DABBLING IN DICTIONARIES

Occasionally I explore the volumes at my disposal, sometimes with a purpose in mind. And, as you perhaps know, I have a fondness for dictionaries. This quite probably started when my father gave me a dictionary of the English language, very likely because I kept mispronouncing many of the words I had learned from reading -- as a child I taught myself how to read in English, because we had vastly more books in that language in the house than Dutch, and I had already done every single Dutch book we had in the house including an Indonesian cookbook -- and I discovered the foreign language dictionaries on the bookshelves in the upstairs living room.

Come si dice "nasi goreng" in italiano?

Among my many dictionaries are a number which give the Chinese seal-script versions of the characters. Seal-script developed when they were still using a stylus to engave or carve the language on bamboo slats before the development of paper and flexible brushes, and often tends toward a stiffness and emblematic quality. It is still in limited use. Seals. Inscriptions. Also sometimes colophons, couplets, artistic calligraphies.


Two examples of my own calligraphy:

Not the classical language, nor any deeply meaningful statements. Merely the titles of two recent illustrations rendered in seal-script as a literary fancy for my own amusement.


Google images thinks there is a tripod there. There isn't. No tripod is mentioned at all. Google images is sometimes wonderful, sometimes entirely wrong.


Nasi goreng is probably "riso fritto in stile indonesiano".
In case you were wondering. Very possible.
It can be quite delicious.

Requires sambal.



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