Month: November 2015

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.
My big plan

Places I might end up in 2 – I spy with my little eye…

November 15, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

The death toll from the nightclub fire in Bucharest reached 48, and many more suffered severe burns. But the response to this national tragedy has been encouraging and frankly remarkable. Many thousands of Romanians took to the streets in anti-corruption protests and affected political change. That’s quite something. It will interesting to see where Romania goes from here under their new prime minister.

I’ve almost made up my mind to go to Romania next September. Exciting? Yes. Scary? Yes, but the alternative is even scarier. In trying to map out my future, there are no unscary roads to go down. September still seems an eternity away – I’d rather go sooner – but I’d like to teach English voluntarily for six months before I go. It should be a good month to arrive – it’s the start of the academic year and it will (hopefully) be neither too hot nor too cold. The big question – well, one of the big questions – is where do I base myself.

The city of Sibiu is in the Transylvania region in the centre of Romania, made famous by Dracula (it wasn’t long ago that I thought Transylvania was a made-up country). It’s about half the size of Wellington, population-wise. The word Sibiu is pronounced how you’d imagine it is, except that when two vowels clash heads in Romanian at least one of them gets mangled, and in this case the final ‘u’ becomes more of a ‘w’ sound. I find the combination of letters and sounds in Sibiu to be quite pleasing.

Sibiu is beautiful, clearly. The medieval part of town looks incredible, and I understand it got a major facelift about ten years ago. It is just me or is every town and city in Romania chock-full of stunningly beautiful buildings that get even more beautiful the closer you look at them? Many of the buildings have large attic spaces with small eyelid-shaped windows; the eyes are quite a noticeable architectural feature. This blog has some brilliant photos of Sibiu, showing the cobbled streets and one of the amazing Orthodox churches. The central square looks pristine, but like the blog writer, I’m a big fan of less-than-perfect. Cracked paintwork, decaying concrete, yep I love that stuff too. Sibiu is surrounded by mountains and offers a fantastic backdrop. You can traverse one of the mountain ranges via the famous Transfăgărășan road (definitely not an unscary road) which is understandably a Top Gear favourite.

Part of the attraction of Romania for me is that it’s mostly off the tourist trail. But for how long? Sibiu’s Wikitravel page talks about “tons of great souvenir shops” and give it the best part of another year and I might have already left it too late. I’ve had a look at apartments for rent in Sibiu; they’re even cheaper than in Timișoara, so from a purely financial perspective it’s definitely on my radar.

Wherever in Romania I end up, there’s the sense that yeah baby, this is happening. And man that feels good.

Life :)

The system isn’t working

November 15, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last weekend when I was down in Geraldine, I saw my brother on FaceTime. Wow, what a difference. He had a horror year in New Zealand and needed at least another year to get over that, but he’s much happier now. I saw his girlfriend for the first time; it was quite disconcerting seeing someone who could easily be my sister-in-law, for the first time in that way, method, format, platform, whatever the word is. I’ll get to see her in the normal way when she and my brother come to New Zealand for three weeks in February.

On Monday I went down the North Otago coast with Mum and Dad. It was a grey old day. I’ve never seen quite so many seals as there were around Kakanui. We made several detours to look at potential real estate options. If they do buy something down there, it’ll probably be a holiday home. I asked Dad what they plan to do with their house, which will eventually be too big for them. He said to me, “Whatever happens, I know we’ll be stuck in fucking Geraldine.” He doesn’t swear that often. Mum was born in Geraldine; it would take a lot to prise her away. There was fog in Timaru on Tuesday early morning which delayed my flight to Wellington by 3½ hours, so I arrived at work at lunchtime. I didn’t mind being stuck at the airport at all; with a book and the various puzzles in the Timaru Herald I had plenty to do.

It wasn’t easy to watch my parents plan their future, which at 65 and 66, they (and especially Mum) expect to be long. Their time horizons are longer than mine at 35. From my perspective, watching them pore over real estate brochures and websites was a bit like watching the last ten minutes of the All Blacks against a crappy team like, I dunno, France, with the score delicately poised at 48-7. Look, I think the All Blacks are going to be OK. Mind if I change the channel?

I realise I never mentioned the All Blacks’ World Cup win. It was well worth celebrating, not just because that team is one of the best to ever play the game, but also because they were so gracious and sportsmanlike in victory. Other successful sports teams (cough – Aussie cricket team – cough) could take a leaf out of the All Blacks’ book.

Mum has worked hard and saved hard; she deserves to enjoy her later life. What annoys me though is her assumption that if you don’t reap the financial rewards that she has, that’s purely down to your own stupidity or even immorality. Wealth equals morality, who would have thought? She even tars a whole generation with the “stupid and immoral” brush. There are hundreds of thousands of baby boomers up and down the country who think the same way and vote the same way as Mum does, and they’ll all live to 108. (Yes I know I’m getting close to tarring a whole generation with the same brush here.) I was explaining this to my colleague on the way home from work on Friday. He’s 27, and on the face of it even more screwed by the system than me, except he’s not because he’s circumventing the system entirely. About time I did the same thing.

Thanks to my whitewash tennis win, I was able to attend yesterday’s TPP protest. The turnout was much smaller than the one in August; many people now think it’s a fait accompli. My colleague gave an impassioned speech outside Parliament, probably the best of the lot. I can barely imagine doing something like that. Someone (correctly) said that if Richie McCaw had made a speech decrying the TPP, it would have made a far bigger impact than all of yesterday’s speeches and protesters combined. I’m not very good at estimating these numbers, but I’d guess that about 1000 people turned up, along with one dreadlocked Hungarian sheepdog known as a Komondor.

I was oblivious to the atrocity in Paris until last night when my cousin and her family popped over to have pizza. Where do you even start? Tim said, “It’s Paris. What do you expect? People get shot and blown up there.” How sad that that’s what Paris means to a ten-year-old boy.

Tennis

Interclub tennis – Week 4

November 14, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Thursday I played a practice set of singles at the club. I completely lost my ball toss and threw in 15 or so double faults including at least three in the tie-break which I somehow won 10-8. After that, I expected to have a tough time of it in this morning’s interclub.

One of our doubles opponents – the one I’d be playing in the singles – was from the north of England and had quite a footbally demeanour on court. “Come on boys, let’s get it together.” The four of us had a combined age of at least 170 but we were all “boys”. We won the first set 6-3 but went through a sticky patch in the middle of the second. We led 40-0 on my partner’s serve at 2-2 but I plonked an overhead into the net on the next point and we lost the game on sudden death. We lost the next game too and at that stage there was a distinct whiff of a super tie-break (and it really does pong as I’ve mentioned before), but from 2-4 we rattled off the last four games for the match. I still had ball-toss issues affecting my serve but I managed to keep them in check. We split the four sudden death points evenly.

Then came the singles against the second left-hander I’ve played this year already. In Auckland I’d go whole seasons without ever facing one. My opponent arrived in New Zealand in 2003, just like I did. He picked up the game as an adult; that suggests that he’s a better all-round sportsman than me. That I can play tennis is due in large part to hitting a ball against a wall, semi-obsessively, between the ages of six and nine. I played a lot with my parents in the back yard then too. By the time I stepped onto a tennis court I’d already spent three years developing appalling technique, which the lack of space in our back garden necessitated. But I could keep a rally going for ages. We had quite a few long rallies in our match this morning. I was just on the right end of most of them, and I beat him in a tick over 40 minutes without losing a game. I’ve now lost just nine games in four singles matches.

My partner won his singles 7-6 (9-7), 6-0, saving five set points in the tie-break. That match brought to mind a painful defeat I suffered a few years ago. We won overall by four matches to two.

Life :)

Please come back

November 12, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

I flew down to Timaru on Friday. Ascending over Wellington, seeing the vast Southern Alps from 23,000 feet, and flying down the coast to almost skid over Temuka where I spent about a year of my life. It all made me feel good inside. Mum picked me up from the airport and within half an hour I was at my parents’ place which looked even more beautiful than it normally does in the springtime. They have probably a dozen fruit trees – apples, plums, plumcots, Black Boy peaches, you name it. They’ll even get a good crop of figs this year.

On Saturday some people came over to look at some of Dad’s paintings. They were doing a tour of gardens around Geraldine and the paintings were just a bonus. Dad said they were tyre kickers who would never buy. Their car pulled up and Dad dealt with them. Mum and I stayed in the kitchen. Mum said, “They won’t believe that an artist could live in a house like this.” I felt a bit sick. Jeez Mum, everything is wrong with that sentence. Why do you have to live vicariously through Dad? (You’ve had a long teaching career that you can be extremely proud of.) And why are you so concerned about your image? The next minute the tyre kickers were taking photos. “Oh no, they’re taking photos of the rhododendrons! But there are so many weeds!” This was code for “Please keep taking photos! Lots and lots of them!” They did buy a painting, of the lovely Central Otago village of Ophir. I was there last year, between Christmas and New Year, when he took the photo. It was a stunning evening. I loved visiting that part of the country; I’d never been there before.

When I was growing up, Mum had a spinning wheel, a guitar, she used to run, she spent time in the garden because she enjoyed it, she even attended maths classes in the evenings and taught me what she learned. Now the golf club is where it’s at. She spends a lot of time in the garden still, but it’s a very different place to the one in the UK. I love 2015 Mum so much, but I wish I could get 1987 Mum back.

My big plan

Places I might end up in 1 – Timmy who?

November 5, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

Romania has been in the news in the last few days. Last weekend 32 people died in a fire in a Bucharest nightclub which had only one exit, and now the prime minister has resigned amid anti-corruption protests in the capital and elsewhere.

If I do end up in Romania, it won’t be Bucharest. I’ve never been there but I can safely say that it’s too big, too noisy and too intimidating for me. Thankfully Romania has a nice selection of medium-sized cities, like Iași, Cluj, Brașov and …

Timișoara. Bet you’ve never heard of it. It’s stuck out on a limb a bit, in the west of the country, closer to the Hungarian capital Budapest than to Bucharest (which is nice, because I’d love to visit Budapest). It’s a compact city, a bit like Wellington, with a similar population. How to say Timișoara? Well, the s-with-a-comma is pronounced “sh”, while the “oa” is one of the famous Romanian mashed-together vowel combinations and it’s pronounced similar to “wa”. Put it all together and you get “timmy-SHWAR-a”.

The architecture is stunning. My two favourite buildings, just from Google street view and one or two other blogs, are Casa Brück and Banca de Scont (discount bank), both on the Piaţa Unirii. One day I’ll see and touch those beautiful buildings. I’ll make sure I do. The city has plenty of parks and green space and is extremely walkable, but it also has good public transport: trams as well as Wellington-style (for now) trolley buses. If I go to Romania I won’t get a car (not initially anyway) because driving there is a nightmare.

I’m lucky to live within (longish) walking distance of three markets here in Wellington. If I was to live in Timișoara there would be more than that, and they wouldn’t only be open at weekends. Markets are clearly a big part of daily life there.

Wellington also has a lot of street art. In July someone painted yin-and-yang dolphins on an electrical box just opposite me, livening up this end of my street in the process. I would have put up a photo of it, but some bastard tagged it two weekends ago. Timișoara is also teeming with street art. They even have an annual street art festival there.

Wellington is the most politically motivated city in New Zealand, which I suppose it should be as the capital. Timișoara came to the fore in December 1989, sparking the revolution that led to Ceaușescu’s demise. The country still has enormous problems but has come on in leaps and bounds since then. That’s all quite exciting to me. Most of the history I hear about seems so remote, but I remember 1989, which was an incredible year politically. And to think that when everything kicked off in Timișoara, I was living in New Zealand, probably lying on the beach at Caroline Bay.

Supposedly Timișoara has a bohemian café/bar where you can lie in a hammock and eat ice cream for about a dollar. Am I too old for that? No, dammit! I suggested to my mum that I buy her a hammock for Christmas. She said she wouldn’t want one because she wouldn’t have time for it. What? How? You’re 66 and you’ve worked hard all your life. How could you possibly not have time? I think I might buy her it anyway.

I mentioned Timișoara, among other places, in an email to my dad. No reply. Assuming he actually got my email, there’s nothing neutral about a no reply. But that’s OK. He doesn’t have to like my plans.

Tomorrow I’m flying down to see my parents. I’ll be flying into Timaru. I must like places that begin with Tim. My cousin’s middle boy is called Tim, and when I was in Boston I bought him a T-shirt with the name of a fairly famous university emblazoned on it, so that it he sees his name when he looks in the mirror. I also got it for him because he’s a smart kid and could go there one day. I think he liked it.

Life :)

What do you know?

November 4, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

I don’t really get social media but I’m trying Twitter (my handle is @PlutomanDotCom). I’d love there to be an option where you can just get every fifth tweet that someone spews out rather than all of them.

Saturday night was fun. Six of us – all blokes – met up at the pub next to where I used to work. One hasn’t got a job and wants to travel around NZ in a van, one hasn’t got a job but has a PhD and a house that he wants to sell so he can travel around NZ in a caravan for several months, one also has a PhD and is a mine of general knowledge but is struggling to get steady work, one is looking for a job but is only 25 so has heaps of time, one has a job but wants to move 11,000 miles away to do something rather different, and one has just started a very normal office job and seems happy with it. I’m not sure that any of us are in relationships – the subject never came up. If everyone had been normal with supposedly normal jobs and families, I’m sure I’d have found the evening horrible.

Last night I attended a quiz at a different pub to the one we went to on Saturday, but with some of the same people, plus some others. One of the women brought her two-week-old baby daughter along. We finished second out of ten or so teams. I was more helpful than I expected to be, but anything to do with movies or popular culture and I’m a complete dead loss. History and I’m not much better. We won a $30 bar tab and spent the money on ice cream rather than alcohol. The barman treated us like we were from Planet Zorg when me made our order.

I arrived at work this morning to find a notice attached to my monitor. Don’t log on to this or any computer because you’ve got another virus. (I had one about four months ago.) How embarrassing. I couldn’t do anything until about ten, and it felt good to almost finish the cryptic crossword (I used to enjoy those) and to start a new book. I was hoping I could go home where I could be productive, but I had to hang around all day and pretend to get work done on someone else’s PC. I don’t know, or particularly care, how I got the virus, but the IT manager made it pretty clear that he did care.

The Kansas City Royals, who won both the baseball games I’ve ever been to, have now won the World Series. For us outsiders, “World Series” is an easy name to make fun of – after all, the competition features 29 American teams and one from Canada – but I’m coming round to the idea that it’s just a name, and they could call it Dave if they wanted to.