked at him.  "You've come here to die.  I wont bother you."  Two days pass, the SO calls me from the basement - there's a pigeon in the window well.  You can see him sitting on the otherside of the window, and the cats are freaking out.  I tell him about what I saw. He goes out and checks out the pigeon, gives him some bread - the pigeon wants to leave but can't fly.  I suggest we leave him alone - he's found a dry place out of the cold to live out his final moments.  I went to get some laundry this morning and the little guy's still there, still alert and alive.  So maybe he's only injured and wont die unless a stray cat comes along and rips him to shreds.  What do I do?  I'm all about nature taking it's course, but...  

[slink]

Ack. Always horrible to get put in that position. If you're feeling brave you could give his wing a brief examination (if you've seen professionals splay out a bird's wing you can gently try it and see where the problem lays). If it's a broken wing, there may be some sort of free vet clinic or bird shelter around you could have him taken to and fixed up, but I don't know what kind of such places you'd have there. Key is to be gentle and reassuring so as to not just freak him out. Might need to throw something light over him to catch him at first though.

Oh, all somewhat depends on how manky he might look too... If it's not a broken wing he might have psychological problems grounding him, at which point making a tiny couch is a bit of a chore.

[AugustWest]

Pyscho-pigeon?  Qu'est-ce-c'est?

[KeithHernandez]

Pyscho-pigeon?  Qu'est-ce-c'est?

Wow.  Two thumbs up.

[jaydub]

Pyscho-pigeon?  Qu'est-ce-c'est?

Is that the French equivalent of que será será?

[side_show]

Oh man.  It was snowing all morning.  I came home and a single set of paw prints lead up to the window and away and the pigeon is gone.   Too bad, because after making the original post I called animal controle and they have an actual injured bird department that would have picked the little guy up.  Oh well.

[wombat]

Did they say what they were going to do with it, though?  If they were just going to euthanize it, well, this way at least someone else didn't have to go hungry, you know?  It's hard to find food in the snow.

[Muse_Of_Fire]

Awww. Well, the circle of life is complete, at least; things are as they should be. And if not, you'll never know, so you can imagine the best outcome you can conceive, and let that be reality.

For the record, "Qu-est-ce que c'st" (pronounced "Keske- say," like in the song quoted by Keith) means "What is it?"

[theinevitable]

tell me how those letters translate into those sounds.
TELL ME.

that makes less sense than a bunch of squiggly lines and dots making arabic sounds.

[Muse_Of_Fire]

Heh. Well in part because I spelled it wrong. The Typo Demon strikes again, curse Her. It should be "Qu'est-ce que c'est"

Do you really want me to tell you? Because I'm afraid that if I do, the Nerd Quotient in this thread will expand to disastrous proportions. Same if I explain the Arabic.

So choose wisely.

[littlefallsmets]

I dunno, I'm more interested in finding out that the Typo Demon is a lady-demon.

[theinevitable]

(to clarify, the reason Arabic Squiggles make more sense to me than french pronunciatio. is that I can read arabic. kind of. I mean, i can read the letters, and theoretically pronounce them. and I know such as "I live in a big house" or "my room-mate (Comrade of the Room) goes to Church on Sunday")

But seriously, they leave out so many letters. Why is that.

[Muse_Of_Fire]

Who? Arabic speakers?

If that's who you're asking about, the reason is because Arabic morphology makes heavy use of infixing, and it's expressed on the morphophonemic level; e.g. at the interface between the sound level of language and the word level.

So for example, the consonant cluster K-T-B is Arabic for "book" or "writing" or some other abstract having to do with text. Whether the book was read or written, or sat on a table, or flew through the air, will be expressed via the vowels inserted between the K, the T, and the B. So for instance (and this is totally a fake-out because I don't know Arabic beyond KTB unless I have a data set in front of me), "katabaa" might mean "I read the book." Vowels in written Arabic (and Hebrew and other related languages) are expressed in little dots above and around the "squiggles." It is assumed that the reader can deduce from context which vowels should go there, so often they are simply left out for expediency's sake.

The French leave no letters out, and in fact add too many; so that often what looks like whole syllables to us are left off completely, for instance, "Ils parlent"=they talk, is pronounced "eel parl." (sorry, I don't have an IPA font to use in here). The -ent is completely unpronounced.

So perhaps Arabic speakers and French speakers should get together in the interest of linguistic harmony and efficiency.

You may shove me out of the airlock now, for utterly geekifying this thread beyond salvation.

[theinevitable]

yeah, that's like Moroccan Arabic. I've heard it is utterly incomprehensible-- the French influence is really strong, and they don't pronounce a lot of letters... or whole syllables. The french influence is probably not the reason for this, but it sounds good, eh? (Actually, I can't tell whether it's a matter of not pronouncing letters, or the words themselves being different. Most likely a mixture. I have been told, though, that the further west you get in the Arab-speaking world, the more the words are "clipped" and the fewer long vowels there are.)

But yeah, when I said "they leave out so many letters" I meant from pronunciation-- ie, in French.

To Read is actually... qa-ra-a. I mean, it's hard to transliterate Arabic... but... it's a Q-ish consonant, then a R, then a glottal stop. All three take a kasra (unwritten "a" vowel.)

ka-ta-ba is actually "to write." So, you were close!

(saying "to write" is wrong, though, because they don't actually have infinitives. kataba is actually the 3rd person singular, past tense. Or at least... the only past tense we've learned so far. There may be more.)

I kind of alternate between loving Arabic and hating Arabic. Which is hard in terms of, you know, picking classes for next year.

[wombat]

(sorry, I don't have an IPA font to use in here).

Dang, if anyone does figure out how to post on this board in IPA I am definitely, automatically, arbitrarily locking the thread.

I just woke up from a dream where I was teaching introductory phonology - we were holding the class squeezed behind the tanks on the salt side of the aquarium where I work, I was totally unprepared and my lecture notes that were mostly in someone else's handwriting, I collected a homework assignment and couldn't tell from the answers what questions I had asked, someone was working on repainting the backs of the tanks while we were trying to have class...  I have no idea where this came from I sure don't need any encouragement for this kind of flashback.  NO PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION ALLOWED.

Poor pigeon, look what happened to your thread.