"Sasupai, why do we have to go to a 'Christian' restaurant? What does that mean anyway? Isn’t it kind of weird to divide restaurants by religions?"

Welcome to Goa, the smallest of the 28 states and 7 territories that comprise India. Located on the mid-southwestern coast of the sub-continent; today it is primarily known for its gorgeous beaches, psychedelic trance music and, increasingly (especially internationally), its cuisine.

The legacies of having been a Catholic Portuguese colony for nearly 500 years - up until 1961 - linger on in obvious and subtle ways: architecture, food, names of people, names of places, and a single yet divided language – called Konkani in Roman script and  कोंकणी in Devanagari script.

It turns out that restaurants are not the only things divided by religion.

At least with restaurants, a person can have a bit of variety. You can go to a Hindu restaurant one night and order vegetarian dishes, like dahl (lentils) or aloo gobi (cauliflower and potatoes). Another night why not try mutton biryani (biryani comes from Persian word beryā(n) (بریان) which means "fried" or "roasted" and is a saffron rice dish to which many different ingredients can be added) at a Muslim restaurant? Though admittedly there are few Muslims in the area. But if you're looking for the spicy and unapologetically pork-laden sorpotel/sarapatel, the eating establishment will have to be Christian.

When it comes to the local language, Konkani, things get more complicated. Native Konkani speakers primarily use one of two different scripts to write the language: Roman and Devanagari.

And a person's script use, like the food, is generally a question of religious culture. If you write the language in Roman script, you are probably Christian; if you write the language in Devanagari, you’re most likely Hindu or Muslim. The school you go to, the books you will be able to read, and the people with whom you can have a written correspondence – all will be inadvertently determined by, and limited to, your cultural-religious background.

In Christian and Muslim restaurants, if I want to, I can just order vegetarian dishes; if I don’t want to drink alcohol, I can order an alternative no matter which restaurant I’m in.

But in their learning institutions, there are no menus to provide choice. Although there are people who can read and write both scripts, most Konkani speakers cannot easily choose to read, write and study in Devanagari script one day and in Roman script the next…

Sasupai is the Konkani word for "father-in-law" in Roman script. The same word, same pronunciation exists in Devanagari as सासुपै.

My Konkani, Portuguese- and English-speaking sasupai passed away in 2008 and is sorely missed. Upon a visit to Goa without my father-in-law in 2009, my husband and I struck up a friendship with a Hindu Goan family we had met and ended up visiting their home.  The grandmother of the house was in her early 80s, approximately the same age of my father-in-law, who had lived in the area as a boy.

The family was delighted to learn that I’d called my father-in-law "sasupai" and insisted I call the grandmother, "sasumai" [ सासुमै in Devanagari ]– you guessed it, mother-in-law.

Gradually, it came to light that the grandmother had known my father-in-law’s family. However, although the two families had known each other intimately, and were native speakers of the same language, they would not have been able to attend the same schools or write letters to each other.

Although English was the language of the British colonists, this script phenomenon partway explains why English remains an official language in India today. Internationally and even within post-colonial India, for better or worse, English is hard to beat as a lingua franca.

My sasupai, a devote Catholic, was able to enjoy his sorpotel, Kingfisher beer and fenny (or feni, a Goan cashew liqueur)... all of which we found at various Christian restaurants between the lovely, if touristy, Goan beaches of Baga and Calangute. 

Regardless of what language, religion, or restaurants you prefer, the rich diversity of landscape and of cultures that a trip to Goa provides is well worth any confusion such diversity might occasionally create. Bon voyage!

As our translation and localization needs evolve, our CATs evolve too. The creators of Computer-Assisted Translation tools (CAT tools) keep releasing cool new updates, and we're exploring one such update today. It's always a nice turbocharge to learn and experiment with new ways to better organize terminology and content, if it means better ways to prevent avoidable detail errors or inconsistent use of words.

Lately, we've been experimenting with a new feature that slices up and analyzes large quantities of text (English text, in this case). Based on its findings, it guesses which words and phrases might be appropriate as glossary terms.

This would sound like an approximate use of semantic analysis, a process that allows users to discover trends or prioritize issues within text – the machine looks for structural patterns and relationships among words and phrases in a large document. Our software uses mathematical algorithms to produce a sortable list of words and phrases that the machine believes are important. The list also includes number of occurrences, a number to describe the term's likely relevance, and sentences that contain each term (to show context). Then, a human can go in and evaluate the system's suggestions, weeding out the silly ideas. For more details about how this works, here's a piece published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

This tool will help tremendously when we build glossaries for clients with specialized terminology... collections of terms we'd like to keep consistent into future projects. It's possible to build a list manually while working on a project, picking out phrases that are specialized industry terms, but for long-term clients with multiple projects, it helps to prepare a trove of glossary terms ahead of time. A computer can slice up and sort the document into phrases before we even approach it.

One creator of semantic analysis software, Janya, Inc., described semantic analysis as the extraction of "critical information from unstructured and semi-structured data to create actionable intelligence." (read more here) A company called Expert System has a similar development called Cogito, used to analyze news about terrorism (Lower on the page is an explanation of the data visualization).

You may have heard of SA's cousin, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – same concept but different purpose, because LSI is designed to improve data retrieval. The system analyzes a large collection of data to produce more intelligent search results or to group documents according to "conceptual similarity".

Both semantic analysis and semantic indexing have dozens of uses related to search engines, programming languages, plagiarism, Biblical texts, and even customer service (Intesa Sanpaolo, a financial services organization in Europe, is using this technology to look for different sentiments in customer satisfaction. Some places transcribe customer calls and identify keywords) Such technology might make our jobs disappear someday, but for the while, smart information design is giving us new uses and applications for the same knowledge. We're applying it to translation and software localization and it's doing us pretty good service.

Part 3 in the 3-part series “Chimps, Fingertips and Polyglottery: 3 Takes on Language Acquisition. Read part one here and part two here.

The following article is based on a conversation I had with polyglot and scholar, Alexander Arguelles, in the fall of 2011. I am indebted to Mr. Arguelles for his willingness to share with me his personal and professional perspective on language learning. Many thanks, Alexander!

Laura Nelson: “So, Mr. Arguelles, please tell me a few things about you that I won’t be able to find doing an Internet search.”

Alexander Arguelles: [chuckles] “Well, I don’t just live and breathe languages; I have a life outside of language study.”

You may, however, doubt his claim of having a life outside of language study if you take a look at the YouTube video, “A polyglot’s daily linguistic workout,” featuring Mr. Arguelles. How could he possibly dedicate time to any other activities given the rigorous, daily – if self-imposed – requirements of the scholarly pursuit of polyglottery? Not to mention holding down a full-time job as a language specialist at SEAMEO [Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization] – a teachers’ training institute in Singapore.

But neither his sincerity nor his accomplishments can be doubted. With a B.A. from Columbia and a PhD. from the University of Chicago, Prof. Arguelles has published 9 texts on language topics ranging from Old Norse sagas to Korean Zen legends to a French/German/English dictionary. His accessibility to both students and like-minded language aficionados is downright infectious, his unconventional and innovative language-learning techniques stimulating.

AA: “I’m married and have 2 sons. I swim and/or run every day. I play the flute. And the didgeridoo.” 

As our conversation was happening on Skype, Mr. Arguelles was generous enough to agree to play the didgeridoo for me. The sound quality was excellent and the music hauntingly beautiful. He adds, “And I’m a vegetarian.”

If polyglottery were a religious institution, Alexander Arguelles would surely be canonized in his own lifetime. I’m not sure if there is a saint of language study, but I am pretty sure that Hermes (the Greek god of languages) would have loved to have Arguelles as an assistant!

But what IS polyglottery anyway?

Polyglottery is considered a misspelled word by my version of Microsoft Word, but Word has “no spelling suggestions”.  Yahoo’s spell checker also considers the word a misspelling, but at least offers me what it thinks are useful suggestions: polygraphs, polygamous, polygonal, polymerization, or polynucleotide, perhaps? On the iPhone, English, Italian and Spanish language spell-checkers may be at a loss (“no replacements found”), but the French version proposes two: polyglotte and polyglottes. Now we’re getting somewhere!

I asked Arguelles, the polyglot who after all coined the term, to define it in relation to three other terms: multilingualism, polyglotism and polyliteracy.

AA: “Polyglottery is the passionate study of languages, for the love of language study; polyliteracy is scholarly language knowledge one develops through conscious study, especially through reading. Multilingualism can be defined as the state of acquiring multiple languages as a natural condition, of exposure in childhood. Polyglotism would be perhaps the broadest term, and can be defined as knowing multiple languages, no matter the means by which they were acquired.”

Merriam-Webster defines polyglotism as “the use of many languages: the ability to speak many languages” and cites 1882 as the year of its first known use.

How many languages does Prof. Arguelles know? This is a question he “dreads” according to his website (2), which is dedicated to helping others in their pursuit of polyglottery. A native English speaker, he studied French, German, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit at Columbia University. At the University of Chicago, he studied Old Norse.

But a look at the list of languages Arguelles is able to read gives us a partial answer: a vast array of European languages, modern and ancient, and I’m including Esperanto and Afrikaans; Arabic; Korean; Persian; Hindi; Sanskrit.

Inspiring or depressing? I haven’t decided yet...

I asked Arguelles if he felt help from new technological resources would herald a new age of accomplished polyglots. Can internet-based language-learning programs like Livemocha.com or language apps like Lexicon improve language learning?

AA: “We’ll need to wait and see.”

I gleaned from Arguelles that the tools themselves are important, but not as important as true desire and “serious, concentrated, focused study”. And resourcefulness. When he was studying Russian in St. Petersburg in 2001, listening materials for language learners were limited, so he came up with the idea of going to the library for the blind where they had just what he needed: books on tape.

Though new technologies may not change the number of polyliterates in the world, easier access to new technology resources should – hopefully! – make it easier for a larger percentage of citizens across the globe to acquire a working knowledge of multiple languages. And having some ability to understand, converse, read and write in several languages is itself a worthy pursuit. U.S. citizens need to be particularly pro-active in the pursuit of language study; we have been the butt of a linguistic joke for decades:

Q: What’s someone who knows 3 languages called?

A: Trilingual.

Q: What’s someone who knows 2 languages called?

A: Bilingual.

Q: What’s someone who knows 1 language called?

A: American.

This is a well-earned stereotype, I am sorry to confirm, but the combination of increasing global interdependence and decreasing U.S. world dominance may provide the impetus needed to make the above joke obsolete. Monolingual Americans will simply have to learn other languages to remain competitive.

Mr. Arguelles’ children (9 and 7) are half American, half Korean, and have obviously had early exposure to foreign languages that most Americans have not.

LN: “You are American and your wife is Korean, so I assume your children are at least bilingual. Are they learning other languages as well?”

AA: “Actually, yes, they are bilingual but not in the languages you would logically assume. I was working in Lebanon when my youngest was born and my oldest was 2, so their early schooling was in French and Arabic. I only speak French with them and their schooling here in Singapore is in English and Chinese. So, their English is slightly better than their French and they have a passive understanding of Korean as my wife mostly speaks English with them. They speak French between themselves, and have done Spanish immersion programs…”

Get all that?

LN: “And what do you and your wife speak to each other?”

AA: “Mostly English in the home these days, but still Korean when we are out alone, and we also revert to Korean when we don’t want the children to understand exactly what we’re talking about.”

Arguelles’ children may or may not follow in his footsteps and pursue polyglottery with the enthusiasm and determination of their father. Regardless, they will be well versed in multiple languages thanks to the framework he has provided, a particularly healthy position to be in early in the 21st century.

Inspiring or depressing? I’ve decided now: definitely inspiring, the way another’s passion, drive and success often are.  With a little diligence, the right tools, and guidance from experts in the field like Prof. Arguelles, the rest of us aspiring polyliterates or polyglots should be able to attain our own personal linguistic goals as well – however modest these may be…

For a closer look at Alexander Arguelles’ autodidactic technics (the Shadowing Technique and the Scriptorium Technique), please see http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/foreign_language_study.html.

(1)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Arguelles]

(2)[http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/index.html ] 

The word ‘etymology’, in its most common usage, means the origin of a word. A quick web search offers a more complete definition:

1. The origin and historical development of a linguistic form as shown by determining its basic elements, earliest known use, and changes in form and meaning, tracing its transmission from one language to another, identifying its cognates in other languages, and reconstructing its ancestral form where possible.
2. The branch of linguistics that deals with etymologies.

For an example of the first definition, let’s take the word ‘ready’. Online Etymology Dictionary, notes the following etymology for the word ‘ready’:

O.E. ræde, geræde, from P.Gmc. *garaidijaz "arranged" (cf. O.Fris. rede, M.Du. gereit, O.H.G. reiti, M.H.G. bereite, Ger. bereit, O.N. greiðr "ready, plain," Goth.garaiþs "ordered, arranged"), from PIE base *reidh-. Lengthened in M.E. by change of ending.

If we were to translate the above abbreviations into more basic English, they would tell us that the origins of ‘ready’ are Germanic as opposed to Latin or Greek, and they include some fairly logical linguistic transformations both in meaning – e.g. ‘arranged’, ‘ordered’, ‘ready’, ‘plain’ – and in phonemic changes, for example, the fact that the letters ‘r’ and ‘d’ appear consistently throughout different forms.

But what about the word ‘etymology’ itself? What is its etymology?

Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language entry states the following:

L. etymologia, from Gk. etymologia, equivalent to etymology(os) studying the true meanings and values of words; etymo “true”, logos, “word”.

A logical derivation and explanation, and this time the roots are Greek. So does Modern Greek use a form of etymo? The answer is yes, but its meaning – not surprisingly – has evolved. It now means ‘ready’. Here are a few examples of the Modern Greek sentences followed by the English translation:

The etymology of ‘ready’ includes the concept of ‘ordered’, while the Greek usage of etymo is now ‘ready’. The parts have shifted like musical chairs.

Every so often, we get requests for the translation and localization of material into Thai – a script language that uses Arabic numerals. I'm a relative n00b at Glyph, and while it's no surprise that most of these documents contain dates, it was surprising to see a range of years in the 26th century. What?

Thai dates follow the usual Gregorian calendar (same references to the usual months), but the years are numbered according to the Buddhist calendar as Y + 543 years to mark the estimated birth of the Buddha in 543 B.C. That would put the year 2012 at 2555 in Thai translations, well past any settings of sci-fi movies such as Blade Runner or Back to the Future II.

References to year are often made in both Western calendar years and Buddhist Era years (numerous references on page 4 of this article about Thai cremation volumes, for example, put the latter in brackets). Blade Runner, in 2019, would have been 2562.

As a bilingual person, I've had moments in which I've had to switch to the other language in order to have more appropriate words for the circumstances. "Oh, you know, it's called ________ but there's no English translation..." (see here for some untranslatables from different cultures)

There seems to be a varying distribution of words per subject, across different languages. (Also related to word populations, do more frequently-used words tend to be shorter?) There are many more dedicated words in Vietnamese to describe tastes, smells, and the way different nouns are carried, while there seem to be vastly more English words dedicated to medical conditions and legal processes. One of my college professors once observed that during periods of extreme excitement or extreme sadness, her bilingual students tended to gravitate toward their non-English language to express those emotions.

I'm finding that my personality as a Vietnamese speaker is completely different from my personality as an English speaker. We seem to speak faster and louder and with higher pitch, and with many more hand gestures. I find that I'm more affectionate and tactile and stand closer to others. Vietnamese is very songlike (tonal) and has an aquatic flow of one-syllable words. As a linguistic result, I trip over fewer sentences but overrun them more frequently – while (personally) using a lot more onomatopoeia, silly words, falsetto, and a more nasally laugh.

Aside from the practicalities of looking good on a résumé, it turns out there are evolutionary benefits to bilingualism and multilingualism such as in preventing or slowing the onset of Alzheimer's, thanks to how well it exercises the brain's neural pathways (Read more about this news of a recent study released May 2011, or its abstract).

Ellen Bialystok, a research professor involved in the aforementioned study, points out in an interview that bilingualism provides skills for a person to better differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information. The system within a brain that enables bilingualism is also the system "what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them," she explains, although the benefit doesn't seem to apply to foreign language use that is only occasional.

And for many other reasons besides, bilingualism is good for child brain development. By the time most of us wish we had more languages under our belts, we've think we've bypassed the ideal age range for picking them up, even though some experts say there's no cutoff.

Many monolingual parents are taking measures anyway to prevent this regret for their children, and as a recent trend, many New York parents are hiring nannies who are then asked only to speak their native language on the job. Can these decisions have lasting impact? Children who stop speaking their native language early, such as by first or second grade, tend to lose their ability to speak it. The most pressing question for me is always to do with duty – how much duty do we have to preserve our cultural identities through language? Am I a more successful human being if I pass on my heritage to the next generation? I like to think of it as a gift I could someday give.

By now, quite a few of you are aware of our new shirts. You may have seen them on Glyph employees or Glyph friends and family. Or you may have gotten one in the mail.

Since the cat is out of the bag (so to speak), we thought we'd tell you a little bit about our new shirts.

Although maligned by grammar school teachers when used to start a sentence, the conjunction “and” is one of the most useful words in any language. Want to finish a list? Try “and.” Tired of using “also”? Try “and.” Want to connect grammatically coordinate words, phrases or clauses? Try “and.” 

The Ampersand (&) is a ligature of the letters of the Latin word “et” for “and” and is equally useful for scribes in a hurry.

We’ve taken this conjunction and painstakingly translated it into over 150 languages – from Afrikaans to Zulu, with Amharic, Inuktitut, Nyanja and Telugu thrown in for good measure.

Designed by Glyph and printed on a shirt made from organic cotton or organic cotton and recycled polyester.

Want one of our shirts? Keep an eye on our facebook and twitter for chances to get one of your very own!

The Grinch–that adorable, deplorable, despicable classic Christmas character. The very name screams grinchiness: greenish, grouchy, grumpy, grumbly, greedy–grrrr...

Dr. Seuss was a genius at dreaming up the perfect names for his children's book characters. But, did he really simply make up the word Grinch?

According to Etymonline.com, "Grinch" is defined as a "'spoilsport'; all usages trace to Dr. Seuss' 1957 book 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas.'"

Dictionary.com defines "grinch" as "a person or thing that spoils or dampens the pleasure of others" and dates its origin between 1965 and 1970, "from the Grinch, name of a character created by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)."

Indeed, the Grinch as we know him first appeared in the book "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" in 1957, followed, just under a decade later, by the animated film of the same name. However, the devoted Seuss fan would know that the word appears earlier in Seuss' 1953 book "Scrambled Eggs Super!," about Peter T. Hooper, a boy who collects eggs from a number of exotic birds to make scrambled eggs. One of these exotic birds is the "Beagle-Beaked-Bald-Headed Grinch," and he looks like a real sourpuss.

Scrambled Eggs Super - by Dr. Seuss (1 of 2) by MistyIsland1

Could one therefore not surmise that the idea of a grouchy Grinch had been festering in the back of Seuss' mind for some time, surfacing now and again in name or in likeness, as so many classic Seuss characters whose lineage can be traced back through Seuss' earlier works from his advertising and cartooning days, before taking their final and enduring forms? It would seem quite plausible.

But back to our Grinch. His name is seemingly endowed with a perfect phonemic-semantic harmony: the sound "gr" connoting the very meaning of the word "grinch" itself–semantically tainted by so many English words beginning with a similar sound and denoting a similar idea of unpleasantness.

The Seuss corpus contains scores of words invented in a similar fashion. It is no surprise, then, that reputable sources trace the word back to the very imagination of the good doctor himself. However, it is quite possible that Dr. Seuss was influenced by a very similar French term, "grincheux."

The adjective "grincheux" comes from a dialectal form of the term "grincer," to screech, grind or squeak, and can be translated into English as "grouchy" or "grumpy." In fact, the French version of Walt Disney's Snow White, used "Grincheux" to translate the name of the similarly-tempered dwarf – Grumpy. Snow White debuted in France in the spring of 1938, shortly after its late 1937 release in the American market, some twenty years before "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." This is the French version of "Heigh-Ho!"

Perhaps Seuss heard the word "grincheux" during the time he spent in Paris in the 1920s after dropping out of Oxford. Perhaps he came across it at some other point. Perhaps it is simply a chance lexical coincidence. We may never know for sure. All we do know is that the Grinch has joined the ranks of Dickens' Scrooge as one of the most beloved humbugs in American Christmas tradition.

Two of our downstairs neighbors at Europa came up the other day to investigate a weird, foul smell drifting down from our 2nd floor office.

Apparently, the smell had separated into different strata. The air was more foodlike at our 2nd-story altitude but much, much worse (like moldy mozzarella) below nose level in the downstairs lobby. And there were certain lobby areas that smelled far worse than others. Maybe it was something to do with vents and the natural variation of airflow vs. dead space in an indoor area.

Our neighbors originally suspected some kind of grease trap or sewage problem. I hadn't even considered that when they knocked on our door, it was because of the smell. I actually thought maybe Ninja (my friend who works downstairs) was here to introduce a new girlfriend. Or that he was just coming up to say hi.

No such luck. The first thing he said when I opened the door was, "It is RANK up here!"

"We're having a cheese party!–" 

"OK, no more cheese parties, Thuy."

I laughed, even though, fundamentally, it's not funny to the neighbor. L10n Tamer left the office momentarily for something, came back with a refreshed nose, and compared the return smell to getting punched in the face with a gym sock.

"Wanna come see it?"

Ninja nodded, I guess. They came in to witness the culprit, a 15-pound full-size wheel of Raclette cheese that Anagram Manager and Preying Semanticist had special-ordered for this cheese-melting party – also called a raclette. To give an idea of what we were up to, here's a demo from user TheThirdShift on YouTube: 

According to our Preying Semanticist, who lived in France for more than a decade, this feast is a classic winter tradition using a cheese from the Savoy region. The idea is to cut up this giant wheel to meltable size, lay pieces into small trays placed into a raclette grill...essentially a cheese broiler... The cheese turns into gooey/chewy goodness, you scrape it off to cover your potatoes or your French bread, and then it goes into your stomach. The cheese actually tastes very delicious, despite the pungent odor.

It took hours to air out the smell from the office, and the place still smells slightly of cheese. Maybe CAT Juggler timed his paternity leave to avoid this holiday party... He might have gotten wind of such holiday plans 10 months ago. 

We'll probably "faire une raclette" again (nearly three-quarters of the cheese wheel remains, despite lunch for more than 10 people).....but word is we'll be doing it outside on the patio.

At open studio during a recent Portland trip, I met an MFA candidate named Lindsay Williams whose art installation was practically magnetic.

You walk into her individual gallery space, and immediately you encounter a wall covered in rectangular pieces of what look like parchment paper. At first, I assumed that it was. It looks like they'd been baked until many of the edges turned wrinkly and golden. In front of this papered wall is a table covered in dusty Mason jars, a book of Syrian recipes, and a sheaf of family recipes. Attached to the table are lamps directed at the wall, to create a warm farmhouse glow.

(Images courtesy of Lindsay Williams)

This art installation was a radical expression of her family history. So when I asked her if these sheets were parchment paper, she said they were actually phyllo dough....as in the kind used to make baklava, the Middle-Eastern pastry delight.

I love baklava. I began to see layers of deconstructionist dessert, or edible wallpaper. Williams made me see reality in a radically different way, which I think is the primary litmus test for a successful art installation.

If you've never had baklava, you're missing out on these alternating layers of flaky, buttered phyllo and spiced chopped nuts, fused together with a syrupy honey glaze....and when cut properly, they become perfect rhombus-rows of brain-zapping mouthfeel.

I could spend forever daydreaming about texture. I was good friends with a pastry chef at one point, but we had only gotten as far as talking about cheesecake by the time both of us disappeared from each other's lives.

At least it isn't completely impossible to make, and there are good recipes out there. Baklava makers from there and yonder give some general information, as do independent pursuers of food history, and there's always Wikipedia... but when it comes to the history of this pastry, there's conflicting information because baklava has been attributed to many cultures. Baklava experienced many transformations as it became popular in the Middle East – different spice combinations, for one, and changing thickness of the dough. According to Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food, compiled here, there's an Azerbaijani version of baklava that uses a thicker dough. This iteration of baklava seems to predate the one with the flaky phyllo that we typically see, and this dough didn't quite flatten out until more than midway through the reign of the Ottoman Empire.

Alton Brown also tackles baklava in an episode of "Good Eats" (recipe here).