And now the tune to "Zajicek v sve jamce"

A few days ago, my friend Karla of rabbit blog fame asked about the music to the song C taught me last week. Karla is in the midst of wrapping up her dissertation and applying to schools next year - in my mind, decidedly in need of being pampered with cookies or, perhaps, a new tune to hum. Since Prague to Pittsburgh is a hike for cookies, I decided to send her a tune. I searched around the web for simple (free) notation software, found it at Finale, and wrote out the song. At first try, the software appears too basic to let me use diacritics and as many hyphens as the text might need, but I think you can get the idea.

Language lessons

Caroline wants to add a new song to our going to bed repertory. It's a Czech song and I don’t know the words, so I promise to learn them from Teta Jarka and sing it tomorrow night.

But no. "Now!" she says, in a four year old sort of way. When I tell her I can’t, that I really don’t know it, she says "That’s okay Mommie." Then she starts, very slowly, to sing a phrase at a time, getting me to sing phrases back to her just the same. She even stops and corrects my pronunciation, and I make my lazy tongue work hard to sound Czech.

Afterwards, I can’t remember most of the words because I spend the lesson wondering when this jump in language arrived, and how C learned to teach someone to sing a song so slowly and still get the words just right.

After Caroline falls asleep I go to Google and look up Czech nursery songs until I find it:

Zajíček v své jamce
sedí sám, sedí sám.
Ubožáčku, co je ti,
že nemůžeš skákati?
Chutě skoč, a vyskoč!

Little rabbit in your den,
sitting alone, sitting alone,
poor little thing, why is it
that you cannot jump?
Try* to hop,
hop and skip!

The song is so apt somehow, such a good nudge for me and language learning, that I laugh when I translate it. Maybe it is time to hop out of my den of comfortably bad Czech and try again to hop and skip in this language C shares with me so patiently.

........................................................
*Want or desire to hop would be a closer translation but somehow try works better in English.

Are you asleep yet?

Caroline’s favorite song of the moment, as she has decided it should go:

Bruder Jakob,
Bruder Jakob,
Dormez-vous?
Dormez-vous?
Morning bells are ringing,
Morning bells are ringing,
Ding dong ding. Ding dong ding.

The Czech version her babysitters sing:

Bratře Kubo,
Bratře Kubo,
Ještě spíš?
Ještě spíš?
Venku slunce září,
Ty jsi na polštáři,
Vstávej již,
Vstávej již.

Imagine the two versions in a round. That's our house right before nap time.

Hatmatilka to some, poetry to others

Sometimes my job involves reading contracts. They start out shiny and smooth on the surface, impenetrable. I tend to get a lot of other work done before I read a page. Then I’ll reward myself with coffee, sit down again and realize I haven’t absorbed a thing. That’s when I pick up my pen and start drawing. ?? and "what in the.." and before I know it that contract has lost its hermetically sealed look and become something a bit turfy and easy on the eye. The work gets fun then and I argue my way through each clause until I’m done. It’s a lot like reading Wallace Stevens, actually.

Except that, working in Prague on contracts written by non-English speakers in English, I’m bound to find a humdinger of a sentence that just doesn’t work backwards or forwards. So sometimes I send it over to my Czech business partner, ask him to think about it in Czech and then in English again and see what we can figure out. (His hourly rates are a lot better than the lawyer‘s.) It mostly works.

Yesterday I sent him one of my humdingers, prefaced with "gobbledygook coming your way!" Gobbledygook was a new word for him and we looked it up. Lingea Lexicon gave us hatmatilka as its Czech equivalent. My etymology dictionary told me that hatmatilka is from the expression hat' mat', which is similar to hatla patla and halabala and related somehow to Halí belí, the Czech song and nursery rhyme that Caroline currently has stuck in my head from incessant singing. If anyone can tell me what hat' mat' means I’d be most appreciative. In the meantime:

hatla patla and halabala = seem to mean slapdash or shoddy. I love learning words like that, they just seem to stick in my mind somehow.

Halí, belí...
Halí, belí, koně v zelí
a hříbátka v petrželi.

Whoops, the horse is in the cabbage
And the colt in the parsley.

Okay, enough procrastination, back to clause 10.4.1.

Just don’t call him that - the slippery slope of house shoe parlance

If you live in a city, you walk a lot more than your suburban bretheren. I’m a fan of walking. It is, in fact, my favorite sport when the weather is nice. But walking in Prague has its hazards, with the dog population in the local park out numbering the children 2 to 1, and poop scooping dog owners in the minority. So although it pays to hone your sidewalk radar, only levitation could save your shoes from any fodder gack accumulation.

Thus, when we moved here we quickly adopted the Czech habit of taking off our shoes as soon as we step into a house or apartment. We’re happy to be shoe free at home, and we wear socks to keep our toes warm. Our Czech friends, however, they wear slippers. Slipper culture is so huge I’d wager every Czech owns at least two pair - one for home and one for work. Most have more so that they can offer them to guests, and of course everyone sports their summer and their winter models. Each child carries slippers to school - backpack, notebook, pencil case, slippers, you’re set to start kindergarten.

Probably because of the prominence of slippers here, they seem to have more names than in the U.S. A pair of slippers with no heels, the kind some ladies wear trimmed with pink boas, these are called pantofle or trepky. Leather moccasins are easily transposed into mokasíny, and their cloth counterpart - fully fitted slippers that look like real shoes but without laces - these are called bačkory if you are a grownup. If you are a kid and your slippers are small too, you’ll call them bačkorky. Slippers even have their own nursery rhyme:

Do školy a do školky nosíváme bačkorky. Do školky maličké, do školy větší, každá ta bačkorka je přece něčí.

To big school and to little school we dress in bačkorky. To little school little girl, to big school big girl, for every bačkorka is surely someone‘s.

Marie, our babysitter, taught me about slippers while she was fixing up a spot in our shoe cabinet for her winter pair and her summer set. Satisfied with their positioning (and with the flowery scented drawer liner I’d brought to freshen up the cabinet) she chatted a bit longer and warned me to be careful about my use of the word bačkora, as it was not a nice word when applied to a guy. It means coward or milksop and no man will put up with that, she said. Czech swear words amuse me in general, so as soon as I could free myself from our shoe organization, I dove onto the computer to look up bačkora (www.slovnik.cz) and see if indeed one might insult a guy by calling him a dirty rotten slipper. And yes, research suggests this is true!

Because I know I'm not the perfectionist I should be when it comes to language, and because dictionaries have been known to be wrong in the past, I'm leaving the final word up to the internet for your opinion on the matter. Please let me know if I have even a hacek misplaced and I'll fix it. I try, after all, not to be a bačkora.

St. Martin on a white horse - winter rides in

“The heavens are ripe with snow,“ our babysitter said this morning, stamping her feet and warming her hands above the heater. Every day this week she has predicted snowfall, ever since November 11th, the name day of Martin, who by Czech tradition reigns in the winter on his white horse of snow. Since our balcony thermometer said 5C again this morning, I waved aside her predictions, but helped bundle up Caroline tight before they ventured out for the day.

The Czechs are a secular sort of people, and they have given up most religious holidays. In place of saints days, they celebrate name days, raising a glass to all the Martins of the Czech Republic on this particular holiday. You wouldn’t know it, living in Prague, that St. Martin’s day, or Martinmas, has been Europe’s first day of winter since the middle ages and a major feast day too. St. Martin’s day was the time to try out the new wine, eat a fattened goose and slaughter your stock for winter. In some parts of Germany, children still celebrate - carrying lanterns in the shape of the moon, stars and sun from door to door, singing Martinslieder and reciting rhymes in exchange for small gifts of cookies or bread. The songs find us even in Prague, and Caroline and I sing one regularly each winter:

Laterne, Laterne, Sonne, Mond und Sterne.
Brenne auf, mein Licht, brenne auf, mein Licht,
aber nur meine liebe Laterne nicht.

Lantern, lantern, sun, moon and stars.
blow out the lights, blow out the lights,
only leave my lantern so it can burn bright.

Tonight the temperatures have dropped and the clouds hang low in the sky. Will St. Martin ride by?

Filed under: Prague winter weather music holidays

Dr. Seuss as Mother Goose

"Oh deah, oh deah, I cannot heah, will you please come over neah, will you please look in my eah?" said the small one to Will the other day, in a croaky stilted voice. He dropped the magazine he was reading and got on the floor to look at her. “Julia! There’s something wrong with Caroline’s ear!! Get over here quick!“

But I just answered, "Say, look a bird is in your ear! But he is out. So have no fear!“* and Caroline laughed and practiced her line again.

*As says Seuss in One Fish Two Fish, if you’re a little rusty on your kid books these days.

Filed under: toddler_tales nursery_rhymes words

A mouse is in the house

It took me three weeks to track down all the words to this little rhyme. Caroline has been walking around the house whispering the words, then belting them out to various tunes, but the only phrase I could partially understand was "Mamo, Tato la la la la nic!" Our babysitter Marie gave me a few more words and Google obliged with the rest.

Mámo, táto, v komoře je myš
Pustíme tam kocoura, ten tu myšku vyšťourá
Mámo, táto, už tam neni nic.

I've filed it away under Básničky (Czech nursery rhymes), and now C and I stomp around chant-singing it together. The rough translation is something like this:

Mommie, daddy, a mouse is in the pantry
Send in the tom cat and the mouse will get clawed out
Mommie, daddy, it's already gone.

Hmm...sounds better in Czech don't you think?

Cookies are cool

Caroline and I had our first hanging out together, mother and daughter chilling and contemplating the ceiling, late evening chat last night. We’d spent the last three hours together, C keeping me company in the kitchen while I cooked, then gobbling up the chicken I accidentally caramelized in apple juice and sunflower oil (a happy accident), I keeping her from drowning in the bathtub and pouring out all of Will’s shampoo, entertaining her through toothbrushing & flossing, pajama assembling and milk pouring. Then we read, about fifteen books but especially her current favorite Mem Fox book, Sleepy Bears. That we read twice, singing along to the rhymes.

After that we sang some more, “Jingle Bells,“ “Sleep sleep“ and “Little Birdies“, Caroline drank her milk and then I was going to leave until she said, „Lie this, Mommie, lie this.“ (this = there). So I did, just for a bit, and since Will wasn’t home yet. And we looked up at the ceiling and I hummed a little more and then Caroline raised herself up, hand underneath chin, looked at me seriously and said, „Mommie, cookies are cool.“

I didn’t understand at first what she meant, but she said it several times, and when I understood, I had to agree. Then I gave her an imaginary cookie, took one myself and we lay back and crunched for awhile, until she gave me an apple (apfel she said) and we ate that too and then I gave her a kiss, said night night and left her to sleep.

Ahoj

Kolo, kolo mlýnský
za čtyry rýnský
kolo se nám polámalo
mnoho škody nadělalo
udělalo bác!

A Czech children's rhyme...when I found it on the web today and sang it out to Caroline she danced around in pleasure and, at "bác", clapped her hands to the floor. She'd learned the poem and the dance from her babysitter. It was the first time we had experienced Caroline knowing something beyond our ken, and my heart caught in my throat. But what a world ahead for her! Thus, "kolo kolo," or the wheel of the mill.

Filed under: nursery_rhymes toddler_tales