some light questions

[cellio]

I learned today that there is a full-service gas station on my way to/from work. I didn't know we had any of those locally. It's been years (probably decades); what is the conventional tip?

As I pulled up to an intersction (all-way stop), someone from the cross street was backing through the intersection. After backing into the space in front of my car, he immediately popped into drive and went through the intersection. Whose turn was that, the cross-street or mine? :-)

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Why does Hebrew have two words for "open" that differ only (apparently) in what objects they take? It's peh-kuf-chet when talking about eyes and ears, and peh-taf-chet for anything else.

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

A1: Nothing.

A2: From the context, I get the impression that Other Guy was entering the intersection from your right. If he had been going forward, and you both arrived at the intersection at the same time, he would have had the right of way. I don't know (a) if his being in reverse changes anything or (b) if the basic regulation differs between MA where I learned it asnd PA where you are.

A3: Duh?

A4: Why? 'Cause it does. It can be argued that everything is an idiom: in Hebrew the notion of "open" is simply semantically different from "open-eyes/ears". Many Native American languages have separate genders for flat things, round things, tall skinny things, things that move, live animals, dead things, dangerous things, invisible things, and on and on. Some of these may be combined in odd ways: this is discussed in a recent popular book entitled (something like) "Women, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things". The point is that languages often represent very different ways of looking at the world.

[cigfran-cg.livejournal.com]

That's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (no "Other") by George Lakoff. The idea is not that women and fire are necessarily dangerous things, but that all three items share a grammatical category in a particular language.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it. Thanks.

You're entirely correct that grammatical genders (which, indeed, need not have anything at all to do with biological gender) often appear to be quite arbitrary, and all we can really do with the particular gender in Dyirbal that includes these categories is to describe it; it's futile to try to explain it, as it is to explain why (as Twain famously noted) in German, a table is feminine but a maiden is neuter.

Nevertheless, I think that at some level -- which may turn out to be simply morphological; I don't speak Dyirbal! -- I think one can argue that the Dyirbal-thinking mind sees some sort of connection between these categories, and it's intriguing to speculate as to what that is.

[cellio]

Yeah, Other Guy entered the intersection from my right, and then went through. There was someone on that same street but facing the correct direction. So I wondered whether he should go next (he's on the right) or I should because his street just had a turn, even if that didn't help him. This doesn't keep me up nights or anything; I just wondered how other people would answer. (Yes, "person on right wins ties" is the rule here in PA too.)

Thanks for the language info.