Saturday, July 16, 2016

Have you ever seen a "mouse's daughter-in-law"?

One of my problems is that I am easily distracted.

I am out on my patio reading about quantifiers and determiners when I see a roly-poly crawling toward me. Then suddenly I want to learn about roly-polies, which are also called "pill millipedes" or "pill bugs." I assume they are called "pill bugs" because, when one is disturbed, it rolls up into a little ball that looks like a pill. By the way, do not eat a pill bug, because, according to Wikipedia, they exude a noxious liquid that can be both caustic and toxic. In other words, they do not taste good.

Anyway, there are only two orders of roly-poly still living, Glomeris marginata and Armadillidium vugare, but, believe it or not, all together there are about 550 species: about 450 of the order Glomeris marginata and about 100 of the order of Armadillidium vugare. I am pretty sure the roly-poly I saw was of the order Glomeris marginata, but I was unable to determine the species, or sex. By the way, Wikipedia does not explain how they reproduce.

Roly-polies are "detrivorous," which means they eat decomposing plant matter, so unless you are saving your decomposing plant matter, I see no reason to consider them as pests. So, let's just live and let live.

By the way, I came out onto the patio to try to figure out a better way to explain the combination 之於 (지어) to learners of Classical Chinese. I was hoping to explain it in terms of the Korean language, but, unfortunately, I got distracted by the adverb 盡 (진) in one of the example sentences, which made me think of the difference between 모두 and 모든.

The Korean word 모두 is an adverb meaning "in all cases," but many Koreans misuse it as a noun. 모든, on the other hand, means "all" and is listed as a 관사, which generally translates as "an article." But I had known "all" to be a "quantifier," so I looked it up to discover it is listed as a "determiner." I was reading about the difference between a quantifier and a determiner when I saw the roly-poly.

The Korean word for pill bug is 쥐며느리, which literally translates as "mouse's (쥐) daughter-in-law (며느리)." It is also called 공벌레, which means "ball (공) bug (벌레)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillidiidae

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