Friday Fun Facts

Fact #1: Yesterday I had sent an email to Roland about how he references that the town of Bethlehem's name ("Beth Lechem") means "House of Bread". Two of our Arab speakers argued that the name really meant "House of Meat". Upon looking at the page myself I saw that he prefaced it saying that "House of Bread" was the Hebrew translation of the name. However, I did know the languages shared some similarities, so I wanted to see what he had to say.

Das Problem lässt sich leicht lösen:
Beit Lechem auf Hebräisch heißt "Haus des Brotes"
Beit Lahm auf Arabisch heißt "Haus des Fleisches"
Das erklärt sich dadurch, dass im Alt-Semitischen, von dem sowohl Hebräisch als auch Arabisch abstammen, die Wurzel "l-h.-m "Grundnahrungsmittel" bedeutet.
Für Ackerbauern, wie die Hebräer, ist das dann das Brot, für Nomaden, wie die Araber, ist das dann das Fleisch.
Im Altsüdarabischen, wo die Leute an der Küste wohnen, bedeutet l-h.-m übrigens "Fisch"!
Also: Alle haben Recht.

For those of you who don't read German, it says in Hebrew House of Bread, in Arab (Beth Lahm) it means House of Meat. Arabic and Hebrew both have their origins in the language called Old Semetic where "l-h.-m" means a kind of food staple. For the people of the land, the Hebrews, it mean bread (a product of the grain they grew). For the Arabic-speaking Nomads it meant meat (from their herds). In ancient southern Arabia, for those living on the coast, it meant fish. So, everybody was right! (and you got a free linguistics lesson) We had fun talking about that in class today. And my teacher was asking me a lot of about the services at CT - I think she may stop by.

Fact #2:
If we got the dryer we wanted we would have to a) pay a fortune for it; decent ones are super pricey here, like 500 Euros (currently $730 with the exchange rate) and then b) we figure we'd have to pay a lot more for our energy bill every year - about 100 Euro extra per year ($146). We have a good energy rate with our company, but we're paying 19.66 cents (Euro) per kilowatt hour (that's $0.29). Crazy`. At least we can say that next year we're signing up for the package that says our energy is coming from 100% renewable resources (not nuclear, and not from Russia). Looks like we have to stick with the stupid drying rack situation. See the joy?

Tomorrow I'm meeting a friend from class, Claire, and we're going to scope out the other half of the Marburg Weihnachtsmarkt - as in, the huge section Stefan and I missed last Friday night when we thought there were only 6 stalls of holiday cheer. Check back tomorrow for a report on that, I biked by the other day and it looks like fun!