Language learning

Language learning

Serbian commentary 1 — The alphabets

July 30, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m trying to learn Serbian, which is a completely different animal from anything I’ve attempted before. It’s not at all like Romance languages such as Romanian and French. At least it is an animal, however. When I explained to my friend in the UK just how dissimilar Hungarian is to almost anything else, he said, so it’s like a fungus then. No, Serbian isn’t quite as off-the-wall as Hungarian.

I’m currently following a course of YouTube lessons. I like them because they explain the whats and hows and whys of Serbian, instead of just giving lists of vocabulary, which would be easily obtainable from a Google search.

First things first, the alphabets. Plural. Both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are in common use in Serbian. That sets it apart from the otherwise almost identical Croatian and Bosnian, where Cyrillic has largely been abandoned. It seems that the choice of alphabet in Serbia is sometimes politically motivated and emotionally charged. In that region, that’s hardly surprising I guess.

There are 30 letters in the Serbian alphabet. Using the Latin version, these are (in order):
A B V G D Đ E Ž Z I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S T Ć U F H C Č Dž Š
Crikey. Should I even bother buying a Serbian–English dictionary? I use physical paper dictionaries all the time, and I can look up a word in an average of around ten seconds, but alphabetical order (as I know it) is so hard-wired in my brain. There are, unsurprisingly, a few accented letters among that lot, but I’m used to seeing accented vowels. All the letters with accent marks in Serbian are consonants.

So how do you pronounce all those letters? Thankfully, Serbian is phonetic, unlike English which seems even more of a mess than it did before, now that I teach it. The Serbian letter C is pronounced “ts”, while Ć and Č are both similar to the English “ch” of chair, with Č being stronger. Ć and Č have their voiced counterparts Đ and Dž, which are both pronounced rather like “j” in “jump”, with Dž being stronger. Đ is sometimes written Dj, as in Djoković (or Đoković), which contains both the weak “j” and “ch” sounds. Then we have Š, which is like the “sh” sound in English, and Ž, which is like the “z” in “seizure”. Lj and Nj are pronounced similarly to the sounds in the middle of “million” and “onion” respectively. J on its own is pronounced just like the “y” in “yes”. Finally, there’s R, which is a really strong rolled sound. It is common for syllables in Serbian, and therefore whole words, to be completely devoid of vowels. An example is brz, which means fast, or srpski, meaning “Serbian”, which starts with five consonants in a row. But as far as I know, these vowel-free syllables all contain a syllabic rolled R.

An important thing to realise is that the digraphs Dž, Lj and Nj (and also Dj, if you write it like that) are each single letters. I noticed this in Serbia, when visiting a money changer, or menjačnica, like the one below. Notice that when the word menjačnica is written top to bottom, the NJ is written on one line, squashed together, like a simpler version of what happens with Chinese characters. You can also see a squashed NJ above the window, but that appears to be a stylistic choice. I’m guessing this is a fairly old photo and they just haven’t bothered with the decimal points; otherwise those exchange rates make no sense.

It isn’t that unusual for languages to have digraphs that are single letters; Hungarian even has a rare trigraph letter: Dzs. English could do something similar with, say, ch, sh, th and ng if it wanted. At least Serbian, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t like Welsh, where (for example) ng can be either one or two letters depending on the situation. That makes alphabetising a real pain.

For my own reference I’ll write out the Cyrillic version of the alphabet:
А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ Ш

Finally, here’s a picture I took from a market in Belgrade, where you can buy fruit and vegetables, cups of coffee, pasta, household bits and pieces, and, um, coc. However those C’s in COC are actually the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, which corresponds to Latin S. The word seems to mean “sauce”. You can tell it’s Cyrillic because the next word is MAPКET. Note that the text above the kiosk windows is Cyrillic written in italics. A lot of the Cyrillic letter forms completely change when italics are used, or in handwriting. For instance, I think the letter that looks a bit like a w with a bar above it is actually a T. Madness!

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Time for a trip?

July 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum and Dad have been back in New Zealand a week, but when I spoke to Mum on FaceTime she looked pretty much zombified. My Wellington-based cousin and her family had been staying there (a base for their skiing) so my parents weren’t really able to recover from their jet lag.

The last two weeks I’ve only just crept over the 20-hour mark and that’s likely to drop further as people take holidays. I’m tempted to go to Belgrade (again), and from there go on a very spectacular train journey to the seaside town of Bar in Montenegro. It would be an unforgettable experience I’m sure, and one that doesn’t come with a high price tag.

With my reduced workload I make the effort to study Romanian for an hour a day, usually first thing in the morning. It’s helping. There’s a site called Context Reverso, which gives words and phrases in context, with their translations, and I’m finding that invaluable. I’ve also started to learn Serbian, which is a totally different animal from anything I’ve attempted before, and I intend to write about that next time.

The weather here has been iffy of late. I wanted to have a good go at fishing at the weekend, but my attempt was severely curtailed. Fishing and lightning really don’t go well together. If I ever do catch a fish, I’ll be sure to post a photo here.

I watched the absorbing final round of the Open golf yesterday. Absorbing because the course, the wind and the final-day pressure made for a tough combination, even for the world’s top golfers. I was probably in the minority who didn’t want Tiger Woods to win, although I enjoyed seeing him out there. I was rooting for Tommy Fleetwood, ‘cos he’s cool, but when he dropped out of contention I was happy to see the uber-consistent Francesco Molinari claim victory in a ridiculously crowded field. The tournament was played at Carnoustie, famous for Jean van de Velde’s meltdown on the 72nd hole in 1999. The scenes, accompanied by Peter Alliss’s commentary, were quite extraordinary. The Frenchman won, but then he didn’t.

I’ve got back to playing online Scrabble again. Five games since Saturday; three losses. In game one I lost by just four points on a ridiculously blocked board, which I struggle with. I still think I made a tactical blunder towards the end. In the second game I learnt my lesson and sacrificed points to open the board up. This felt like a well-played game for me, and I won by 78. Game three: I got both blanks simultaneously, but plenty of crap to go with them. My solitary bingo wasn’t enough and I lost by 43. Game four: my opponent drew both blanks and very quickly made two bingos (they all play so damn fast, probably because the play much more than me, so a lot of the time they’re on auto-pilot). I made a bingo myself and started to close, but my opponent scored well on his final moves to beat me by 73. Game five: I was lucky to draw both blanks, eventually cruising to a 114-point win thanks to two bingos.

Family - International travel - Language learning

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 3

June 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Our first full day in Belgrade was Mum’s 69th birthday. We visited the impressive fortress, on the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. Outside, as part of the military museum, was an array of tanks and guns from various countries and eras. Given Belgrade’s recent bloody history, it seemed a fitting place to find things that go bang.

It soon became apparent what one of the major highlights of Belgrade would be for me: the Serbian language. As far as I know, all the countries of the former Yugoslavia speak very similar varieties of the same language, which I’ll call Serbian here, because Serbia is where I first encountered it. It has a little over 20 million native speakers, roughly the same number as Romanian. Serbian is written using both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, although there are significant differences between Serbian Cyrillic and Russian Cyrillic. For one, the Serbian variant makes use of the Latin letter J. It also has two letters, Љ and Њ, that are romanised as LJ and NJ respectively, and are equivalent to ll and ñ in Spanish, or lh and nh in Portuguese, or gli and gn in Italian. I was quickly able to read Cyrillic street and shop signs reasonably well, although actually speaking and understanding the language, which is very different from anything I’ve studied before, would take a huge effort. For a start, it has seven grammatical cases, leaving Romanian firmly in the shade.

After much angst, we did in the end find a good restaurant for celebrating Mum’s birthday. We all had something filling and pork-sausagey. We were getting accustomed to terrible service by now, but our waiter (an older bloke) was excellent. The next day we visited the nearby automobile museum, which was brilliant. It had shining examples of makes such the Aero, a Czech-manufactured car that I’d never heard of. We could have done without the yapping, pooing dog that was allowed to roam free the whole time we were there. Later that day a black cloud descended on us, as we worried how we would get back to Romania without a working phone that the bus company could use to contact us. We bought a sim card from the Serbian equivalent of a dairy, but I had no luck getting it to work. I had all kinds of fun and games trying to use Google translate to figure out the Serbian instructions. After dinner, which consisted of pizza slices from a kiosk and a wonderful chocolate dessert, we caught the second half of the thrilling 3-3 draw between Spain and Portugal, the match of the tournament so far.

Dad said he didn’t sleep a wink that night. He was worried that without a phone we’d never get back to Timișoara. He had visions of being stuck on the side of the road in the pouring rain, with the stress levels unbearably high. The next day was Saturday, the phone shops shut in the early afternoon, so we urgently needed a connection, for our sanity as much as anything. The lady at the first phone shop was breathtakingly unhelpful, but we had much better luck at the second shop and were soon up and running at very little expense. Having breathed a huge sigh of relief, we walked through the city, with the intention of visiting the national museum to give us all a better handle on the region’s troubled history. But it was closed, as it has been since 2003. We changed course and reached St Sava’s Temple, which we thought would be spectacular. And old. Instead we found a post-WW2 edifice that had ridiculous amounts of interior scaffolding to keep it from falling to pieces. When we got back to our apartment, we met the old man who gave us a bottle of Serbian schnapps that I’m now working my way through. He made it very clear that he didn’t like Tony Blair.

Language learning

Weird end to the week (part 1)

May 28, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a weird end to the week. On Thursday morning my Skype student cancelled 15 minutes before our lesson because she was about to go swimming “with the girls”, as she put it. I texted her to say that she should pay me for the lesson regardless, and she replied with a long rant, basically saying that I was a terrible teacher and she wanted nothing more to do with me. I then asked her how I could improve, saying that I’m still learning myself, but she said, “You’re the teacher! How can I show you how to teach!” Doamne. I hope I get the 200 euros she owes me, but other than that, I certainly want nothing more to do with her. I’d felt I’d done my best with her, so that exchange left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Yesterday Dad called me. Mum had gone to a funeral in Mosgiel; one of her many cousins had died from a slow-growing brain tumour at the age of 60. Apparently she held me as a toddler when we came to New Zealand the first time in 1982. This gave me a rare opportunity for me to ask Dad about life with Mum. Not much had changed. Dad said that one of these days, heaven forbid, Mum could find she has a tumour, and whatever Maureen from the golf club says or does would become irrelevant very quickly. As for me, I’d say my relationship with Mum has improved as a result of being 11,000 miles away. They’ll be here in just two weeks and I’m looking forward to that.

I played tennis today for the first time since December and I want to write about that but I’m going have to end this for now because my sinuses are killing me.

Language learning - Romania

Romanian commentary 11 – how many?

December 20, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Numbers. When you move to a new country, you really need to have numbers down pat in whatever language they speak. And it’s no good just learning them up to 10 or 20 or 100 or whatever your book or YouTube video goes up to. When you’re living in a new country, your accommodation costs are bound to run into the thousands, no matter what currency you’re dealing with. In some places even a chocolate bar will set you back a few grand. (I’ve figured out a way to help people remember the difference between hundred and thousand in English, by the way, even if they don’t have different-sized cats. Thousand, thanks to the long “ou” sound, is more drawn out when you say it.)

In French, you say four-twenties-ten-seven for 97. In German, you say seven-and-ninety. Romanian doesn’t have anything that off-the-wall, but it has its quirks nonetheless. Up to ten, Romanian numbers look pretty similar to those of other Romance languages. Of note (to me) are patru (4) and opt (8). The ‘c’ or ‘qu’ of Latin has morphed into, of all things, a ‘p’. Heaven knows why. You see the same phenomenon in other common words such as apă (water) and lapte (milk). Beyond ten, Romanian numbers diverge from their French and Italian counterparts, and they get long. The word for 15 is cincisprezece; 17 is șaptesprezece. They’re a mouthful to me, and clearly to many Romanians too – in informal speech the –sprezece ending becomes –șpe, hence cinșpe and șapteșpe.

Between twenty and one hundred, numbers are easy enough to form: 39 is treizeci și nouă, literally “three tens and nine”. But again, Romanians often get lazy, and treizeci și nouă is mashed together to become something like treișnouă. You will hear, and have to recognise, both the formal (long) and informal (short) forms, in just about every environment. When I’m speaking, I feel most comfortable using the short forms up to 20 and the long forms beyond that. These formal and informal numbers are the first real oddity.

Hundred is sută (plural sute); thousand is mie (plural mii). Both sută and mie are feminine, so for 1100 you say “o mie o sută” (one thousand one hundred; unlike in English you never say eleven hundred). Nothing too complicated there.

But here comes the second quirk. Gender. Romanian has different forms for ‘one’ and ‘two’ depending on whether the thing you’re talking about is masculine or feminine (and if it’s neuter, Romanian’s third gender, you use the masculine form for ‘one’ but the feminine for ‘two’). This can become a problem, especially when ordering food. Are langoși (deep-fried flatbread thingies) masculine or feminine? How about gogoși (which are a bit like doughnuts)? Part of the issue is that when you see a sign for these mysterious food items, they’re shown in the plural and you can’t necessarily tell what the singular is. As it happens, the singular form of langoși is simply langoș, which is masculine, but the singular of gogoși is gogoasă, which is feminine. One way of avoiding the gender problem is to order at least three of everything (but don’t go too crazy – if you order twelve of something, or a higher number ending in 1 or 2, you’ll run into the same difficulty). If you’re just talking about a number (e.g. platform two), rather than a quantity, you always use the masculine form.

The third quirk is that if you’re talking about a quantity, you sometimes have to put de (of) between the number and the noun. The rule is that you don’t use de for numbers up to 19, or for larger numbers that end in anything from 01 to 19. Otherwise you have to use de.

7 oaks – 7 stejari

39 steps – 39 de pași

76 trombones – 76 de tromboane

101 Dalmatians – 101 dalmațieni

10,000 maniacs – 10,000 de maniaci

A new apartment block, containing 108 apartamente (note, no de) according to the sign, is being built almost next door to this hotel.

In Cluj I saw this sign, promoting Walking Month (English – aaarghh!) which showed the number of steps to various landmarks in the city:

Note the de (or lack of de) in the above sign depending on the last two digits.

Staying in the beautiful city of Cluj, but changing tack slightly, I saw this Latin inscription on a church. Why are some of the letters tall? Hmmm. It looks like some kind of puzzle. Well, the tall letters are all Roman numerals, aren’t they? And if I add the M and D and L and various C’s and V’s and I’s, I get, let me see, 1782. I think. That would seem to be when the church was built (or finished; they take a while).

Just around the corner I saw this one. It’s a bit harder to read:

1744? Note that in both of these inscriptions, the letter V (conveniently) represents both U and V. I couldn’t find any other Roman numeral puzzles besides these two. These puzzles are known as chronograms and are quite common in Central and Eastern Europe, including Transylvania.

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

We’re living in seismic times

November 16, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

The upper South Island of New Zealand was rocked by a large earthquake on Sunday night at around midnight. Two people were killed and several more injured. Kaikoura is a mess, and unless you’ve got a boat or a chopper it’s completely isolated, especially if you’re a cow. The quake was felt very strongly in Wellington, where they’re being pummelled by regular aftershocks. I’m glad to be away from it all. Some buildings have been condemned. I think mine is OK apart from some superficial cracks, similar to what we experienced in 2013, but I haven’t heard any confirmation of that.

Today I popped into that “promising” language school, so promising that they hadn’t communicated with me since then, apart from the occasional thumbs-up on Facebook which I only joined because of them. But there’s good news. They want me to run my first “conversation club” on 9th December. The marketing manager phoned me later in the day to invite me over to his flat on the seventh floor of a sixties tower block near the train station. By his own admission the building is an eyesore with barely tolerable noise levels thanks to trains, trams and cars. I met his wife, Simona, and for once I was able to speak a fair bit of Romanian. I probably surprised him with how much of the language I knew. When he corrected me I was grateful. I accepted Simona’s offer of food, expecting a biscuit but getting a meal of meat patties, pickled cabbage and bread. Seriously yum! I’d already had lunch at the market but I didn’t care. Days like today make me feel that it’s all worthwhile.

I’m getting better at picking elections. I spoke to Dad on FaceTime soon after the result became apparent. He called my just-out-of-bed hairstyle presidential (ha!). It had been a long, dark night. I didn’t want Trump to win. In a fellow human being I like to see humility, compassion and respect. He showed virtually none of those qualities throughout the whole campaign. I get why people voted for him. They’d had enough of being neglected by career politicians, people like Hillary Clinton. But they didn’t just get Donald Trump (if it was just him I wouldn’t be that bothered). America is so depressingly partisan now that the vast majority of voters no longer think. They don’t split their ticket; instead they support their team, red or blue, all the way. So by pulling the lever for Trump, they also got the rest of the Republican Party, people who don’t believe in evolution or man-made climate change, people who don’t believe in universal healthcare, paid maternity leave or a minimum wage.

For all the talk of the white working class voting against the so-called elite (and Donald Trump isn’t part of the elite?), and the Democrats neglecting their support base (if you follow British politics, that might sound familiar), one factor played an enormous part in this election and it’s hardly got a mention. Five years ago I wrote that geography would eventually become irrelevant in elections: why do you have to live next door to someone who shares your interests when you can insta-whatsit them online? But in those five years the opposite has happened. People are living closer to like-minded people. For those who lean left, that tends to mean clustering more and more tightly in urban environments. And it’s very electorally inefficient for parties on that side of the political spectrum in countries with FPTP systems, in particular the US. When it comes to the presidency, the Republicans win all the small states which have more electoral votes per capita than the large states. They also win a majority of the states (even when they lose the popular vote as they did this time), and now that most people just vote straight-ticket red or blue, they then pick up a majority in the Senate too. As for the House, well the Republicans, who control most states, can gerrymander the hell out of them because it’s so much easier to draw an advantageous map when your opponents live in such tightly-packed zones. That’s part of why, even though the Democrats have at least as much support as the Republicans, and Clinton will wind up with a near-two-point popular vote margin once all the votes are counted, they’re triply screwed right now. Of course if the US had a 21st-century electoral system instead of an 18th-century one, none of this would matter.

I should point out that I was never a Clinton fan. I was supporting Bernie Sanders during the primaries.

International travel - Language learning - Romania

I’m sorry I haven’t a Cluj

October 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

This is my last evening in Cluj, or to give it its full name, Cluj-Napoca. Cluj rhymes with “luge”. My hotel is on Strada Căii Ferate, or Railway Street. But what’s up with that name? Railway in Romanian is cale ferată, literally “iron road”. (The French term, chemin de fer, means the same thing.) But we want to say “Street of the Iron Road”, so we need to articulate the noun cale (“road”) and put it in the genitive case which indicates belonging. Cale is irregular, and it turns out the articulated genitive form is căii. As for the ferată (iron) bit, well that’s an adjective, and because cale is a feminine noun that we’ve just put in the genitive case, we need the plural form of that adjective, and that’s ferate. Got that? Good.

Yes, Railway Street. So I’m very close to the station, and that means it gets a bit noisy. It’s also rather warm in here, but less so than when I walked in and the heater was fully on. The fridge was switched off when I arrived and I haven’t tried turning it on because the wiring at the back looks potentially lethal. I’m enjoying the breakfasts here: lots of salamis and other cold meats, cheeses such as feta, eggs (either boiled or scrambled), and vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Yeah, I know tomato is a fruit. Not an English breakfast, not a Continental breakfast, but a Romanian breakfast. I’ve had much the same everywhere else, but it’s tastier and better presented here.

I like Cluj, and wish I’d come here straight from Sibiu instead of going to the capital. In some ways it’s better than Timișoara, a similar-sized city. The clock has been advanced ten years. The trams are more modern (Timișoara, I think, had cast-offs from Germany), the buildings in better condition, the main park that little bit tidier. I read that Cluj is the coolest town you’ve never heard of, and while it’s got a cool name that makes the awful title for this post possible, I’d still say Timișoara is cooler. It’s got all that street art that Cluj doesn’t appear to have, it’s more random, it’s more raw. But if you want to know whether something is cool or not, I’m probably not the man to ask.

Cluj is the capital of Transylvania and possibly the cultural capital of Romania. So you get lots of theatre, opera, and all that stuff. Today (Sunday) there was an interesting craft market, aimed in part at tourists.

I wish I could spend longer here, but I feel I want to get down to business fairly soon. Tomorrow I’m taking a three-hour train trip to Oradea where I’ve booked three nights. From there I intend to spend two nights in Arad before settling in Timișoara.

I emailed the woman at my hotel in Timișoara, the one who said she was impressed with my Romanian, chatted to me for ages about language schools and a property boom in the city, then gave me her business card. I wrote my email partly in Romanian. It wasn’t a five-minute job. Neither was her reply. It must have taken her all of 15 seconds. She just said she’d pass my details on to one of her contacts. She hit the ball to me, I returned it, and then she just whacked it over the fence for the neighbour’s dog to chew on. Game over. I don’t have all that much human contact, and while that might have been the most important chat I’d had all month, she might have had half a dozen just as important (if not more so) that same day. Or she might just have been busy. Making human contact.

Our bus got stuck in traffic and the journey from the capital took a few minutes under ten hours.

Language learning - Life :)

Romanian commentary 10: some seismic vocab

September 3, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was woken at 4:40 this morning by the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck off East Cape. I felt a rolling motion that lasted a good 20 to 25 seconds. I didn’t get a lot of sleep after that. My carpool mate didn’t feel a thing and didn’t even know there had been a thing to feel. Gah!

Talking of things, Father’s Day is actually a thing that some people make a thing of. Who would have thought? There was me thinking it was just commercialised crap. If I gave my dad a Father’s Day present he’d think I was taking the piss. And he’d be right.

Brexit is back on the agenda after the parliamentary summer recess. I think the process was (and is still being) appallingly handled. The issue of Britain’s EU membership was too complex to be put to a referendum in the first place, both sides lied (though the Leave side did so more blatantly), and I can’t believe they never had a plan or timetable for leaving the EU.

This morning’s earthquake was the same magnitude as the one that hit Canterbury almost six years ago to the day, and at almost the same time. It generated a mini-tsunami, and came hot on the heels of Wednesday’s pretend “exercise” tsunami. Eastern Romania experiences earthquakes fairly regularly. Thirty years ago on Wednesday 150 lives were lost in a 7.1 quake, and in 1977 almost 1600 were killed in a 7.2 quake, mostly in Bucharest. Here is some earthquake vocabulary that I hope I won’t need:

Earthquake: cutremur
To shake: a zgudui
Shock wave: undă de șoc
Aftershock: replică
Fault line: linie de falie
Depth: adâncime
Damage (noun): pagubă
Destruction: distrugere
Struck: lovit
Earth or land: pământ
Crack (noun): crăpătură
Collapsed: prăbușit

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

In other news…

June 26, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday was a relatively normal Saturday. In the morning I watched my cousin’s youngest boy play football and dropped him off after his four mini-games. “I’m a defender,” he said with pride and excitement just before the games started. He defended resolutely and was awarded joint player of the day for the second week in a row. I had lunch with my cousin, then went for a drink in Petone with probably my best friend, or at least the person I have most in common with here in Wellington. We talked about Brexit, work, the Spanish election (go Podemos!), travel, and more Brexit. Later I saw Independence Day 2 with my friend from the tennis club. The rest of the world doesn’t accept “America saves the world” as it did in 1996, and there was more laughter from the audience than I can ever remember from a non-comedy film.

Today I haven’t been in contact with anybody and I’m fine with that. I’ve got my English teaching tomorrow; it’s time I concentrated on that and my exit plans. Kiwexit? Kexit? Plenty of portmanteaux have been bandied about for the possibility of other countries leaving the EU: Czech-out, Italeave, Finnish and so on. How about, off the top of my head, a Frog-off?

Here’s an article in the Guardian about Ebbw Vale, a Welsh town that once had a thriving steelworks but has in recent times relied on EU money (a lot of it) to stay afloat. It has very little immigration. Ebbw Vale voted decisively (62%) to leave the EU. The number of people who voted against their interests is quite remarkable.

EU-funded road in Wales

The road sign above is interesting to me. The word for Wales in Welsh is Cymru but, like other Welsh words, it undergoes mutation in some circumstances, meaning the initial letter changes depending on (I think) the last letter of the previous word. In some cases Cymru becomes Gymru, and in other cases it turns into the weird-looking (to my eyes) Nghymru. Another example: maes (which means field) turns into faes after certain letters such as n. Apparently Welsh speakers make the mutations when they speak without really thinking about it. This changing of the initial letter is just one reason why using a dictionary in Welsh can be quite challenging. Another is that some digraphs such as ff, th and ng act as single letters. (Imagine for a minute that th, when it makes a single sound, counts as a single letter in English that comes between t and u in the alphabet. This isn’t as silly as it sounds: th was once written as a single very-different-looking letter in English. The word think would then come after time in the dictionary, and athlete would come after attempt. But pothole, which just contains t followed by h and not the th letter (because there’s no th sound), would come before potion, not after it. I’ve lost you now, haven’t I? But these sorts of things crop up all the time when using dictionaries or other alphabetical lists in Welsh.) Welsh is fascinating but I need to be concentrating on Romanian. I also need to be getting into linguistics properly but have no idea how. It’s frustrating as hell.

Language learning

Romanian commentary 9

June 6, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I learnt a new word at the weekend: dușman, meaning “enemy”. It’s Turkish in origin and pronounced “douche man”. Duș means “shower”, just as the similar-sounding word does in French and German, and puns abound on Romanian websites. That guy who fixes your shower is hostile! In English you could say “don’t be a dușman, you’re my friend” or something. I’m not very good at this: douche(bag) isn’t in my normal lexicon. If you like puns and word games, learning a new language is great; it opens up a whole new world of words, of anagrams and permutations.

I’ve spent some time on words for “this” and “that”, “these” and “those”. In English we have just those four words. In Romanian there are sixteen. Here goes:

acest băiat or băiatul acesta – this boy
acel băiat or băiatul acela – that boy

această pictură or pictura aceasta – this painting
acea pictură or pictura aceea – that painting

acești tigri or tigrii aceștia – these tigers
acei tigri or tigrii aceia – those tigers

aceste cafele or cafelele acestea – these coffees
acele cafele or cafelele acelea – those coffees

So there are different words for masculine and feminine, and you mustn’t forget that neuter nouns are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. This takes us from four words to eight. But you can either put this/that/these/those before the noun, which is more emphatic, or after the noun. If you go for the latter option you need to articulate the noun, while the this/that/these/those word changes slightly, normally getting an extra “a”, and so the word count doubles again. And even that isn’t all (I lied when I said sixteen). Even words like “this” and “that” suffer case changes, so while “this boy” is acest băiat, “this boy’s life” requires the genitive case: viața acestui băiat. Yet another word, and there are plenty of these other words. Doamne, this is hard! I don’t expect to remember much of this.

A word about cafelele above. Coffee is cafea, which becomes cafele in the plural and the nice soothing cafelele when you want to say “the coffees”. But if that sounds soothing, how about lalea, meaning tulip. For tulips you say lalele, and for “the tulips”, yep, you guessed it, lalelele. It’s hard to stop saying (or typing) that word.

Lalelele sunt frumoase!
Lalelele sunt frumoase!