GeographEnunciation

When we were small and came up to ask our parents what a word meant or how it was spelled, they’d tell us to look it up.  My older sister would complain because if she didn’t know how it was spelled, she couldn’t look it up.

I recently had a friend share her young daughter’s attempts to write the grocery list, including such items as “hees” (cheese), “ckukees” (cookies), “seerel” (cereal), “peesu” (pizza), and “isckreem” (ice cream).  And she’s a young but native English-speaker.

Moving on to my patron:  English as at least a second language, he’d seen a show on the History Channel that was about [unintelligible] and Christian Orthodox churches.  I asked him to repeat his question.  This time I picked up that it was in South Africa.  Still couldn’t understand the word that he was presenting as the primary focus of his information search.  To me, it sounded like he said “afubya”.  I asked him to write down the word.  He admitted he wasn’t sure how it was spelled, writing “Athiubia”.  This did not ring any bells. 

Sticking to what we were sure of – the History Channel, Africa, and churches – I began to search the Internet with very little success.  Searching the History Channel site itself didn’t spit up anything the patron recognized, he didn’t recall exactly when he’d been watching this show, and general Google searches gave us all kinds of chaff.

As with, well, everyone ever, when experiencing communication difficulties, he repeated himself, with emphasis and volume.  Somehow, though, this actually worked as my brain churned along with its recognition process, finally lining up “Athiubia” with “Ethiopia”.  ‘Ethiopia “history channel”‘ led us to a video of Cities of the Underworld (Season 3, Episode 4) which was called Secret Holy Land. 

SECRET HOLY LAND (Ethiopia)

Ethiopia is home to some of the oldest settlements in the world. This cradle of mankind is a country born from legend and shrouded in mystery. An ancient home to both Jews and Muslims, Ethiopia is also the world’s second oldest Christian nation. But if you were a Christian during ancient times, and if you wanted to stay alive, the only place to practice your faith was underground. From underground engineering marvels to remote, cliff-hanging caves, Ethiopia’s isolated churches allowed Christianity to evolve in ways found nowhere else in the world. From tombs of vanished emperors and subterranean cathedrals where orthodox priests have been worshipping for thousands of years, to the buried Palace of the Queen of Sheba and the possible resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, clues to Ethiopia’s lost legends and tribes are littered right here…in the African underground.

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I gave him the search phrase and site URL so he could watch the online videos himself.

Hooray for connections finally figured out!

Conclusion: WIN

Tags: ethiopia "history channel" pronunciation spelling churches