Cá heo means dolphin, but literally means pig fish.
Hươu cao cổ means giraffe, but literally means long necked deer.
Mông Cổ means Mongolia, but literally means butt-neck.
Rau thì là, dill, is named 'is' because when God created everything He forgot to name dill, so dill went up to God and asked what it's name was. God pensively began to reply, "your name is... is..." and dill happily scampered off thinking it's name was "is".
Folklore/local belief has it that migrant fishermen are the cause of the different dialects in the North, Center, and South. In theory, their lackadaisical, lazy lifestyles translate to their approach to language, and as they migrated down from the North their pronunciation grew lazy and sloppy and so the Southern dialects are essentially derived from lazy pronunciation. I wonder if the South has it's own version of this story.
"Bà ba béo, bán báhn bèo bên bờ biển" means "Second fat Grandma sells cake down by the beach." "Bạn tôi bán bàn ở bản" means "My friend sells tables in the village in the mountains." The two are tongue/tone twisters that I can only hope to be able to pronounce correctly by the end of my time here.
In our daily quest for lunch today we ended up in a magical tent town/market around the corner from our conference center. Pungent eel was out to dry; cuts of meat, possibly including snake were for sale; enticing fruit piled high. Lunch was what I have now come to call 'rice et cetera', and possibly my cheapest full meal yet (15,000 VND, which is about $0.75) and just as delicious. After lunch I tried the highly praised custard apple, which unfortunately did not live up to expectation. It tasted like eating the smell of sweet perfume, which was not unpleasant but rather overpowering. And kind of powdery in texture. The fruit kind of looks like a fuzzy reptile, but in the back of my mind it reminded me of something else. After a while I realized that it reminded me of a magnolia's seed pod, and I was later proud of myself to find that my botanic gestalt held true; they are in the same order. To eat it you peel off the fuzzy scales and take a bite.
On my last post I got a request for information concerning the "local yeast derivatives". I have tried Bia Hà Nội, Tiger, La Rue, and Bia Hởi. All are lager style, which is not my favorite, but all are more than drinkable. Bia Hởi is a bit of a cultural phenomenon and remarkably cheap, and actually perhaps the best of the four, in my opinion.
Me wondered aloud to mi esposo in surprise we hadn't heard about local brew! Mom signed up to get your posts, and has been responding apparently...but not in comments, so I had to school her on how to do that. Let her know if she's successful...would that we be as amenable to learning in our 80s as she!
ReplyDeleteStay safe, Adelina!
So what I learned today is how to call someone a name by referring to their neck.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if what you atr was an anona. Looks like it. Sounds like it. But you referred to it as being in the Magnoliaceae and not in the Anonaceae. Hmmm.
Now I dunno where you thought that I was referring to that liquid, bubbly, sometimes yellow yeast derivative. I was surprised we had not heard much about bread. Jarr. Jarr.
love,
El papi
It probably is indeed an anona. I said that it was in the same order as magnolias, Magnoliales, but it is in the family Annonaceae.
ReplyDelete