All the language and people I’m seeing and talking to in relation to Lithuania takes me back to my childhood with my grandma, and good memories...
These are the words I remember in Lithuanian (please excuse the atrocious spelling- I never learned to spell these words, most were from grandma's dinner table!):
Driskas= salt (This is the one I remember best-I said that a lot at the dinner table because I eat way too much salt, and was sometimes scolded for doing so!)
Chaltas vondanas= cold water
Achu= thank you
Zeplins= potato things with sausage in the middle. We didn’t really like them. I just learned they’re really called zeplini.
Oi oi, oi oi= oh boy! My dad said that, sometimes my grandma
Labas= my dad said that, to say hello
I have a good memory about a little song my grandma taught me once. I don’t know if I ever learned the song completely, but I remember “dentis ke vorgorni”, meaning “teeth like an organ”… the song was about a rabbit, and the song described its body, the ears, the teeth, …but I only remember that one phrase.
I remember the big zodynas book that my grandma used to have. It was a Richard Scarry picture dictionary. We used to read it for hours, reading the Lithuanian words. I don’t think I realized it was a children’s dictionary. I didn’t realize until I said the word zodynas to Asta (the Lithuanian girl who works in the office of my apartment complex), that zodynas means dictionary. I always thought it was the title of that book.
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I remember that long display case in grandma's dining room with Lithuanian treasures in it like decorative marble eggs. Were the wooden toys Lithuanian, she had these little toys that if you moved the toys just right the chickens would peck the ground or the bears would saw wood. Then there were the weird amber necklaces that I remember thinking looked like teeth (they had big rectangular pieces of amber) and who can forget the leather things that smelled like fish (from our relatives who visited from Lithuania). How sad that we lost so much of that Lithuanian culture that grandma tried so hard to share with us.
yeah, dad's cousin Bob Chestnut still paints Lithuanian eggs- he showed me how to do it. I wonder what happened to all that stuff. I saw the amber at home, but I wonder what happened to the rest...
I asked dad about the wooden toys, I remember those too! he wasn't sure, he thinks she got them from Lithuania, but that they're not "traditionally Lithuanian".
And that amber necklace you remember that looked like teeth- I think that was her prize necklace. When I went to the Lithuanian picnic this summer, someone brought up that necklace.... It was a big one!
salt = druska (like dr-oo-s-cka), unvaried in all dialects of lithuanian.
Cold water = šaltas vanduo (sh-aa-ltas van-d-oo-o), somewhere in lithuania could variate from šaltas unduo (sh-aa-ltas oo-nd-oo-o) to šalts vandou (sh-aa-lts van-d-o-oo). aa - like english word are. there're 4 sharp dialects in this small country plus subdialects.
Thank you = ačiū (ach-ee-oo).
Zeplins = cepelinas, pl. cepelinai (zepel-ee-nass, pl. zepel-ee-nai) - potato balls with meet (!) inside. very tasty, but not everyone can boil it well.
:)
Thank you anonymous! I just finished a 2 month course in Lithuanian, which I obviously had very little background in. I am very behind in postings, but it's been interesting, during my language learning, to come across VERY sporadic memories of the language my grandmother spoke and my dad probably used to understand.
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