Language teaching

This afternoon I had a session with two new girls aged 15 and 16. One of them is the daughter of my first-ever student and is clearly a voracious reader in English. Her vocabulary was unusually good. They both have Hungarian, not Romanian, as their first language, so when they spoke to each other I didn’t have a clue what they were saying. That felt weird. And weird is probably the best word to describe Hungarian. It’s almost what is called a language isolate: a language that shares no ancestors with any other. It doesn’t quite qualify because it shares roots with Finnish and Estonian, but it took a sharp left turn many centuries ago and is now firmly on its own. If Romanian, French, German, and even Serbo-Croat are animals of one species or another, Hungarian is a fungus. Because Hungarian is written using the Latin alphabet, I expect to get some kind of read on it, but it’s worse than Greek to me.

On the way back from Vienna, we stopped in the city of Kecskemét. It’s pronounced “ketch-keh-met”, but with a lengthened final syllable. That’s what the acute accent does. Just like in almost all Hungarian words, the stress goes on the first syllable. For us English speakers, we’ve already got a problem here. In English, long vowels tend to be stressed too. Take the word believe. The vowel in the second syllable is long, and happily the second syllable is also where the stress falls. It would be quite hard to say be-lieve while keeping the vowel lengths the same, but that’s exactly what Hungarian requires you to do.

Kecskemét means “goat pass” (simply, kescke means “goat” and mét means “pass”). So let’s look up kecske in Wiktionary, an extremely handy multilingual dictionary. It says goat, with some stuff about an uncertain etymology. It even gives me a picture of a goat. Great.

But when I click on the “inflection” arrow, I get this, a veritable explosion of word forms in both singular and plural:

All those endings tell you whether you’re doing something to the goat, with the goat, on the goat, near the goat, or whether something is being put inside the goat or falling off the goat or the goat is transforming into something else. It’s mindblowing that a noun can even have this many inflections. By the way, all the things in blue in the first column – dative, instrumental, adessive, and so on – are cases. English and French ditched cases, which were part of Latin, a long time ago. Romanian still has them – five, unlike the crazy number Hungarian has, and because two pairs of them share the same form, you can think of Romanian as having just three, of which one isn’t used all that much. Serbian has seven, and they’re all distinct.

It’s not just nouns. Hungarian verbs are fiendishly complex, too. There’s the whole concept of definite and indefinite conjugations. Definite would be eating a pizza, say, while indefinite would be just eating. At least I think that’s what the difference is.

When I got back from Vienna I fired up Duolingo in Hungarian. By the fourth lesson I realised it was hopeless and gave up. I can’t hope to even scratch the surface of such a language by playing a game, which is what Duolingo is. It doesn’t help with pattern recognition, which is vital when the language is so complex and alien to anything I’ve seen before.

Before Hungarian there was German. I felt almost ashamed at how little I knew of such a well-known language. While clearly much easier than Hungarian, German seems full of traps. Langsam, meaning slow, sounds slow. But then so does schnell (snail?), meaning fast. Then there are the crazy-looking space-bar-free words. Even some sensible-length words like Borschtsch, a kind of soup, look completely ridiculous. I saw a sign for Schifffahrt – a water taxi on the Danube – which looked pretty damn silly too.

Then on my trip to Maribor I was confronted with Slovenian. Just like Serbian and the other Slavic languages, it’s highly inflected, though nowhere near as extreme as Hungarian. Slovenian has six cases, one fewer than Serbian which also has the vocative. (The vocative is used when a person or thing is addressed directly; Romanian also has this case to a limited extent.) One major phonetic difference between Slovenian and Serbian is that Slovenian has final devoicing. This means that voiced consonant sounds at the end of the word, such as b, d or g, are replaced by their unvoiced counterparts, p, t and k respectively, even though their spellings may remain the same. Most Slavic languages and many others like German have this feature, and I can’t say I’m a fan. I like a nice strong b or g at the end of a word.

Just like Serbian, Slovenian is full of prefixes and suffixes. The cases give you the suffixes, while the prefixes are attached to verbs to denote completion or direction or a bunch of other things. A common prefix in both languages (I think) is po-, while -om is a common suffix. That meant I kept seeing pom a lot. It caught my eye because I now see that word every time I get in my car.

It was only when I returned from Slovenia, many months after my purchase, that I saw another car with POM on its plate, registered in Timiș. It was a sporty red Fiat with the top down. Then yesterday I saw a rather more prosaic POM – a white van – registered in Bucharest. It’s nice to know I’m not alone after all.

A bit better today, certainly. We topped out at “only” 35, so that helped, but still almost no energy or enthusiasm. Most of this flat is a mess. I was struggling in my four hours of lessons with various boys. The mother of two of the boys insists on me sending her sheets which she prints out and they fill in. This does not work, unless her goal is to make my life five times harder in which case it works perfectly. I can’t see what they’re doing.

Before my lessons I picked some plums in Mehala. One woman asked me if I’ve I’d got permission from her neighbour. They didn’t look like they were on her neighbour’s (or anyone else’s) property – the tree was on what I call a berm after living in NZ for 13 years – and anyway her neighbour didn’t seem particularly interested in them. They were fully ripe; three more days and they’d have had it. I said nothing and left. There were plenty more trees down the road.

I’m now going to scale the steep berm of language once again. About 30 hours ago a luxury yacht named Bayesian sank in a storm in Sicily, probably killing seven on board. The ship’s name comes from Bayesian inference and Bayes’ theorem, some nifty statistical stuff that Thomas Bayes came up with in 1763. In fact there’s a whole load of stuff named after the man. As far as I see it, Bayes theory is basically this: you have a “prior” or “gut feeling” about something probabilistic, then you get new information that may cause you to shift that feeling in one direction or another by a certain amount. For example, I have a coin in my pocket. My “prior” is that it’s fair: both heads and tails have a 50% probability. Then I toss it ten times and get nine heads. That probably won’t convince me to shift my prior much. Nine heads out of ten is rare, but not super rare. But then I keep tossing the coin, and after 100 flips I’ve got 85 heads. Now I’m convinced that I’ve got a seriously skewed coin. Getting that many heads from 100 flips of a fair coin is one in a squillion dillion, give or take. But what is the real probability of getting a head on this particular coin? The more flips you do, the less notice you take of your original prior (50% in this case) and the more weight you put on what you actually see (85% or whatever). Bayes’ theory tells you how much to weight your prior as opposed to your observed information, according to how much information you’ve observed. Anyway, it seems this Bayesian stuff is very lucrative for certain people, including the owner of the yacht, Mike Lynch, who is now presumed dead. He has had major court proceedings against him, and weirdly his co-defendant was killed by a car while running on Saturday. The word Bayesian has all of a sudden entered the mainstream.

I watched a video on the sinking, or tried to – I’m finding it hard to take in new information. I was struck by the Italian journalist they interviewed named Alina Trabbatoni. Her English, which she spoke with a standard English accent, was extraordinary. Better than fluent. You’d never know she wasn’t a native. With one exception: her pronunciation of innovative when describing the yacht’s mast. She said i-NOV-uh-tiv, with second-syllable stress, pronouncing the “nov” bit just like in “novel”. My students have come up with this pronunciation too over the years; it isn’t a rare word. But as far as I’m aware, native speakers never say it this way. Brits (like me) go with IN-uh-vuh-tiv, while Americans say IN-uh-vay-tiv, sometimes even shifting the main stress to the “vay” part. I checked Wiktionary just in case, and it told me that in-NOV-uh-tiv was the default pronunciation for Brits! I don’t believe that for one minute. I checked Youglish, a very handy tool where they play short chunks of popular YouTube videos containing a word that you specify, and nobody, not even the Brits, ever said i-NOV-uh-tiv.

Finally, scone. How do you say it? I rhyme it with gone, just like about half of those surveyed in Cambridgeshire where I grew up. But I think Mum being a New Zealander made it a sure thing that I’d say it that way. I remember Mum’s mother joking one time about the rhymes-with-bone pronunciation, as if it was ridiculously upper-class for NZ. Mum, as well as her mother, often made scones, but I had to laugh at the bit about people’s preferences for putting the jam or the cream on first. Mum’s scones, though delicious, came with margarine. The idea of having either jam or cream with them, let alone both in either order, would have been absurdly decadent.

Three lessons tomorrow, leaving time for packing. Then a seven-hour drive (but I bet it’s more) to Maribor.