Making the leap to Blogspot.

Even changing a longstanding handle. Well, my love of mollusks did certainly predate my love of weird anagrams involving my name.

Hopefully I'll be able to babble about translation and etymology more here, in addition to the occasional rant about how much more I like pen-and-paper writing. The notes on translation and etymology are likely to be either anecdotes from experience, for the former, or correspondences I find amusing.

Namely, things like the fact that English mollusk [>Latin mollis/molluscus 'soft'] has a correspondence in Czech, měkkýš, [>měkký "soft", though the Czech does not seem to be genetically related to the Latin] formed by the adjective plus a nonproductive terminological suffix - ýš. Another of the words that shares this is is the noun hroznýš, "[boa] constrictor", from the adjective hrozný, "terrible, horrible, awful." This allows for a play on words in the Czech that's nonexistent in English. This, naturally, occurs in chapter one of Spalovač mrtvol, the book I've been translating. Paraphrasing from memory, it's something like "everyone knows in advance what to expect from a constrictor; it's in the name, after all."

I guess that still carries in the English, for one would expect constriction, but that's at a level of remove from expecting outright horror. And that's why it's footnoted, of course.

And this is most of what I think about all day.