Language learning

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Humming

May 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve been humming. During the day everything has been beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and at night I’ve hardly slept. On Thursday, after my fifth night in a row of sleeping for a couple of hours max, I decided to take a sick day, only my second in over two years there. It was the perfect day for it, the sun was shining and my flatmate had moved out the day before. I walked around my local area for two hours or so, wide-eyed, taking photos of beautiful trees and houses that were now so much more colourful than I remembered. Other than that I gave the bathroom a good clean (it needed it – my flatmate was a rather aggressive user of the toilet) and studied some Romanian.

I’ve now got my Google set to Romanian: the “I’m feeling lucky” button is now “Mă simt norocos” and if I search for Sibiu I get aproximativ 32.100.000 (de) rezultate in just 0,57 secunde. The same goes for Google Maps, Google News and Google You Name It, everything is in Romanian including all the suggested search terms and my supposedly tailored results. As anti-Google as I can be at times (they are so pervasive), that’s pretty cool. There’s also a social network, Google Plus, which I’ve joined. It’s much smaller than Facebook or Twitter, with “only” a few million active members. I find the network part of Google Plus as confusing as hell (and of course all the terminology and help pages are in Romanian for me), but what I like about it is that it’s great for viewing and sharing photos, and I’ve spent hours staring at colourful photos of Sibiu and elsewhere. I might even post some photos of Wellington at some stage, and I’ll post the link here if that happens. I’ve even got an animated Romanian flag as my mascot or avatar or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I had to find one that wasn’t so fast as to drive everyone batty and to re-order the frames so that the first one looked nice (sometimes you only get to see a still photo and it defaults to the first frame). Yeah, working with animated images, or GIFs, is fun.

romania_done

 

I think what’s made me hum is the realisation that I’ve got so much freedom. I can be who I want and for years I didn’t even know it. Isn’t that something? Billions of people around the world don’t have that. In my own country we do pretty well in the freedom stakes, but so many of us are constrained by the situations we end up in. Take my boss. He plans to move house soon, but can’t move more than a mile or two because his three kids would have to move to a different school otherwise. He works extremely hard and his mind works extremely quickly but to me, as I watch him shove TV food down his throat while he rushes from one bullshit meeting to the next, none of it seems worth it. I used “TV food” there because of something I saw on a train in America. The guy in front of me in the food car dropped an armful of processed crap on the counter, and the bloke behind the desk tried to stop him from buying it: “You don’t want to be spending eighteen dollars on all that TV food.”

It would be criminal for me to waste this freedom I have. I haven’t got a two-mile radius dammit, I’ve got a great big map. My train itinerary which will cover some of that map is likely to be:

  1. London to Paris via the Eurostar, 2½ hours;
  2. Paris to Munich, humming along at 200mph on a double-decker train (Seat61.com tells me to get a top-deck seat for the best views), 5¾ hours;
  3. Munich to Budapest overnight, 9¾ hours, and I’ll have a few hours to look around Budapest when I arrive;
  4. Either Budapest to Timișoara, 5 hours, arriving in the evening of day two, or Budapest to Sibiu, 10 hours (why so much longer I have no idea), arriving in the early morning of day three.

Without Seat61.com I don’t know where I’d be.

A week ago yesterday I had my performance review, the last one that will matter in my current job (and I’d prefer not to ever have another job where they’ll matter). I got through it OK, and that felt pretty good. The same evening I went to a regional tennis awards presentation. Someone at the club nominated me for an award for those nine consecutive singles wins I had, but there wasn’t much chance I’d ever win it. Most of the prizes went to the elite players who already win heaps of awards anyway. The best moment of the evening was when a bloke of about eighty, who had done so much work organising competitions over decades, was recognised with the volunteer of the year award; it brought a tear to his eye.

Talking of freedom, having this apartment to myself again, and the freedom that gives me, feels incredible.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan

Romanian commentary 8 (it’s happening!)

April 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

The timing of all these long weekends has been bloody terrible. I wish I could have saved the days up until my flatmate moves out. He should be out before the next three-day weekend, Queen’s Birthday, but I’ve a horrible feeling he’ll try to extend his time with me. That will be the last long weekend before I go away on 27th September. Yes, I’ve now booked my flight (a one-way ticket, how exciting is that?) so it’s happening! I plan to spend a few days in the UK before heading to Romania.

Yesterday I met up in town with the Romanian lady who my cousin knows through work. This was awkward, first because I didn’t know what time she wanted to meet so I had to hang around for hours, and also because she had somebody with her. Still, we got a chat a fair bit. She was very nice but she gave such a glowing description of Romania, especially the part of Transylvania that she hails from, that I didn’t know what to believe. She even spoke longingly of her childhood under the Ceaușescu regime.

I did get to speak some Romanian. She tried to get me to improve my pronunciation of the â or î vowel, which I mentioned before on this blog as being difficult because we don’t have even a near equivalent in English. It’s especially difficult when followed by i such as in pâine and câine, or in words that also contain the ă vowel such as sâmbătă, săptămână and smântână. I’d better make sure I try smântână. I was also struggling with rău, său and tău.

Another major sticking point for me was possessive pronouns. I wanted to say “my brother’s cell phone” which is celularul fratelui meu. Needless to say, that isn’t what I said. When you want to talk about an item that belongs to someone, you have to articulate it, i.e. say “the phone” rather than just “phone”. In this instance you do that by tacking ul on the end of celular. As for “brother”, which is frate, you need to articulate that and change it to the genitive case, because something belongs to my brother, and that gives you fratelui. Without the case change it would just be fratele, obviously. You finish with the masculine singular version of “my”, which is meu. Simple, right? If it was my sister’s cell phone instead, it would be celularul sorei mele. The last word, mele, is the feminine plural version of “my”, even though I’m only talking about one sister, because you always use the plural when dealing with feminine nouns in the genitive case. I mean, c’mon, everyone knows that. So, yeah. All this articulation and case changing on the fly, when you’re also trying to process what someone has just said to you, is a feat of mental gymnastics, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to master it.

She compared my attempt to learn Romanian with her experience of learning English. She said she was struck by how much “fill” English speakers use in speech compared to Romanians, and how she struggle to distinguish the fill from the content. I can believe that. I use “I mean”, “y’know”, “like”, “basically” and “I reckon” and numerous other fillers all the time. And they serve a really important purpose. Contrast “Don’t park here!” with “Y’know, it’s probably best if you don’t park here, yeah, [points] somewhere over there would be just fine.” In English, not using those fillers gives one’s speech a sharp, icy quality. A few times my flatmate has said things to me in a way that comes across as rather twattish, and it was only yesterday that I figured out why. He uses very few fillers; he’s a “Don’t park here!” kind of guy. He spends a lot of time during the day editing Wikipedia articles about armies and battalions, and it’s as if he doesn’t switch off from that mode when he’s talking. And he talks a lot. He also makes jokes, that I don’t think are nearly as funny as he thinks they are. So I find interacting with him more exhausting than with the average person, and believe me, I find average tiring enough.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople was simply brilliant. To call it a classic Kiwi film doesn’t praise it enough. It made me laugh, it made me emotional, it made me feel good inside.  I loved the scenery, I loved all the main characters, even the CYFS lady who I loved to hate. I really hope this film makes a splash internationally as it surely deserves to.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

It’s a fix

January 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday I played Risk with a bunch of people from a Meetup group, including my soon-to-be flatmate. We played at my place. Having all these relatively unknown people over caused me some anxiety which didn’t entirely disappear when we started playing. I was playing with some clever people who knew their war history inside out and backwards and could spell and pronounce “hegemony” and even use it in a sentence. Two people brought along far newer copies of the game than mine, which was quickly deemed to be old hat. We played a version I’d never played before where the objective was to complete missions instead of dominating the world. I had the chance to eliminate somebody but decided against it in order to complete a mission. Half an hour later this decision backfired spectacularly as the bloke I could have knocked out knocked me out in last place. I then just wanted to go home, but I already was home. Bugger.

I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety at the moment. The imminent arrival of my new flatmate isn’t helping.

On Tuesday night I watched the second set of Simona Halep’s shock defeat to the 133rd-ranked Chinese qualifier Zhang Shuai in the first round of the Australian Open, with commentary in Romanian. I understood a few words here and there. It was a stunning performance by Zhang who completely overpowered Halep in the last five games. She was in the zone, hardly missing at all, and Halep seemed unwilling to change her game. I think she was just hoping – not unreasonably – that Zhang’s level would drop. This was Zhang’s first win a grand slam in 15 attempts; she was on the verge of quitting the sport. She has since followed that up with a convincing win over Alizé Cornet, ranked exactly 100 places above her.

There has been a lot of talk about match fixing in tennis in the last few days. This should come as no surprise. It’s an extremely easy sport to fix (much easier even than other individual sports like boxing), and with the array of bets available on sites like Bet365 that go right down to point-by-point level, you don’t even need to fix the whole match. It’s also a ridiculously top-heavy sport. The top ten amass vast fortunes, while those ranked in the 150 to 200 range struggle to make ends meet. If you’re ranked 200th in the world, you’re an incredible player. If I played the 200th best player in my country of just two million blokes, I’d probably win six or eight points in the entire (two-set, twelve-game) match. Now extend that to the whole world, and you get a player who eats, sleeps and breathes tennis, someone who spends many hours at the gym, on the practice courts, travelling to play tournaments in tinpot towns like Timișoara that nobody has heard of, and he can’t make a living from it. But you’re able to bet on his matches, and you can understand why the temptation to tip the very unbalanced tennis scales a little would be so strong for him.

I’ve got friend, of sorts, in Auckland who if I’m honest does my head in. But we had a chat last night on the phone and he was genuinely interested in my plans to go overseas, dropping the little man in Google Maps and telling me what he saw at his end. It was nice that someone was taking an interest.

Language learning - Life :)

Romanian commentary 7 (and a bit of Bowie)

January 14, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had absolutely no idea David Bowie was so ill, so I was shocked and saddened to hear that he had died of liver cancer at the age of 69. Most rock stars don’t really appeal to me as people: stardom is a long way from anything I’ve ever aspired to. But Bowie is an exception; I wouldn’t have minded at all being him. He was always reinventing himself, visually as much as in his music (who was your favourite David Bowie?), and he must have had a helluva lot of fun doing that, but he also seemed a thoroughly nice bloke. My dad told me that his first TV appearance in 1964 at the age of 17 caused quite a stir, mainly because his hair was a bit long. That would be laughable now. So Bowie was lucky I guess that he was around in a time when you could still make an impact.

On Tuesday I looked for articles about David Bowie on Romanian websites. I printed off three. The first two articles gave you the facts and figures: that he died after an 18-month battle with cancer, that his career spanned 50 years, and that his latest album, Blackstar, was released on his birthday two days before he died. I didn’t have too much problem understanding them. But the third article was on a different plane entirely; the author told us how, as a very emotional 20-year-old student, he was affected by Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, and similarly how he felt when Freddie Mercury died three years earlier. In comparing those experiences to hearing of Bowie’s death, he used a lot of flowery language and complex constructions that left me all at sea, even with the aid of Google Translate (which, admittedly, is some way short of perfect). I’ve got a long, long way to go in learning this language.

To improve my listening skills I’ve taken to watching the Romanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on YouTube. It’s great for a whole raft of reasons. The questions and possible answers appear on the screen, so you can try and figure out what the question means (and sometimes attempt to answer it), or you can pause the video and look a word up. The contestant often spends considerable time on a particular question; that’s to my advantage too. The same phrases come up all the time: “are you sure?”, “final answer”, “phone a friend” (which is “sună un prieten“; they annoyingly call the 50:50 lifeline “fifty-fifty”) and so on, so I try and pick them out. Amounts of money of course come up regularly, and I can now pick out stuff like “Marius is 36 years old and he’s a lawyer from Bucharest.” You learn quite a lot about Romanian culture from watching it too; questions on sport are far rarer than in the UK (and certainly the Aussie) version, while questions on art and the Bible are far more common. One particular question from the last programme I watched was about monkeys (maimuțe). Which of these monkeys doesn’t exist: vervet, owl, spider or rabbit? The contestant (who did well in the end) used two lifelines on that question, and I could tell that he and the host were making jokes about monkeys throughout the rest of the game, but I was nowhere near being able to understand the jokes.

Talking of monkeys, it will soon be Chinese New Year: the Year of the Monkey (anul maimuței – to say “of something”, instead of using the word for of you change the ending of the something). I’m a Monkey, born in 1980, and here’s hoping that this will be my lucky year. Pity my poor brother: he’s a Cock. (Outside Chinese culture most people aren’t going to know the full zodiac – I don’t think I do – so it would be fun to think up an animal at random and say that you’re the Year of the Alligator or something, and see if you get away with it.)

Language learning

Romanian commentary 6 – some challenges

January 11, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve made reasonably good progress with Romanian so far, I think. Off the top of my head I know how to say I’m happy or sad or bored or tired or proud or ashamed or tall or short. I don’t remember knowing any of that after the same length of time learning French. I’ve spent a good number of hours in the last ten weeks reading and listening to Romanian, and a smaller but still significant amount of time writing it. What I haven’t done yet, and what I really need to do, is speak it. (OK, I have spoken it a bit, to myself, but I’ll soon be getting a flatmate and he might think I’m nuts.) So far what I’ve done is the equivalent of learning how to play tennis by hitting against a wall. I can now hit a half-decent forehand, backhand and volley, but I’m buggered if I have to react to someone else’s forehands, backhands and volleys. Problem number one: how do I find someone in Wellington to speak Romanian with? My best bet was the Romanian lady who turns up to the tennis club every six months or so, but she never replied to my email. It looks like I’ll have to go online, and for me that will take cojones or whatever the Romanian word is. I haven’t got that far yet.

Problem number two: as a native English speaker, the bar is constantly being raised. By that, I mean that the standard of Romanian I’d need to reach before it becomes really useful gets higher by the day. That’s because the average Romanian’s English gets better by the day, and unless I get fairly good at Romanian, people are likely to just respond to me in English if and when I get over there. Interestingly when I last went to Italy in 2010 I didn’t have this problem, even though my Italian was only at a high basic (or low intermediate) level; if you speak German at that sort of level you don’t stand a chance. I expect Romanian to be somewhere in between. A day will probably come when it is no longer worth an English speaker’s while to learn any foreign language; that will be a sad day.

Problem number three: there aren’t a ton of textbooks, phrase books, CDs or websites to help me learn the language. This isn’t French or Spanish or German or even Mandarin. It just isn’t very popular. But there is a lot of real-life material out there like YouTube videos and online articles. After all, over 20 million people speak Romanian and a great many of them have large digital footprints. In a way, having to use “proper” material makes the learning experience more fun. It reminds me of the time I tried to figure out badugi, a relatively obscure poker game, with the aid of a spreadsheet. I made enough money from that game to pay for a month-long trip to America. I hope Romanian treats me as well as badugi did.

I’ll talk about exactly what real-life material I have been using in my next post.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan

Didn’t think I’d do the flatmate thing again, but…

January 3, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

My potential new flatmate is about to come over. He’s the same age as my previous one (born in 1977) and about the same height, but that’s where the similarities end (I hope). He might not be here for long: he intends to go to the UK soon, probably before I embark on my adventure. Anything to get my mortgage down, even by a small amount, before I go away would be really helpful.

Here are some pictures of the big futon move at Makara last weekend. It was a beautiful day there:

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And this was my attempt at making a crossword in Romanian:

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ZVON was a word I’d just come across in an online article; it means “rumour”. COZI is the plural of coadă which means either a tail or a queue.

I think we’ve already had our hottest day of 2016 in Wellington. It got to 28 on New Year’s Day.

Language learning

Romanian commentary 5

December 5, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

Romanian is the coolest language I’ve ever tried to learn (for me anyway – we’re all different) but there just is so much to learn. I’m working my way through the excellent Learn Romanian with Nico lessons on YouTube (and she’s still in the process of creating more lessons; she’s so far up to number 34). Nico makes it fun and that helps a lot. It looks like she can speak at least four languages herself. A lot of Romanians seem to be tri- or quadrilingual, while we English speakers are proudly monolingual and miss out on so much as a result. In English classes at school I learned virtually nothing about how language is structured; I was told that an adjective was a “describing word” and a verb was a “doing word” and that every sentence must have one of those doing words in it or else it’s not doing anything and isn’t a real sentence. And that was about it. I learned much more about the English language when I started to learn French.

Other than YouTube videos I’ve mainly been relying on a notebook and flash cards (hundreds of old unused business cards). One of the biggest challenges I explained here: every noun has a plural form, an articulated form, and a plural articulated form, and that’s before you get into cases. So every time you come across a new noun, you don’t have to learn one word but several. As for verbs, there are four categories of verb conjugations but there’s a ton of variation between each category, and sound changes abound. Adjectives at this stage seem a little simpler. Once you’ve learned the words you then have to put them together, and that’s no easy task. Romanian doesn’t seem to work like French where you can learn a bunch of really useful stock-standard phrases before you even know what each word means.

Wordplay can be useful in committing new words and phrases to memory. Occasionally the word will be an anagram of English word, such as ieftin which means cheap (something I can afford given my finite resources) or galben which means yellow (I can think of a yellow bangle). Sometimes it will be an English word, such as drum (= road) or slab (= weak). Other times the letter combination just makes me happy, as in a zbura (to fly) or zgomot (noise). Seriously? Romanian has words beginning with “zb” and “zg”? This language just gets better.

I mentioned before that Romanian uses five accented letters: ă, â, î, ș and ț, but there are also four “normal” letters that it doesn’t use, namely k, q, w and y. (There are however loanwords, such as “whisky”, that do make use of these letters.) Lack of Q was a bit of a surprise to me: you can’t count to twenty in French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese without coming across Q, and it’s also used in a lot of question words in those languages. Where “qu” might have come into play, “cv” is used instead, as in acvatic. Lack of Y is less of a surprise, because I often takes its place just like it does in Italian (an example being the first i in ieftin above).

Talking of loanwords, a surprising number come from French. e.g. trotuar (trottoir = pavement), șofer (chauffeur/driver), șosete (chaussettes = socks), birou (bureau), tricou (tricot = T-shirt), and many more.

There’s a Romanian lady at the tennis club whom I hadn’t seen in months… until last weekend. Unfortunately with so many other people around, and me being me, I didn’t get the chance to speak to her in any language, but I’ve managed to get in contact with her since and hopefully we can have a chat. She could be an extremely useful contact for me, as well as a potential friend.

Language learning

Romanian commentary 4 (and some English too) – sounds stressful

December 1, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

As I’ve said before, Romanian has some complex sound changes. When you go from one person of a verb to another, it’s often not as simple as changing the ending. You’ll quite often get changes, or mutations, in the stem as well. This sounds a bit like genetics, doesn’t it? To show you what I mean, here’s the present tense of the verb a juca (to play):

eu joc – I play
tu joci – you play (singular)
el/ea joacă – he/she plays
noi jucăm – we play
voi jucați – you play (plural)
ei/ele joacă – they play

The vowel in the stem bounces around between o, oa and u, with the added bonus that because the stem ends in a c, you also get a consonant sound change in the second person singular (c before e or i is the English ch sound). This doesn’t just happen with verbs; you see it with the different forms of nouns and adjectives too.

You also come across sound changes when you form a longer word from a shorter one. When you lengthen the word, one of the vowels from the original word will often change, and a syllable that was originally stressed will become unstressed.

Examples:
țară (country) → țăran (peasant)
casă (house) → căsătorie (marriage)

Yep, the Romanian word for “marriage” comes from the word for “house”, and why shouldn’t it? What you see in both cases is the a sound being reduced to ă, which is a schwa. A side-effect of this vowel reduction is that the stress moves from the first syllable to later in the word. In țăran it shifts to the second syllable (there isn’t anywhere else for it to go) whereas in căsătorie it moves all the way down to the fourth syllable.

On the face of it, this seems crazy. What’s going on in Romania that makes their language so unnecessarily complicated? And then I thought about it for a minute…

In English this happens, and worse, all the time. Take the noun equator. It’s got three syllables, and therefore three vowel sounds. Some small points before I go further:
(a) yes it’s got four vowel letters, but that’s not what I’m talking about;
(b) the second of these vowel sounds, represented by the a, is what’s known as a diphthong;
(c) there exist such things as syllabic consonants which mean that not every syllable has to contain a vowel sound, although the vast majority do.

Anyway, equator is a noun which has three syllables and three vowel sounds. The stress is clearly on the second syllable. Simple. But look what happens when you form the five-syllable adjective equatorial. Precisely none of the original vowel sounds in equator remains the same. All three of them change! And what’s more, the stress shifts to the third syllable, with a hint of stress also on the first. The second syllable, which previously had the stress, is now entirely stressless.

equator

While I’d be all for simplifying English spelling in principle, this shows one of the problems with fully phonetic spelling, in English at least. It’s quite handy that the word equatorial is just equator with some letters tacked on the end, even though the two words are pronounced quite differently. Under fully phonetic spelling, the words would be spelt something like ikwáytuhr and ekwuhtóriuhl, which look nothing like each other. One would be listed under I, the other under E! Another problem is that people pronounce things differently: do you go for skédyool or shédyool? Who would decide? The question is academic I suppose: English isn’t a geographically contained language like Romanian, which last went through a formal spelling reform in 1993, not long after the downfall of Communism. I couldn’t see any proposal to formally change English spelling ever getting off the ground.

With English pronunciation being all over the place, it’s a wonder anyone learns to speak it as a second language at all. That so many people do learn to speak English is, of course, because it’s all over the place. All over the TV, film, the radio, music, billboards, the internet, social media, and so on. You can’t avoid it. It makes me wonder what the future holds for less widely spoken languages, even languages like Romanian which currently has 20-odd million speakers.

Language learning

Romanian commentary 3 (and some English too) – it’s how you say it

November 18, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve strayed a bit lately from the whole point of this blog, and for that I apologise. I don’t want to be criticising my own mother, who is fundamentally a good person, or anybody else on here. This blog is supposed to have an optimistic slant to it (which I know is hard to achieve sometimes; after the Paris attacks it feels like the world is going to the dogs). From now on I’ll be talking about things I’ve done and dream of doing, places I’ve been to and dream of going to, and stuff that interests me. Like language.

When you learn a new language, you learn more about your own language, and I’m certainly learning more about English as I try to get a handle on Romanian.

Here are a few miscellaneous features of Romanian that I’ve picked up:

Romanian is a syllable-timed language, like French but unlike English which is a stress-timed language. To show you what I mean, consider this English sentence: I ran into my brother’s bedroom and hid in the wardrobe.

When I say the sentence above, I split it into two sections, a bit like bars of music: I ran into my brother’s bedroom / and hid in the wardrobe. The first section contains nine syllables, the second only six, but I take about the same length of time to say each section.

Furthermore, there are “important” syllables which receive extra stress, like a drum beat: I ran into my brother’s bedroom / and hid in the wardrobe. The time I take between those stressed syllables is (roughly) the same, no matter how many intervening syllables there are. I say the “into my brother’s” bit quickly so I can get to the next drum beat in time. Also at play here is that running into the bedroom is a short period of frenetic activity, whereas hiding in the wardrobe involves waiting. The speed at which we talk takes account of this difference in pace. Romanian doesn’t really do this and neither does French; in both languages you take about the same time over each syllable regardless of its importance in the sentence.

Romanian does have word stress, just like English but unlike French. Romanian stress isn’t always predictable, however. In English we stress the word elephant on the first syllable but in Romanian it’s the last syllable of elefant that is stressed. (Romanians write f where we write ph; good for them.) In French, all three syllables of éléphant receive more or less equal emphasis.

Romanian has schwas, just like English, French, German and Welsh, but not Spanish or Italian, or Maori for that matter. If you don’t know what a schwa is, you probably should because it’s the most common vowel sound in English. It’s represented by ǝ (an upside-down e) in the IPA, and it’s the “neutral” vowel found in the last syllable of normal, happen, pencil, bacon and album. The fact that English uses any of five letters to represent that same sound (actually make that six: zephyr) is one reason why so many of us struggle with spelling. Throw unpredictable double letters into the mix, and it’s no wonder people don’t know how to spell occurrence. (Is it an a or an e? One r or two?)

In French the schwa is represented by e; in Romanian it’s ă (and it’s great that it’s always the same letter). Unlike in English, schwas can occur in stressed syllables in Romanian, as in fără (stress on the first syllable) which means “without”.

I was going to write lots more, but linguistics isn’t an easy subject even if it fascinates me. I’ll be back with another chapter soon.
Language learning

Romanian commentary 2 – what’s that thing?

October 30, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

The Rugby World Cup final is almost upon us again, but unlike last time when the All Blacks just squeaked by France and I was on the edge of my seat, I’m finding it really hard to care. I’m writing this to the sound of Robbie Williams’ Let Me Entertain You – they’re rehearsing for tomorrow night’s gig at the Basin which I live pretty much right next to.

A lot of languages have two genders. Some, like German, have three. English has somehow (and I’m grateful for this) evolved to have just one. So how many has Romanian got? Well, kinda two, kinda three. Officially it’s three: masculine, feminine and neuter, but the neuter gender behaves as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. Just like in French, the indefinite article (when you want to talk about a thing, or one thing) has a masculine and a feminine form (un/o), but the number two also does (doi/două). So for neuter nouns, which switch gender when they team up, you use the masculine “one” (un) but the feminine “two” (două). As for definite articles, when you want to talk about the something, well they don’t really exist in Romanian. There’s no “the” word. Instead you tack something on the end (and there are rules for what you tack on the end and when). Then to make things plural, you change the ending, or the middle, or both… Things get complicated quickly.

Masculine example
A boy:              un băiat
Two boys:       doi băieți
The boy:          băiatul
The boys:        băieții

See what I mean?

Feminine example
A girl:               o fată
Two girls:        două fete
The girl:           fata
The girls:         fetele

Diacritics matter! Here you’ve got two different words, fată and fata. There’s also față, which means “face”, and becomes fața when you want to say “the face”. And făta, făța and fâță are all words too. They’re all pronounced differently. Wonderful isn’t it?
A French bloke I flatted with in Peterborough in 2003 has just had a son to go with his daughter. He wasn’t sure whether to call him Gaétan or Gaëtan. Both options work in French, but he was having a hard time deciding which accent (the acute or the tréma) his son would be saddled with for the rest of his life. These little dots and squiggles matter.

Neuter example
A chair:            un scaun
Two chairs:     două scaune
The chair:        scaunul
The chairs:      scaunele

This one is actually fairly simple.

Another feminine example
A sheep:          o oaie
Two sheep:     două oi
The sheep (singular):  oaia
The sheep (plural):      oile

Riiight. Of course “sheep” is weird in English too, but I think it’s weirder in Romanian! While we add an ‘n’ to avoid saying “a apple”, they seem to manage fine with “o oaie”. So many vowels! (But no U of course. A sheep could be some kind of cryptic emoji meaning “missing U”.) They count sheep in Romanian just like we do. I might cover numbers in another post.

Another neuter example
An egg:            un ou
Two eggs:       două ouă
The egg:          oul
The eggs:        ouăle

In some languages “egg” can get a bit scrambled so I was intrigued to see what might happen here. In French the F of “œuf” (singular) is pronounced but it’s silent in “œufs”. I don’t know of any other French word that behaves like that. In Italian it’s one of the very few words that is masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, in other words it’s neuter! I’m not surprised that it’s neuter in Romanian too.

I’ve completely ignored cases here. The case of a noun is what the noun “does” in a sentence, and it can mean you have to make further changes to the word beyond what I’ve shown above. I might talk about that some other time.