Camels, an undervalued castaway

Camel ( Catalan camell, French chameau ), both from Latin camēlus, from Ancient Greek κάμηλος (kamēlos), from Proto-Semitic *gamal-; compare Arabic جمل (jamal) and Hebrew גמל (gamal).

A starting point can be the maxim: "a camel is a horse designed by committee." 

which has been attributed to three sources (wikipedia:  Vogue magazine, July 1958, to Sir Alec Issigonis and also to professor Lester Hunt)


The story goes further on the wrong side with the image of the Camel on the 


A children favourite has been How the Camel Got His Hump by Rudyard Kipling. Collected in Just So Stories, 1902, illustrated by the author, and introduced by: "Now this is the second tale, and it tells how the camel got his big hump.

Penjat per eDewcate el 10/12/2010

When the animals began to work for Ma

My favourite, the Mongolian fable, where the camel lost the contest with the mouse:

A long, long time ago, the Great Borhan Khan invited all the animals to apply for the great honor of having a year named after themselves for their new calendar. 
"Hey Elder Brother Camel! Did you hear?" cried the mouse as he scurried up the tall legs and perched on the rearmost hump of his Bactrian friend.  "There is to be a new calendar, one which will repeat every twelve years. And each year will have as its totem one of us animals! What do you say Elder Brother Camel? Shall we put ourselves forth as representatives of our families?"

Based on a traditional Mongolian folktale from George Lane's Daily Life in Mongolia. A brief online version of the tale can be found here. Also, the open spaces of Mongolia can be read in the superb novel The naked name of love (by Sanjida O'Connel)


But in another version, Buddha felt sorry for the camel. If you look carefully at the camel, you will see that the Buddha has kept His word, because the camel has:

• the ears of the Mouse
• the stomach of the Cow
• the paws of the Tiger
• the nose of the Hare
• the body of the Dragon
• the eyes of the Snake
• the mane of the Horse
• the wool of the Sheep
• the hump of the Ape
• the head-crest of the Rooster
• the crooked back-legs of the Dog
• and the tail of the Pig.

As early as 1800 BC, trade routes from Asia and Africa crossed the Arabian Peninsula carrying spices, incense, gold, ivory, and silk on their way to Europe and the lands of the Fertile Crescent. Camels were used by the Nabateans in the first century BC, on their way from the Gulf of Aqaba to the trading capital of Petra in central Jordan. Camels were used by the Bedouin, whose warriors formed the nucleus of the Muslim armies that conquered the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the 7th century AD. War, trade, and civilization -- all riding on the back of a hump.

Try to answer these questions:
Question #1: The camel has played such an important role in Arab culture there are how many words for it in the Arab language?

Question #2: You can easily identify a dromedary camel if you remember that their single hump forms the letter "D" on its side. Can you remember what the two hump camel is called?

Question #3: The camel's eye is protected from sand by two rows of extra long eyelashes, one on the upper eyelid, and one on the lower eyelid. In addition to this, each eye also has a very thin third eyelid that moves in which direction?

Question #4: Although camels will normally select the freshest vegetation available, when food is scarce they will eat anything-- salty plants, dried plants, bones, fish, meat, leather, and even on occasion their owner's tent. What is the scientific term for an animal that will eat anything?

Question #5: In the wintertime, camels can gather enough moisture from the plants they eat to go as much as 50 days without water. In the summertime, how many days can a camel go without water?

Question #6: Camels are capable of losing safely how much of their body's weight in water?

Question #7: The term hydrophilicity, which describes the hemoglobins in a camel's red blood cells, means what?

Question #8: Camels are capable of drinking how many gallons / liters of water in 10 minutes?

Question #9: A camel keeps as cool as it can by resting when the weather is extremely hot. It will lay down in a shady place, if it can find one. What will a camel do if it cannot find a shady place to rest on a hot day?

Question #10: Although chicken is the most widely consumed domestic meat in Saudi Arabia today, camel meat could be the meat of the future, especially in health-conscious Western countries. Why is this?

The Camelidae family includes:

Genus Camelus:
Camelus dromedarius (dromedary, one-hump camel)
Camelus bactrianus (Bactrian camel, two-hump camel)
Genus Lama:
Lama glama (llama)
Lama guanicoe (guanaco)
Lama pacos (alpaca)
Genus Vicugna:
Vicugna vicugna (vicugna)

LRRH (Ladle rat rotten hut vs little red riding hood)

The Little Girl and the Wolf

Story tellers may: 

• shorten the story
• tell it in a different style of language
• leave out the bloodthirsty bits
• shift the setting/timeline
• change the characters behaviour 

The story-telling needs a textual time background

• Once upon a time/ Long time ago....
• One day she set out....
• Then, ...//After that ...
• afterwards, // Later on
• When somebody did sth, ...
• Suddenly ...
• As time went by, 
• ... lived happily ever after.

Here you will find some variations to our fab fairy fable. 'Nuff said!

1. The latest I read, Roal Dahl's Perverting Rhymes chapter 5 (listen -or read- to it here, in the Poetry archive). He made up the classic tale. The wolf enters the grandmother's house and devours her before putting on her clothes in order to eat Little Red Riding Hood next. Riding Hood is not disturbed however, and calmly acts: 

"The small girl smiles/Her eyelid flickers/She whips a pistol from her knickers/She aims it at the creature's head and BANG! BANG! BANG! she shoots him ... dead.") 

2. LRRH by James Thurber (1939)One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.
When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.
(Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.)


Although I prefer the short "streetwise" version I read somewhere, some decades ago. Later on, I learned it was really just an earthy extrapolation of a retelling by famed humorist James Thurber glued above. Here is the "urban" version ending:

"Aha! Little Red Riding Hood!" cried the Wolf, happening upon the girl in the woods. "Now I'm going to take off your little red cape, lift up your little red skirt, pull down your little red underwear and burst your little brains out!" [We used to speak more direct language.]"Oh no you're not, Mr. Wolf!" the smirking Red Riding Hood replied, slowly pulling a gun out of her basket and pointing it at the wolf. "You're going to eat me - just like it says in the book!"

for a Politically correct version, read here)

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut  (click to Listen)
and the dangers of Spanglish intonation..
The story of Little Red Riding Hood as you've never heard it told before. Sit back and enjoy this story as told by master story teller, Paul Lantz in a way that will captivate kids from 2 to 102.

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived with her mother in a little cottage...

Since I know the story my brain almost automatically interprets the "nonsense words" as the "correct" ones - at points it just sounds like a very strange accent of English. But if you try....

Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage,... 

wikipedia

The History of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

As printed in The Next Whole Earth Catalog (circa 1980)

"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" is often attributed to Anonymous, but it was actually written by H. L. Chase. He was a professor of French at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, retired in 1965, and now is living in Cincinnati. He is in his eighties. I talked to him by phone about the story of the story.

"I wrote it about 1940. It was going to be part of a little article I was writing. It was in the days of rationing during the war and I thought about what would happen if we had to ration language. If our vocabulary were cut in half, we'd have to get along with other words. Consequently, I thought I'd see how you'd get along with the other half. I've never written that article, but I've always thought of doing it.

"I taught French, and I used the story in my class to show the importance of intonation in learning a foreign language. You see, if you take these English words and put them in columns like a spelling book and just read them, they have no meaning. However, if you read them with the proper intonation, the meaning appears for certain people. For other people the meaning never does appear.

"I never submitted it to anybody, but it got spread some way or other. It's one of those things that got completely out of control. I showed it to a few friends and to a book salesman who came to see me. He liked the thing because it had to do with words. I think I may have given him a copy, and he must have given it to someone else. It first appeared in print in the Merriam Company's magazine Word Study. I think it got in Stars and Stripes (U.S. Army newspaper) because I heard from people in Baghdad, Sweden, all over the world. Sports Illustrated found it in another publication and gave me $1000 for it. Arthur Godfrey found it in Sports Illustrated, and he broadcast it and very generously told any readers that wanted a copy they could have one by sending me postage. To my surprise, I mailed about five thousand of them. After that episode, Prentice Hall asked me to write a series of stories for a book, which I did. (Anguish Languish was published by Prentice Hall in 1955.)

"The book sold fairly well for that sort of thing. It went through four printings I think, maybe 14,000 copies total.

"It's used now a good deal in textbooks to demonstrate the phonetic structures of English. The book has been used by some psychologist to determine the ability of people to understand sound, to study the limit of distortion that can be comprehended. That varies from person to person.

"People who like it best are language people, teachers, lawyers, and doctors. That's almost all the people who are interested in it. And children, strange to say. I've had a lot of letters from them."

I asked him if it bothered him that it is often printed without his name. He said, "Well, it doesn't bother me, but it's just that if I had a cent for every Xerox copy, I'd be much better off because I know it's been copied by the thousands."

The book, Anguish Languish, is out of print and very hard to find. Chase himself only has one copy. Dover or somebody should reprint it.

-Anne Herbert