Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Maybe it was the Basques

My friend Nancy called my attention to the fact that a jewelry store in Provo was robbed on Monday. In fact, it's the very same jewelry store where Jeremy and I got our engagement/wedding rings.

I read through the article and one part really caught my attention. It's the part where the men were "described as being about 5 feet 10 inches tall with olive complexions, and they spoke in a language the clerks didn't recognize." Now, I understand that the only witnesses were tied up and gagged at the time, but how obscure does a language have to be for you to not recognize it? I am honestly wondering. I am not poking fun here. I remember a few weeks ago at IKEA there was a lady in front of me in line speaking a language that I could not have placed on the globe to save my life. I could not have told you if it was a Romance language, or Germanic, or Slavic, or anything. I finally decided it was Basque so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore (Basque is famously a language isolate, meaning it doesn't seem to be related to any other language now extant on earth).

So maybe the robbers were Basque, too. Who knows? The bigger issue here is (as Jeremy pointed out) that the article ends with a police officer's assessment that the crime "does not sound random. This sounds like they planned it." Well, yeah.

Middle School

Brain dump re: diglossia