Language learning

I was about to write about my experiences with an employment consultant, but I’m trying to keep things positive on this blog.

Here’s some more Romanian. I’m getting just a little obsessed with this language (I need to be obsessed with something or else I’ll go mad). I often used to look at Wikipedia pages on obscure languages in dull moments at work, but this is the first time it’s gone further (and this is hardly what you’d call an obscure language).

There are several different words for Hello/Hi in Romanian, just like in English. The ones I’m seeing the most are:

Bună ziua (literally “good day”), bună dimineața (good morning), bună seara (good evening). Good night is noapte bună – I’ve no idea why that one is the other way round.
Bună – this seems to be a nice informal catch-all for the bunăs above. It’s used quite a lot I think.
Salut (as in French)
Servus (used mostly in Transylvania, as well as a bunch of other Eastern European countries)
Ceau (pronounced like the Italian “ciao”, and mostly used in the west of the country)

It’s quite nice that they use different greetings in different parts of the country. I’ll talk about a city in the west of Romania in another post.

Servus and ceau are also used for “bye”, as is pa or pa-pa. The “official” goodbye phrase is la revedere.

It’s important to know what words/phrases people actually say. I noticed as I was coming up and down Mt Kaukau on Monday (public holiday: lots of people) that “morning” was more common than “hi” or “hello” at that time of day. “Good morning” (which you’ll see near the start of any English phrase book) didn’t crop up at all, but it certainly does in more formal situations. It’s interesting that we keep the “morning” in informal situations whereas Romanians keep the “good”.

The next post on Romanian will deal with nouns.

I really enjoy looking at and thinking about language. My decision in 1996 not to study languages at A-level, because I’d never get a job if I did that, was immense muppetry on my part. I went down the scientific route, because that’s what I was born to do, and I’ve regretted it ever since. But better twenty years late than never. If I do end up teaching in Eastern Europe (and that’s my master plan) I’ll want to, and feel obliged to, learn the language. I’ve been looking at Bulgarian, Hungarian and Romanian, three languages that are virtually nothing like each other.

Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. That means it’s out of the question for me, since I’m thirty years too old to be learning a whole new alphabet. Only kidding, I’d love to, and I have some idea of Cyrillic already, but it does add an extra layer of complexity. My biggest problem with Bulgarian isn’t the alphabet, it’s the verbs. According to Wikipedia, “The Bulgarian verb can take up to 3000 distinct forms, as it varies in person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense and even gender.” That 3000 figure is flagged as being dubious, but Bulgarian verbs still sound like they would mess with my head. I still wouldn’t discount learning the language completely.

Hungarian, I must say, looks bloody horrible. The “gy” combination, which is very common in Hungarian and even counts as a letter in itself, doesn’t appeal to me. It crops up in English from time to time in words like “edgy” or “gyrate”, to say nothing of “gypsy” which is lovely with those other descenders, but it isn’t something I’d want to see all the time. It isn’t even that easy to pronounce in Hungarian. Another digraph which is its own letter is “sz”; that’s a bit nicer than “gy”, but not much. Hungarian also has far too many diacritics. Its vocabulary seems to be very different from just about any other language, making it hard to get a handle on, and it’s a grammatical nightmare with a ridiculous number of noun cases. All in all, it looks extremely hard, and not that much fun to learn either.

Romanian, well that’s a different story altogether. To me Romanian is great and here’s why:

• First and foremost, it’s a Romance language, but its strong Slavic influence gives it extra variety. There are beautiful words like frumoasa (the feminine form of “beautiful”), Russian-sounding words that you’ll see at the market like morcov (carrot) and cartof (potato), and words like scump (expensive) which is only not an English word by pure accident. Lots of variety is really important to me when learning a language. On the face of it Italian lacks variety (fairly small sound inventory and just about all words end in a vowel) but you’ve got geminated consonants, words beginning with “sb”, and wonderful stuff like that. And it sounds great. Maori also sounds great, but it has no sibilants, no voiced consonants except the three nasals, and no consonant clusters (of even two consonants) at all. Maybe it’s just me, but I find Maori to be missing something.

• It’s totally phonetic. That might sound boring, but I find it quite refreshing when my native language is anything but.

• Vowel combinations that get me far more excited than they probably should do: two, three, sometimes four vowels in a row, as in creioane (pencils/crayons). Then there’s copil (child) which becomes copii in the plural, and the wonderful copiii (yep, three i’s in a row) when you want to talk about the children. That word could make some good logos. When I lived in Auckland there was a restaurant in Northcote called Tastiii. Would you dare eat at a place called that? Maybe it was owned by Romanians. Words like copiii would be great for Scrabble – I always get too many i’s in that game. Scrabble seems to be fairly big in Romania. Ceausescu once famously banned it.

• Sound changes between masculine and feminine, and singular and plural. These certainly make the language harder. It’s not just a case of changing an ‘o’ to an ‘a’ or sticking an ‘s’ on the end; you have to learn the different forms, just like mouse–mice or goose–geese in English. Luckily, because the changes are cool, I’ll want to learn them. That’s what I think is great about Romanian – plenty of weird stuff going on, but it’s all totally awesome weird.

• A sensible number of diacritics. There are enough to pepper the page and make words look cool and exotic, without things getting out of hand as in Vịềtnẳmễsệ. Most importantly, there are only five different letters with accent marks. Two of those are pronounced identically (î is used at the beginning or end of a word, â in the middle). The â/î sound is a bit tricky because it doesn’t exist in English or any other language that I’ve studied, and it gets even trickier when combined with another vowel, as in câine (dog) or pâine (bread), two words that rhyme like they do in Italian (cane/pane). Some Romanians are lazy and type without diacritics; that’s a pain in the butt for people trying to learn the language. Is that a normal ‘a’ or has it got a bowl or a hat?

I’m sure I’ll find more cool stuff if and when I delve deeper into this weird and wonderful language.