Brendan the Navigator, Brandán el Navegante, Brendan de Clonfert et la moins connue des îles Canaries

 

Jasconius // Aspidochelone // Aspidochélon

- Il existe dans la mer un être nommé tortue à bouclier, semblable au dragon ou à la baleine

-  There exists in the sea a creature known as the shield-turtle, resembling the dragon or the whale.

 

During Inktober of 2024,  when the prompt was "navigator" I made a little picture about Saint Brendan.

And I knew about the legend of phantom island of San Borondon for a good long while. 

Yet somewow, I've never made the connection between the two - the difference in the writing of the name was sufficient to mask it. Up till today, that is.

Now I know it all started with Saint Brendan. It was him and his companions who stopped by what they assumed was an island. They were wrong, the island was not an island, but rather a giant creature called Jasconius. They woke him up by making a campfire at his back.

I prefer to think of him as a dragon rather than a whale. He learned to hide much better since Saint Brendan's time.  Here he is, dreaming happily, undisturbed by campfires.

Cadet Rousselle

 

Cadet Rousselle a trois maisons, 
Qui n'ont ni poutres, ni chevrons,
C'est pour loger les hirondelles

Reading a French text book a couple of days ago, I came across a word "hirondelle", "swallow". It sounded somewhat familiar and after a while it hit me that "hirondelle" was mentioned in a song that my friend used to sing at school. She was having French lessons, and I was doing English, so her singing was just a jumble of sounds for me. And now, 40 (!) years later, the words unjumbled themselves suddenly, and I was able to find the song. It is a nursery rhyme "Cadet Rousselle" and the text is rather strange, but then, nursery rhymes tend to have strange texts. Isn't it weird how memory works, though?

Here is the beginning of the song: 

Cadet Rousselle a trois maisons,

Cadet Rousselle a trois maisons,

Qui n'ont ni poutres, ni chevrons,

Qui n'ont ni poutres, ni chevrons,

C'est pour loger les hirondelles...

Cadet Rousselle has three houses,

Cadet Rousselle has three houses,

Which have neither beams nor rafters,

Which have neither beams nor rafters,

It's to house the swallows...

etc.

I figure that is a house has neither beams nor rafters, it probably means that it has no roof, either. And the figure of the Cadet comes from a rather strange statue of him they have in Auxerre. 

Vote for Meow

Good news everyone ©.

My one-drawing-per-day challenge, from 14 March to 11 May 2020, is out as a full-colour book, Vote for Meow (ISBN 979-8-6667-1099-9). It includes some unpublished drawings and some interesting, I hope, non-drawing extras.

It’s kinda cute, even if I say so myself. And it is available from your nearest Amazon store.

The book is named after my post from 23 April.

We (I and Kirill) had fun putting it together.

I hope you have fun reading it.

Le niveau d'orthographe

Les dictées permettent aux professeurs d'évaluer le niveau d'orthographe de leurs élèves //

Dictations allow the teachers to test the level of their pupils' spelling skills

The cat doesn't seem to be very pleased with the level of his pupil's skill, don't you think?

In case you are wondering what is it the owl is writing, allow me to refer you to the original.

Well, actually, of course, he is saying ‘A Very Happy Birthday with love from Pooh.’

un peu chétif

Depuis sa plus tendre enfance il n'a pas grand appétit, ce qui explique pourquoi il est un peu chétif // Since he was a very young, he has not had a big appetite, which explains why he is a bit puny

After a long break here is another picture. French word of the day once again brought along a phrase which I felt I must illustrate.

Same as with "a bit whiny" the phrase asks to be said with an apologetic intonation.

It seems that the chronic lack of appetite affects the size, but not the shape of these guys though.

He works in a lab

Il travaille dans un laboratoire. Il est chimiste // He works in a lab. He is a chemist

We carry on with the professions, as you can plainly see from the pic. We also had a long explanation about possessive adjectives in French. To be honest, I didn’t get what was the problem. It might well be some specific difficulty that Spanish speakers tend to have. Or I might have missed the point completely. I’ll report next week, when the lessons and pictures resume.

The cat doesn’t like it the lab either, though maybe not so much as in the eggplant jungle. Nobody knows why did he get there, but that’s cats for you.

And hooray for me — another week done (another Koi pen brush for me!)

les chats

les chats sont nombreux / cats are numerous

Last Christmas we bought a white matte bauble with an idea to cover it with some sort of imperfectly repeating pattern. I don't think we made it, but "multitude of cats" was one of the possibilities we considered. So as not to let it go to waste - here it is.

Can you spot a sumo wrestler (lutteur de sumo)?

Le cheval a huit ans

Le cheval a huit ans / The horse is eight years old

This time the phrase comes from Duolingo site. I thought it was rather adorable and lends itself well to a little drawing.

Judging by the discussion under the phrase, native English speakers find it difficult to accept that age construction can contain verb “to have” (“avoir” in French, “a” in third person singular) and not the equivalent of “to be”. Fortunately I have already passed though this stage with Spanish. Spaniards also “have” their years, not “are” them, if I may say so.

Come to think of it, the Russian construction “Тебе сколько лет?” — “Мне 50”, implies by the grammatical cases that somebody went and gave the years to the speaker. I.e., the question can be interpreted as “How many years (were given to) you?” and the answer “I (was given) 50”. If so, Russians also “have” their years.

S’il vous plaît

silver plate / s’il vous plaît / please

I always assumed that the use of “silver plate” in Nanny Ogg’s “fake foreign” was Terry Pratchett’s invention. I was quite surprised to find it listed as one of “American fighting words and phrases”. In the same capacity of course — as a way to remember how to say “please”, “s’il vous plaît”, in French. Maybe it is more widely used than I thought.

While we are on the subject, did you know that “Yellow blue vase” sounds like a very polite and formal (and not very well pronounced) “I love you” in Russian? If you didn’t, let it be your daily bit of useless knowledge.

Continuing with free associations: in a Russian folk tale there is an episode where a silver plate (saucer, to be more precise) and an apple were used for divination. This explains the weird writing on the sketch.

I am not sure whether all the above will help me to remember the spelling of s’il vous plaît, but silver plate is now etched in my memory.

Numbers

vingt, dix, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt dix / twenty, ten, eighty, ninety

I must admit that numbers are not my strongest point in any language. That is, while being perfectly happy operating with figures, I have certain difficulty in writing numbers down as words. That applies to both cardinal and ordinal numbers, and my troubles start already in Russian. I am happy to write 1916 but ask me to write it as words and that will definitely give me a pause (is it “тысяча” or “одна тысяча”, “девятсот” or “девятьсот”?). I will figure it out eventually, of course, but the pause will be there.

English and Spanish numbers both come with their own sets of pauses to bestow on me.

Now, we only just started with numbers, but I must say it already looks like French takes the macaron biscuit. I mean, eighty is “quatre-vingts”, which is “four (by) twenty” and ninety — “quatre vingt dix”, i.e. “four (by) twenty (plus) ten”.

I mean, wha’?

In other news, our French class keeps growing, so much so that I found “my” corner place in the second (and last) row occupied when I entered the class today. So I had to sit in the first row. That, in turn, made further sketching of my classmates’ ears impossible. Maybe I should come earlier tomorrow, sit in my usual spot and glare at anybody who dares to approach.

Food

formule de jour /daily special

We spoke about food today (and many other things). To me, “formule de jour”, “formula of the day” is reminiscent of an alchemy labs with a tangle of glass vessels and crucibles all joined by transparent tubes with green liquid running through them.

While meaning simply “daily special”.

Beautiful language. Bit crazy though.

Trois chats mignons

trois chats mignons / three cute cats

Dans le train

 dans le train / les passagers / la destination

Today we listened to a short conversation which was happening between a few people on a train. One of them was supposedly a Russian guy. He spoke with an actual growl to his voice. Seems like some people still think that not only bears roam the streets of Moscow — they actually believe that said bears are breeding with Muscovites.

Second observation — just as I found it curious and a bit embarrassing that the the dialogues in my “Spanish for beginners” books were concentrating on appearances (“how is the new girl? she is short and ugly and has black hair”), in French for beginners I find it curious and amusing that during the casual introductions people give each other their ages almost first thing. I mean like “Here is my seat number four, oh, hello there, nice to meet you, I am Laura and I am 23 years old”.

It is rather reminiscent of this passage from Jerome K Jerome on the subject of learning French — in school, in his case:

... the importance attached by the French nation to pens, ink, and paper. “Have you pens, ink, and paper?” is the first question asked by one Frenchman of another on their meeting. The other fellow has not any of them, as a rule, but says that the uncle of his brother has got them all three. The first fellow doesn’t appear to care a hang about the uncle of the other fellow’s brother; what he wants to know now is, has the neighbor of the other fellow’s mother got ’em? “The neighbor of my mother has no pens, no ink, and no paper,” replies the other man, beginning to get wild. “Has the child of thy female gardener some pens, some ink, or some paper?” He has him there. After worrying enough about these wretched inks, pens, and paper to make everybody miserable, it turns out that the child of his own female gardener hasn’t any. Such a discovery would shut up any one but a French exercise man. It has no effect at all, though, on this shameless creature. He never thinks of apologizing, but says his aunt has some mustard.

Arguably, learning someone’s age is is more useful than knowing if they have ink, so there was some progress made since Jerome’s times.

Écoute!

Écoute! / une oreille (Listen / an ear)

Don’t know about you, but I tend to switch off almost completely very soon after our class enters into repetitive phase — i.e. the same grammar construct or a pronunciation point is being worked on for a while.

Not even the obvious approach of “my turn” can quite pull my attention back. Instead, I was concentrating on drawing ears of my classmates. They are surprisingly difficult to draw, once you are past “just a loop” stage.

The first one

This year I have started with French lessons. To make me remember better and to make my classes more fun I will try to do a sketch in each class and put it here. There are four lessons per week till January. Let’s see how long I will last :)
And, appropriately, here is my attempt at The Gallic Shrug:

I dunno

Funny that English “I don’t know”, French “Je ne sais pas”, Spanish “No lo sé” and even Russian «Я не знаю», all can be said using exactly the same cadence.