William Wright's May 22 post "What is even more amazing than a talking dog?" included a picture of a worksheet where you have to do sums to solve an anagram, the answer being "a spelling bee."
The red and green boxes are my own addition. I first noticed that the second column of letters -- ABIL -- suggested the French word for "bee," abeille. Then I noticed that the missing letters are right there to the right, and that if you take all the letters in the green box, you can spell abeilles, "bees."
What about the remaining letters, in the red box? The only phonotactically plausible way of stringing them together is peng. My first thought was that this might be an abbreviation for pengolodh, "lore master," an Elvish word which has come up on William's blog before. Then I realized that it was awfully close to the Mandarin for "bee" (or "bees," as Chinese nouns are not marked for number) which is transliterated feng. Linguistically, it's usually a fairly safe bet that any word with /f/ evolved from an older form with /p/, and such proves to be the case here as well. The Old Chinese for "bee" began with a /p/ sound, and this is still preserved in some non-Mandarin dialects. Unfortunately, the vowel has changed, too, so no modern or historical dialect of Chinese actually has peng for "bee." Still, it certainly suggests that Chinese word in its various forms.
In writing this post, I also noticed for the first time that William's son actually misspelled spelling on the worksheet as speiling. According to Google Translate, that's the Norwegian word for "mirroring." Not sure if that means anything. My first thought in connection with a "mirrored bee" was Thérèse de Lisieux, whose autobiography I recently bought and whose name contains a mirrored deseret.
1 comment:
Looking Glass is another way of saying mirror, and that has come up a bit in the form of Alice walking through one.
Speil in German means prick, skewer, splinter, etc. I actually first thought of German because of Spiel, with the "ie", which means play, game, since that has come up in my German words, but this is "ei".
A bee could definitely prick someone, and if its stinger was big enough, skewer them. In Words of the Faithful, Deseret-Izilba was known for her sword, which she skewered a few folks with, and which she drew out of beeswax like Arthur pulling Excalibur out of Stone.
"Izilba walked to the cube, ran her hands over the bee's wax. . . her hands grasped the sword's hilt, and she pulled it from the wax with ease, and the sword sang as it came forth, laughing that it's restful incarceration had come to an end, and the evil of this new day would by its steel be stung, shivered, and sliced"
We've compared the Word and Stories to a Sword, so could be a link there with Spell/Speil.
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