Sunday, December 18, 2011

Talking

What was I? I was definitely more like koshka Murka than all the lyudi, even though she was covered with fur, and lyudi had fur on their heads only. I was about the same size as Murka, and lyudi were way bigger, plus they walked upright, and Murka and I could only crawl about on fours.
Also, lyudi were constantly chattering, like ptizi. Murka remarked to me scornfully, "I can't imagine using so many sounds and taking so much time just to say, 'meow'." I totally agreed. Lyudi spent too much time talking and saying seemingly nothing, whenever they were together.And when they weren't talking, they listened to talking boxes. And babushka talked to herself as well! Jabber, jabber, jabber, all day long.
I was pretty sure I was closer related to Murka, that I was some kind of a hairless koshka. I couln'd possibly be related to those huge, blabbing creatures. Their language had way too many sounds for everything, in fact, it had more than one sound for the same thing! They used this many words just to say 'a table': stol, stolik, k stolu, za stolom, pod stolom, na stolye, nad stolom! That was insane. Even ptizi didn't do that.
Apparently, all that jabbering was called yazik (a language), and the shorter bits of it were called predlozheniya (sentences) made up of even smaller bits - slova (words). Yazik lyudey differed from yazik koshek. Murka's meow was quite different from slovo or even predlozheniye. Normally she didn't need to meow, she talked with her mind; meowing was like an exclamation, to emphasize something. She meowed mainly for the benefit of the large upright beings. They were obviously so used to chattering noisily that they were no longer able to hear the quiet conversation in one's mind or the heart. I realized soon enough that they couldn't hear me most of the time, and I had to shout to get their attention. And when I did get it, it was only partial. I had to scream until I was blue in the face, and then they had to go through a range of things in order to find the right one by elimination. They would check pyelyonku (the diaper), they would try giving me butilochku (the bottle), they would lift me up and rub my back, and so forth. All those motions they went through, instead of just listening to what I was saying. Murka just flicked her tail at that and said, "They are so dumb." I figured, I might as well learn to make a couple of those sounds lyudi used, so I could get what I wanted faster. So I learned to say "ba" for babushka, "boo" for butilochka and "ka" for kaka or going number 2. Murka didn't approve. I promised her I was never going to use anything else, or anything longer, so as not to get sucked in to that endless bla, bla, bla cycle.

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Vocabulary:
Lyudi - people
ptizi - birds
stol - table
stolik - cute, little table
k stolu - to a table
za stolom - at a table
pod stolom - under a table
na stolye - on the table
nad stolom - over the table

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