Parse this!

I just came across an interesting Dutch clause while browsing through old emails, looking for something: dat Jan Marie Pieter Arabisch laat zien schrijven “that Jan let Marie see Pieter write Arabic”, but literally “that Jan Marie Pieter Arabic let see write”, with lots of nouns next to one another and where you have to figure out which noun fills which role in the sentence!

That works in German, too, though with a different order of verbs: “daß Jan Marie Pieter Arabisch schreiben sehen ließ”. I suppose internally you have to put all the nouns onto a stack in your brain and then pop them off as needed to fill the slots in the verbs as they arrive at the end of the sentence. In that sense, the German order might be a bit more “logical” than the Dutch, since the verbs arrive in such an order that the last noun to be pushed onto the stack is popped off each time a new verb comes along.

Zhuāng Zhōu Mèng Dié

For Stella’s birthday, she was given some new bedclothes for the two of us.

They had Chinese characters on them, and at first I feared they’d be random characters thrown together without regard for meaning, or badly drawn, or upside-down, as happens so often when they’re used for decoration.

But not only were they correct and and properly formed (and traditional characters, too, which I prefer), they even make sense. They say 莊周夢蝶, Zhuāng Zhōu Mèng Dié.

After a bit of Googling, I found that this appears to be a well-known phrase, referring to a story told by 莊子 Zhuāngzi where he dreamed he was a butterfly, then awakened wondering whether he was Zhuāng Zhōu (Zhuāngzi’s personal name) who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was dreaming that it was Zhuāng Zhōu. According to Wikipedia, “Zhuāng Zhōu Mèng Dié” is the usual title for a section of the chapter “On Arranging Things” of his eponymous work Zhuāngzi.

(Following a couple of links, it seems that Zhuāngzi is called Sōshi in Japanese, while his eponymous work, written with the same characters, is pronouned Sōji instead (the beginning consonant of the second syllable has “been muddied, become murky or unclear”, i.e. has been voiced). The slightly simplified Japanese spelling of both the book and the name is 荘子.)

You know you’ve stayed in a hotel too often when…

…they don’t ask you for your room number any more at breakfast.

The first time, last week, I had wondered whether each server thought another one had already asked me for my room number, then I wondered whether they had remembered from the day before.

But when I was eating breakfast there yesterday, nobody asked me for my room number, either, even though a server had come to my table to ask whether I wanted coffee or tea. And even though I (obviously?) had a different room from last week. (For that matter, a room I had never stayed in before.)

The only obvious conclusion is that they recognise me now and just look up my name in their list or something, rather than looking for me in the list by room number. (To make sure that the person chowing down on the food (a) has paid for a room in the first place and (b) has booked a rate including breakfast, I suppose.)

As for me, I only know one server’s name. I seem to see her more often than others, too, but that’s perhaps because I know her name and so she registers on my subconscious more than someone whose name I don’t know and might not connect as easily with a memory of having seen them before.