The teacher across the hall comes over yesterday and could barely contain his laughter. In the previous period, there was an autistic kid sitting in his seat which is near a filing cabinet while the teacher was at the front of the room doing his lesson. The kid is singing/humming/babbling to himself while facing the broad side of the cabinet, with his head hunched down.
The teacher asks, "James, are you singing to me?"
The kid answers back, "No, I was just thinking about how funny it is that the goblin word for 'flying' can be roughly translated as 'falling slowly'".
The teacher did hold it together (somehow), but miraculously, so did the rest of the class. It is nice to know that despite the fact that adults are very skeptical of people that are unlike themselves, the kids are very understanding of others who are truly not like themselves. Hats off to the kids in that class. I'm not sure if I could have held my mouth shut hard enough to keep the laughter inside.
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When the Soviet Union fell apart, the old republics became new countries, and formed international links that had not existed before. Azerbaijan not only fought a war on its own, it also set up a national airline and created ties to Turkey (linked somewhat by culture and by very similar, mutually intelligible languages).
Mutually intelligible does not mean identical. Apparently there was near panic on one of the first flights to from Ankara or Istanbul to Baku, as the captain announced to the passengers in clear Azeri that the plane was 'landing'.
The Turkish meaning for the same word is 'falling.'
I think the goblin-English problem is not as serious.
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