A Cool Canadian Capital City - Iqaluit

I'm very fascinated by remote and 'extreme' locations.  It intrigues me to consider what daily life is like in a place so vastly different than any place I've lived.  I'm from Pennsylvania.  To me, PA is pretty "normal".  There aren't many extremes (no extreme hot or cold, no extreme light or darkness).  It's a pretty reasonable place to live, with four separate seasons and a variety of weather. It's also got a good mix of densely populated areas and sparsely populated areas.  Pretty normal, not too extreme.  So let's talk about a more extreme locale...

Nunavut!
In 1999, Nunavut packed it's bags (not literally) and quit being part of Canada's Northwest Territories to become a territory of its own.  Nunavut spans nearly 1,932,255 sq kilometers of land, and around 20% of its nearly 30,000 people live in its capital, Iqaluit. To put that into perspective, if each member of Nunavut's population had 1sq km of land all to themselves, they'd fit entirely on Prince of Wales Island.  With land left over.  Also, Prince of Wales Island is just slightly smaller than Taiwan, and Taiwan is home to over 2.6 million people.  Hmm. 

Here's a map of Prince of Wales Island, so you can compare it to the rest of Nunavut.

View Nunavut and Prince of Wales Island in a larger map

So if everyone in Nunavut went to a party on Prince of Wales Island and ended up wanting to stay there (nevermind that it's uninhabited), Nunavut would still have more land than ALASKA available for the polar bears and muskoxen and birds and other cool stuff.  Just THINK about that!

Anyway, I think the population density alone is a huge factor for life being vastly different up there.  You know, that and snow.  And polar bears.  And muskoxen. 

MUSKOXEN!?!

Did you know they're related to sheep?  Baaaaa.

Speaking of Nunavut's cool critters... Their license plates rock!  They kept the same license plates when they separated from the Northwest Territories.  Which means that their license plates are shaped like POLAR BEARS!!  Here is a way cool sample, courtesy of Wikipedia and Flickr:

Roar!

Ok, enough about Nunavut.  It's time for Iqaluit! 

Iqaluit!

Iqaluit is Nunavut's capital city, and it is home to somewhere around 6,000 people.  Your college may have had more people than that.  Mine didn't.

While English and French are the official languages in Iqaluit (and Canada in general), about half of the population in Iqaluit predominantly speaks a non-official language, such as Inuinnaqtun and Inuktitut, which are among the Inuit languages.  According to the wiki article, Iqaluit means "place of many fish" in Inukitut.  Here is a stop sign in Iqaluit!

Don't you wish your alphabet was that cool?

The 4-way stop diagram rules too!

Iqaluit was also featured in a White Stripes video!

Let's Visit!

Now that you know some of the reasons I'm fascinated by Iqaluit and its bright yellow airport, let's visit!  You can fly there from Montreal and Ottawa!  The Nunavut Tourism website has lots of suggestions on awesome things to do there.  For example, we can go on a number of Arctic Odysseys!


Stats & Data from Statistics Canada.  :)

A Brief Comparison of Eastern European Languages

My genealogical research involved the Rusyn people in Eastern Europe. While they have their own language, so does everybody else in that neighborhood! This means that looking at old maps and church documents becomes a crash course in learning a few key words in multiple languages. You quickly begin to see how place names evolved over time, depending on the ruling country of the day. I was curious to compare several of the languages that exist in Rusyn areas. Since place names aren't exactly universal, it makes comparing languages pretty sticky. Since churches are quite vital to genealogical research [they held the records!], I decided to compare the word "church".

Disclaimer time! I don't speak these languages... so Google Translate is my source. So all credit/blame goes to them. :)

Here is a comparison of "church" in Rusyn to "church" in a variety of other languages from nearby countries. Transliteration of words in Cyrillic are in parentheses after each word.

Rusyn		цирков (cyrkov)
Bulgarian		църква (tsŭrkva)
Croatian		crkva
Czech		kostel
Estonian		kirik
Finnish		kirkko
Galician		igrexa
Hungarian		templom
Latvian		baznīca
Lithuanian		bažnyčia
Norwegian		kirke
Polish		kościół
Romanian		biserică
Russian		церковь (tserkov')
Serbian		црква (crkva)
Slovak		kostol
Slovenian		cerkev
Swedish		kyrka
Ukrainian		церква (tserkva)

I was very surprised to see how different the Czech and Slovak words are from Rusyn, especially when considering their proximity to the Rusyn area [Rusyns live in Slovakia and Ukraine] and the fact that a lot of Rusyn words are very similar to their counterparts in Czech/Slovak. No surprise here: the Rusyn word is very similar to Russian and Ukrainian.

I ended up including the Baltic States because of how similar some of their words are to the Romanian word for church. Unexpected!

As always, Hungary is an outlier. :-P

I'm sure you're wondering why I included Galician, as it clearly has nothing to do with anything I'm talking about. I included it simply to point out that the Galician language in Google Translate refers to Galicia in Spain, not Galicia the historic area in Eastern Europe.

To help visualize these variations, I threw together a map:

Fascinating, no?!

Virii!!

Coolest 'computer virus' I've seen in a while:


First off, you have to agree that it's a fun idea! They're marketing it as computer virus art. But what makes a virus a virus? The replication? The infection or malicious intent/outcome? The fact that the receiver doesn't really want it and receives it unexpectedly? I tend to think of this more as a cool application than as a virus. Thoughts?

Also, I know that "virii" isn't really officially accepted as the plural of virus, but I like it more than "viruses" because it's more fun. Wikipedia has this to say:

• The form virii would not have been a correct plural, since the ending -ii only occurs in the plural of masculine and feminine words ending in -ius. For instance, take radius, plural radii: the root is radi-, with the singular ending -us and the plural -i. Thus the plural virii is that of the nonexistent word virius. The form viri would also be incorrect in Latin. The ending -i is normally used for masculine or feminine nouns, not neuter ones such as virus; moreover, viri (albeit with a short i in the first syllable) is the plural of vir, and means "men."

Words are fun. :)

Hardcore Cursing, Slovenian Style!

I read from a few sources that Slovenians don't have their own curse words, they just steal Serbian words. I don't know if it's actually true, as I don't speak Slovenian...

From a blog:

• "Three hundred hairy bears. It's the worst curse in Slovene. Apart maybe from `Duck on the lake' and `You are the mother of a chicken'. We don't really have any swear words in the language."

I am definitely going to start using these 'curses'! Awesome!

Anyway, I started looking all of this stuff up because, according to my Slovenian Grammy, chuntaglava = bonehead in Slovenian! This may or may not be true, as my family likes to make stuff up, especially in other languages. Glava = head. But as for that first part, who knows what it means. If it's highly offensive... oops?

My parents are apparently big fans of using foreign words that they think they know the meaning of... but don't. Example: putz [Yiddish]. Not a great thing to have little kids calling their friends! Also, I've heard that dupa [Polish] is more... strong than mom thought...

All of this entertains me.

Transliteration (Pertaining to Eastern Europe)

I'm sure most of you won't find this the least bit interesting, but... I do! And it's not like the fact that I'm a nerd is a news flash or something.

Over the past year and a half I've done a lot of genealogical research. This has led me to many documents in many languages! These languages include: Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak, German, Slovene, Polish, and Lithuanian. I don't know anything about German, Slovene, Polish or Lithuanian yet... that's for later. Anyway, most of my research has focused on my dad's family. That part of my family comes from the Rusyn areas in western Slovakia and eastern Ukraine. If you're not looking at Rusyn names... this won't be nearly as helpful, but most of these are fairly constant.

Enough background info, here's a breakdown of a few things that I find fairly common in surnames!


*The H is mostly silent in names that begin with Hr. Stick with silent and you're likely to be closer to how it's supposed to sound!
**In most Slavic languages, Г is transliterated to a G. However, in Rusyn (where names that begin with Hr are common) Г is an H, whereas Ґ is a G.
***This isn't a single letter, it's two. Therefore, no IPA pronunciation.


So, if you know me, you know my last name. If you don't... it has a silent H and a bunch of other stuff non-Eastern Bloc people don't like to pronounce. I'm hoping that this might help people understand how to pronounce fun names like mine! :-P

New blog?! And... tea!

I think I'll use this new blog for random information that I want to share. I haven't really decided yet. I like that I can log in so easily from Google. :)

If I decide to use this blog I want to create a layout for it. You don't care.

Anyway, here is a post that will not be found ANYWHERE ELSE*! Consider yourself very lucky to have come across this blog!

Today I had hyun mi nok cha for the first time in a long time. This is because I used to drink it every day and I got kind of tired of it. But it was good to have it again today, because it is really quite tasty. For those of you who don't speak Korean, [not that I know anything more than some foods and tourist phrases] hyun mi nok cha is green tea with rice.

So, to break things down for you:

• 차 = cha = tea
  
• 녹 = nok = green
  
• 현미 = hyun mi = brown rice
• One thing I've noticed in my [very minimal] studies of Korean is that there isn't much of a standard for transliteration. I've seen "hyun mi" more frequently than "hyeonmi", but I'm not sure which is correct. If you know, tell me!
  

Now, Wikipedia has an article on brown rice tea, but the tea I have is actually a combination of green tea and rice tea. I read that this began, back in the day, as a way for the lower class to make what little tea they could afford last longer. Diluting green tea with rice eventually became quite popular, even with the ruling class! I wish I could find that article so you would not think I am making this up, but no.

So now I should go accomplish something other than writing a new blog. Yay!


*This is untrue. You should still consider yourself lucky to have found this blog.