It is

"Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

well-known from my L103 class that Turkish and Amharic supposedly aren't related, though it is no longer clear which languages they are related to. However, I have found lots of words in the two languages which sound alike and mean the same thing in only two months of hearing them spoken in two local restaurants. The similarities first caught my attention during an argument at the Turkish restaurant in which the owner kept saying "sought." The next day I heard it at the Ethiopian restaurant I always eat at, so I asked the waitress what it meant. The next time I ate at the Turkish restaurant, I asked the waitress what it meant, and would you believe it, it meant the same thing! The next day I realized I should write it down so I wouldn't forget it, and after that I made notes of all the similar words I learned from the waitresses at the two restaurants.

The informant sessions took place three times a week for each restaurant around meal times. Whenever the waitress came near my table, I asked her how she would say two or three really simple

"Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time." --George du Maurier

words, like the ones we were taught how to teach second-graders how to spell. (They had a fancy name in L103 class, but I don't remember it.) The Turkish waitress would even write them down for me when the owner wasn't looking, because he would yell at her that he was running a restaurant, not a school. However, when I asked the Ethiopian waitress to write down the words she had told me, all she did was doodle. After that I wrote down what they sounded like and took them to my sour old AI, Mr. Thompson, who refused at first to transcribe them for me. "Do your own damn work! I swear, the reason they don't have an honor code here is so the students can turn in their homework." I then asked him when he switched from coffee to whiskey in the mornings before office hours, and did the administration know. He then agreed to transcribe the Amharic words for me. I must have done a good job because he was smiling by the time he finished and urged me to publish my results in your journal. "Publish and perish, I always say," he told me, and I said, "At least I'll get published," which for some reason made him really mad, but he always was a jerk in class.

The words are listed in the table I made below, with the English

"Language was conceived in sin, and science is its redemption." --W. V. Quine

meaning on the right like we were taught in L103. As you can see, all of them are really simple words any second-grader would know, which is what makes two languages related. In case you're not familiar with Amharic, the dot under the t means it's a sympathetic consonant, which is really funny because when I first heard it I thought the waitress was irritated with me. In conclusion, I hoped to have more words to share, but my research ended when my funding was cut, though Daddy promises to restore it if my grades improve.

Amharic	Turkish	English
säat	sa'at	look
sämmi		hear
	ayn	eye
	göt	but
		meet
sälam	selam	high
	nefes	wind
tarik	tarih	tail
	vâris	air
hisab	hesap	bill
hakim	hekim	doctor
äzziya	oraya	their
wädä	dahi	two
		sail
waqt	vaqit	time
bärät		pen
maryam	mirim	marry
zämän	zaman	period

	Up the Mind's Nose; With the Mind's Finger--Claude Searsplainpockets
	Los Eres y el Erre--Trey Jones
	SpecGram Vol CXLIX, No 4 Contents