Sory Abowt That

As I mentioned in a recent post, we've been watching The Adventures of Tintin, a Canadian TV series from 1991. One of the joys of watching, besides the multifarious adventures, is the collection of assembled accents. Whenever an English character appears, he utters syllables that surely have never passed the lips of any citizen of the British Isles. However, Tintin's dulcet Canadian tones more than make up for other abuses. We don't often get the chance, in our neck of the woods, to hear a genuine Canadian accent, and Tintin's is a doozy.

What stands out, particularly, is his pronunciation of the word "sorry". I'm going to render it as "SORE-y", though it could also be spelled "sory". At one point he has to apologize profusely to a room of tourists. "SORE-y!" he exclaims. "Sory, everyone. Sory abowt that!"

Delightful, eh?

This started me thinking about how I pronounce "sorry". Although I've standardized a good deal throughout the years, I still carry some of the cadences of my Virginia childhood and my mother's Baton Rouge roots. When I need to apologize a la Tintin, I might say "SAH-ry uh-BAOUt THAt." (The small t at the end denotes not a dropped letter, but a closing without a distinct explosive sound.)

Darwin grew up in Los Angeles and can have a quick monotone West Coast delivery at times. My best approximation of his off-the-cuff apology ("Hey hon, say "Sorry about that", will you?") is "Srry'bouthat".

Eleanor, age 10 in about 30 minutes, has appeared in the library complaining of growing pains. When asked to speak the phrase, she produces a perfect "Sorry about that" with no discernible accent. Is it a good blend of West and South? Do Darwin and I use better diction when speaking to the children? I don't  know, but her pronunciation needs no apology.

Language Acquisition: Spanish Edition

Some good friends of ours are hosting a 12-year-old orphan from Columbia for the summer, so we here in the Darwin clan have all been doing our parts at trying to pick up a little Spanish. I have no good explanation as to why I never picked up much of any Spanish before. Growing up in Los Angeles, with one of my parents of Mexican ancestry, I somehow managed to pick up less Spanish than MrsDarwin did growing up in Cincinnati. I think that because Spanish was so omnipresent in Southern California, learning it never seemed like the sort of exclusive knowledge that fascinated me. Being able to say "I speak Spanish" didn't so much say "intellectual" as "works in construction".

Learning a spoken, modern language which is so directly related to Latin, has been interesting. Reading through a grammar text (more familiar to my Wheelock-formed Latin background) while listening to Pimsleur conversational language records is an interesting contrast, and leaves we wondering what the differences are between how grammar is presented to natives in elementary and high school grammar versus in a formal language acquisition course for outsiders.

I'm curious if any of our readers know: Would one sit down and study the forms of first, second and third conjugation verbs as a native Spanish speaker? Are the conjugations even formally named except by non-native speakers? Or is it more common to simply talk about -ar, -er and -ir verbs and then irregular verbs?

I am rather charmed by having two version of the verb of being, one for permanent conditions and one for characteristics which are had at the moment. It seems like all sorts of fun could be had with those distinctions. For instance, while some might say, "El coche está sucio," in my case it would be more accurate to say that, "Mi coche es sucio," as my vehicle has become permanently scruffy.

Though perhaps what seems to the beginner to be cleverness would just come across as grammatical incompetence.

Distance and Truth

As I mentioned a while back, I got drawn into a group providing adult catechesis lectures at our parish. This evening I went down to hear another member of the group, a middle-aged immigrant from Lebanon, give a talk on commandments 5-10.

After several other topics under the heading of "Thou shalt not kill", he moved into the Church's teachings on just war, and put up the standard four bullets from the catechism which those familiar with online Catholic debates of the last eight years are so familiar with. Those sorts of topics always draw questions, and sure enough one woman raised her hand pretty quickly and asked, "So what should a Catholic soldier do, if he's in Iraq right now but he thinks that we hadn't tried everything, that war wasn't a last resort for us."

He launched into an explanation of how a soldier has certain duties to follow orders, but must do the right thing in each situation in which he finds himself, and how leaders of a country have a responsibility to make sure they do not send soldiers into a war without need. For many people this would have been a brief and perhaps somewhat awkward explanation. It is the natural human response of the unpracticed speaker to sound apologetic and qualified when addressing a topic on which he knows people hold strong feelings. But in this case, the explanation was long, fascinating, and intensely personal -- because he was talking about his experiences being drawn into the civil war in Lebanon: Becoming a soldier at the age of 13. Being wounded by a sniper's bullet at 14 and again by a mortar shell at 16. About people being stopped at roadblocks, walked around the corner, and shot. And about how -- as a battlescarred teenager he'd begun to study his faith for the first time.

All this personal history, relayed in the strongly accented and sometimes ungrammatical English of someone who grew up speaking French and Arabic, made the doctrinal points about casus belli and jus in bello come alive in a deeply compelling fashion. Much more so, I think, because of the language barrier. There's a pain, sometimes, in hearing truly harrowing experiences expressed too plainly. We need that slight layer of distance to allow us to listen and soak it all in without our minds wincing away and closing in on themselves.

The points about just war and just soldiering would not, I think, have sunk in if they'd come from somoene who'd been a civilian all his life. And at the same time, hearing of such harrowing experiences from a more fluent English speaker would, I think, have caused people to stop listening. It would have been too personal. Sometimes we need distance to see truth.

Linguistic Politics

It's fascinating the sorts of things a people's language can tell you about them. Some of these things are basic. For instance, though the Indo-European languages share words for a variety of animals and natural features, they lack a common word for ocean. The Indo-Europeans originated on the steppes of Eastern Europe, far from any sea.

I was listening to a recorded lecture on the fall of the Wiemar Republic yesterday, and the instructor pointed out that when we talk about a military overthrow of the legitimate government, we have two words we generally use: coup, which is French, and putsch which is German. We have no English word for it.

Makes you think.

Language can also be a key element of a nationalistic movement. Modern Greek is a very recently standardized language -- formulated from a combination of what was spoken around Athens in the mid 1800s and attempts to bring Classical Greek back into use. The purpose of the language standardization was very specifically to achieve a common Greek identity and culture with connections to its classical history.

A less formal but perhaps even more important process is going on in the Arab world, where the regional dialects of Arabic are gradually being replaced by Modern Standard Arabic, which has become the language of some pan Arab newspapers and TV channels. Until the advent of MSA Arabs from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Lebanon would actually have had a fair amount of difficulty understanding each other. And although theoretically Koranic Arabic was a language everyone was familiar with, Koranic Arabic is more often memorized than understood and spoken, perhaps along the lines of Latin's place in Europe circa 1800.

The Peripatetic School of Russian

I did indeed follow through with my intention of starting to learn a new language, and the language I eventually picked was Russian. The more I thought about it, Russian was the logical choice because I have a great fondness for Russian literature, and so I'd be much more likely to use a knowledge of Russian and keep it up. While Persian and Arabic strike me as interesting because I'm interested in Islam and the Middle East (and because I just find the Arabic script which both languages use attractive) but present rather less that I'd be actively interested in reading. (Though I did pick up a few books on Persian from the library and get through learning part of the alphabet.)

So I ordered a copy of the Penguin Russian Course by Nicholas Brown from Amazon, and from the library I picked up Pimsleur's Basic Russian at the library.

I've been progressing through both programs slowly. In the Penguin text, I've worked through the alphabet and some basic words, but am taking some time to be able to write reliably, due in part to the fact that handwritten Russian script is in a few cases drastically different from the printed alphabet. For example: the Russian "t" sound is represented by a letter that looks pretty much like an English "t" or Greek tao -- but the cursive version looks like an English cursive M. Almost makes me tempted to forget about cursive (as I long ago did in English) and just write the exercises as if they were typed. But some it seems like one ought to try to do the thing properly.

With the Pimsleur audio course, I've been extracting the lessons to my iPod and listening to them while taking my afternoon walk around the corporate campus. I'm now moderately proficient at saying things like "Excuse me", "Hello", "Goodbye", "Do you understand English?", "I don't understand Russian very well", "I'm American", etc. However it's been making me realize how essential spelling (and the instincts coming from knowing the phonetics of English, Latin and Greek) is to my language acquisition skills. In English, and to an extent in Latin or Greek, I can hear a word and pick it up pretty quickly because I'm fairly confident as to what phonetic sounds make it up. I know enough of those languages to know how a word is likely to be spelled -- and thus what phonetic sounds I am likely to be hearing.

However, I have no such instincts when it comes to Slavic languages as of yet, and so I find it very difficult to tell if what is being said and say it correctly. For instance, the word for "hello" is (spelled very roughly phonetically) edravstvoyte. However, to hear it (even with many, many repetitions) it was hard for me to tell if it ended in an "itche" or "oyte" kind of sound.

Clearly, we must originally learn language without giving any thought to spelling, but it seems that I at least have lost much of any ability to address things in that manner. I find it very hard to feel confident in using a word if I don't know for sure what phonetic sounds compose it, and in a langauge I'm not yet very familiar with, I can't feel confident in knowing the phonetic compostion without knowing the spelling.

So while I'm enjoying the walking and listening approach (and it assures that I get my daily dose of Russian) I'm finding that as of yet there is no replacement for book learning.

When Metaphors Outlive Reality

In an early morning meeting, one of my Indian-born coworkers complained in her Mumbai accent, "It's like a game of whack-a-mole. Every time you deal with one thing, something else pops up."

Whack-a-mole has become a standard metaphor, but I wonder how many people have ever actually seen the carnival game that it derives its name from. (Unless there's a computer version that I'm not aware of which keeps it in current. Wii mole, anyone?) Certainly, I've never seen a whack-a-mole game in person, and I'm guessing that it's not very common on the west coast of India either. However I've certainly made whack-a-mole analogies myself, despite never having experienced the game myself.

Some things seem to live on almost primarily as metaphors. A number of common metaphors center around arrows and archery, yet how many people (other than those of us who got the chance long ago at Boy Scout summer camp) have actually seen an archer fire an arrow?

I wonder how long a metaphor can live on in common usage after the reality it's based on has faded into obscurity.

Words Cannot Explain

I suspect that all of us have, at times, run into those whom words cannot describe, or at least, those who insist that words cannot describe them.

Are you liberal or conservative? No.

What kind of music/movies/books do you like? My tastes are really to eclectic to define.

Are you two dating? I think that phrase is very limiting. We're definately something, but dating is such an awkward term.

Indeed. Terms are awkward. A word or phrase is seldom comprehensive enough to describe the whole of something, and so one often must resort to describing it several times, in different ways, in order to get one's point across.

And yet, words -- however imperfect -- are how we convey meaning to our fellow men. To refuse to use them, or refuse to use them in common ways, eventually becomes a sort of linguistic anarchism.

One must agree that it is often silly to call the man a woman in her late twenties is romantically attached to her "boyfriend" -- a term perhaps better suited to the activities of high schoolers. And yet, rightly or wrongly, that is the most standard way to refer to such a connection.

Next to inapplicability, another objection often thrown at standard terms is that they are too ordinary to convey the amazing reality of one's life.

"We're not just 'going out'. It's so much deeper than that."

Indeed. Congratulations. But you see, the world is populated by people who imagine themselves to be so much deeper than that. They only look identical and trite in their relations because you are not they, and have no wish to be. A single word is used for all these relationships, not because they are all the same, but because it is necessary to have some term which captures the whole constellation of of such things in order to allow common conversation. Each snow flake is unique, yet even the Eskimos have a comparatively small number of words for snow.

The great time for this insistence that words cannot describe one's life seems to be high school and college. It's at that time when one feels oneself so very different from "all those normals". Over the following decade or two the insistence on uniqueness cools, not so much because all of those over thirty are reduced to clone status, but because one becomes aware that one is not the only person to be unique.

Evenutally, words have to suffice.

Diagramming and hamming

Postmodern Papist defends the diagramming of sentences:

Why is the study of grammar so important? It is because the rules of grammar, if not absolute and eternal, are nevertheless based upon the framework of reality--at least in so far as we understand reality. To be correct grammatically does not necessitate flawless understanding of reality, but real ignorance of and errors in grammar (not simply careless typos) will affect our understanding of reality. Grammar errors can mean errors in understanding.

...How does actual diagramming help? It trains the mind the recognize the parts of speech and other structures of language, making explicit and visual what is implicit and mental, and thus familiarizing the diagrammer with the structures of grammar, with the structures by which we understand reality. Knowing those structures well will help readers, especially in our hyper-visual age, to understand the meaning that is being expressed through language. It helps particularly with sentences written in less-than-familiar construction, such as "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York," a sentence a proficient diagrammer will see immediately as "The winter of our discontent is now made glorious summer by this sun of York."

Apropos of nothing, I was flipping through a cookbook this evening and came across the entry discussing a style of ham from Spain: jamon serrano, or mountain ham. In Spanish the adjective follows the noun, and I wondered idly if jamon serrano and serrano jamon had such disparate meanings as the corresponding English phrases. There's quite a difference between "mountain ham" and "ham mountain".