My Prima Donna Swamp Princess: 35. MELLIFLUOUS

  • 2006-11-08
All this time Arva and I communicated, mind you there was no small amount of linguistic trouble. Her handle on language was improving by the day, of course, but there were still moments when she confused words and vocabularies. In one sentence she could glide across an entire substratum of Baltic dialects, then jump into another language family, tread upon a few syllables in English and exit via some arcane tongue that time has buried. At other times she was perfectly intelligible - well, as intelligible as a 600-year-old swamp princess could be, I suppose.

For the most part though, it could be a frustrating experience.
"Would you like something to eat," I asked her after we had pulled into a roadside restaurant.
"Gryba'tum meeleldi paraudzeit ituo uzkanda," Arva said.
I looked at her in utter consternation. "Run that by me again."
After repeating the phrase slowly, I would shake my head in dismay. In one breath she managed to jumble Lithuanian, Latgalian and another language I couldn't quite pinpoint.
"Meeleldi," I repeated, "meeleldi..."

Where did this come from? The obvious answer pointed to Indo-European - melit, the word our ancient ancestors used for honey (hence mellifluous, molasses and, believe it or not, mildew). If this were true, Arva said something like, "I would like to try these snacks with some honey."
Comprehension of the phrase was made easier by the fact that she was standing in front of a food-service counter and nearly drooling at the sight of some stewed vegetables with rice.
Otherwise, the phrase made sense. Leave it to a Balt to ruin a perfectly good dish by pouring honey all over it. Hell, Latvians add honey to their beer - talk about lunacy.

"And give her a side of honey," I told the girl behind the counter in Lithuanian.
"No, I don't want honey!" cried Arva.
"But you just said you did."
"I said nothing of the sort."

I reminded myself not to wind the princess up, since the level of her linguistic confusion was in direct relation to her temper. Get her riled up, and you'll have Babel.
"Meeleldi - you said 'meeleldi,'" I repeated, looking down on her as a parent would to a child.
"It's Estonian, you dork," the princess snapped. "It means 'with pleasure.'"

Like I said, leave it to a Balt to say "with pleasure" every time you offer them something.
But that was one example of how agonizing communication with the undead princess could be. When she was tipsy, the result was pure chaos. Not only were the sentences a study in the bastardization of languages, but the words themselves would be butchered in a polyglotic way - a prefix from Latvian, a root from Prussian, and a suffix from the devil knows what language. And I won't even describe what she did with infixes.

"I can't just disregard the Estonians," Arva said, suddenly the magnanimous democrat. "They're all alone up there, pinched in between the Russians and the Finns."
"What's wrong with the Finns?"
"They're a bunch of wimps," she said.
I smiled. "I think most Swedish hockey players would agree with you."
"What's hockey?"

I ignored the question, but the princess wouldn't let it go. She saw the world in black-and-white, pro-Balt and anti-Balt. I mentioned that someone might not like the Finns, and she immediately saw a potential ally.
"So what's this hockey," she asked as soon as we had sat down at our table.
I tried describing the game - with the ice, sticks, goalies and what not - but I gave up after unsuccessfully trying to remember the Skalvian word for puck.

"Puck, puck, puck," I repeated, as I usually do when I'm concentrating on a word.
"You mean a pug! They hit around a dog?"
"No, no, no!"
"That's cool," said the princess, not letting my finish. "I gotta' see this game."
I was ready to strangle her.
"Are Russians good at hockey?"
"Perhaps the best in the world," I answered.
"That figures. Because it sounds as if this hockey is a Russian plot. After all those Teutons fell through the ice on Chudskoe Lake, one would expect the Russians to draw their opponents to a icy surface and subsequently run them through with their swords while they're drowning."

Sometimes I didn't know whether Arva was naive, cynical, paranoid or just pulling my leg.
"You know the English word 'sword' comes from the Latin 'veretrum', which is the male genitalia. You know, the earliest people believed that God created the world by sundering Chaos into parts with his mighty 'Sword,' so to speak."
I shrugged my shoulders, and Arva fell silent. I took pride in the fact that, after all the time we spent together, at least I knew what to say to get her to shut up.