Month: December 2015

Life :)

A simple Christmas

December 31, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a good Christmas with Mum and Dad and nobody else. It was far less stressful, particularly for Mum, than anything involving extended family would have been.

On Christmas Eve we went to the church across the way. We had the same priest as two years ago. He’s fluent in at least three languages, including Maori and Spanish, but I bet he knows more. We sang carols (well you could hardly call what I did singing) including some in Maori and a lovely one in Samoan that I hadn’t heard before. Unlike in Geraldine or Temuka (or our local church in the UK for that matter), the congregation was a real melting pot and the service was an interesting and uplifting one.

The weather could hardly have been better the whole time my parents were here. Island Bay on Christmas Day was simply beautiful. Our Christmas dinner included turkey and ham (as all six of my subsequent dinners have done). I got a new camera for Christmas and will put up some more photos when I get the right sort of adapter.

On Boxing Day we went to Palmerston North to see Mum’s younger brother and his kids and grandkids; one day of that kind of thing is enough. I was able to pop out and see a friend who has just moved there from Wellington. He was busking in the middle of town. I was slightly envious of him for being able to (a) play the guitar, and (b) do so in front of people. He said he gets a better hourly rate from his busking than from his job, and I imagine on a 27-degree Boxing Day it was better still. His repertoire is currently only twelve songs; he’ll need to expand that. I hadn’t been to Palmy since 2004 and it was good to have a look around. The Regent Theatre stood out as a very attractive building amongst some rather ugly ones.

CAM01413

On the 27th we went back to Island Bay so that Dad could take some photos (his batteries were flat the first time); I’d like it if he could do more paintings of Wellington. We all agreed that Island Bay would be a good place for my parents’ hypothetical fifth house. (I say hypothetical. I wouldn’t totally put it past them.) As well as being very picturesque, I think it would be an invigorating place to live. That evening Dad and I saw the latest Star Wars film at the Embassy. Dad hadn’t seen any of the previous films; I had but I’m not exactly fanatical. This one was great though. You didn’t need to have seen any of the others to enjoy it, and it was a whole heap of fun.

The next day went to Peter Jackson’s incredibly lifelike Great War Exhibition just across the road. I’d been there before and will definitely go there again. After lunch we went to Makara. I’d been wanting to go there for ages but I’d never really had anyone to go with. It was a lovely spot, and on yet another perfect day it was very popular. Someone had just bought a futon and transported it by (barely big enough) boat to their home. There are some good walking tracks there, which I’ll keep in mind should I ever get back there. My car had a good workout getting to Makara and back. Its clutch is slipping, and the cost of a new clutch (if I need one) might be prohibitive. I might have to get by without a car for a while, just like I plan to in Sibiu or Timișoara or wherever I end up. (I’m too far down the track now to let anything in my control stop me from going to Romania. Of course plenty of things could happen between now and September that are out of my hands, but otherwise if I don’t go through with this I’ll regret it. Mum and Dad are very supportive of my plans, and for that I’m grateful.)

After dinner that evening the three of us played Scrabble. Big mistake. Scrabble really brings Mum’s competitiveness to the fore. This time it made me more competitive too. Mum played very well and both she and I made big scores. I won in the end but that hardly mattered; the game really wasn’t fun. This morning I tried making a Romanian Scrabble crossword without a board and removing the K, Q, W’s and Y’s. I started with ten letters and then added another five whenever I had a completed crossword or got stuck. I tried to do as little rearranging as possible along the way.

My parents left on the 29th. It was almost a stress-free Christmas. We were able to appreciate the simpler things like the pohutukawas which are wonderful at this time of year, and the baby seagulls which hatched on the roof of the apartment block opposite, as they have done every early December since I moved in here. This year there are three, and they’ll fly the nest any day now.

We almost certainly had our last earthquake of 2015 this morning (there’s just half an hour left), and for once I’m optimistic about the year ahead.

Life :)

Modern gestures: please translate!

December 21, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I sat on the bank of the Basin and watched some provincial cricket, along with, er, forty-odd other people. It got me thinking. Sportsmen are really tactile, aren’t they? During Otago’s run chase against Wellington there were fist bumps, high-fives, low-fives, shoulder slaps and all manner of other gestures that I can hardly describe. I hadn’t taken much notice of this before, in the same way that until a couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have taken much notice if two people were conversing in Romanian. And that’s precisely it: this vast array of modern gestures is a foreign language to me. When I drop my colleague off after work, he’ll sometimes want to shake hands with me. That’s a gesture I’m entirely comfortable with; to me a handshake implies acknowledgement of the other person, and it’s good to acknowledge the other person. But other times he’ll want a fist bump or even a high-five, and on those occasions I feel distinctly uncomfortable. I’ve even seen him fist-bump our boss, who unlike me, seems au fait with the concept. I’m guessing fist bumps are meant to imply mateship, something more than just acknowledgement.
As it happened, Wellington’s early declaration paid off, and they skittled Otago’s last six batsmen cheaply when all three results had been perfectly possible. As I walked home (all of three minutes) I passed what must have been the Wellington changing room and I could hear them singing something in celebration of their victory. That’s some kind of mateship going on there again, isn’t it? Even low-grade rugby and football teams have those rituals, don’t they? I’ve never been part of anything like that myself. I play my interclub tennis, and I win and go home, or I lose and go home, or I stick around a bit to watch other people win or lose, and then go home. I have certainly played in teams where we’ve been to the pub afterwards and had a good chat, but singing has never been on the menu.

Temperatures soared into the mid-thirties today. Not here in Wellington – that would just be silly – but on the East Coast of the South Island. Christchurch and Dunedin both broke their all-time records for December; Timaru equalled theirs. (Note that this is New Zealand where “all-time” isn’t that much time. In the UK I’d sometimes hear that it had been “the wettest October since 1806” and those two centuries of weather records would remind me of how pioneering the UK was.) My planned adventure will give me both extremes of temperature to look forward to.

The Spanish general election was interesting, and it will now take a long time to form a government. Sometimes a messy outcome can be a good one, and I think this is one of those times. The two-party system has been well and truly obliterated by two newcomers to the game whose leaders are barely my age. Interestingly, as far as I can see, Spain doesn’t have a significant far-right anti-immigration party. This result is a version of what might have happened in the UK in May if (a) the polls had been accurate and (b) they had a better electoral system, not that the Spanish system is perfect (it gives extra weight to rural voters). Gosh, when the UK exit poll came out on that Friday morning (my time) I almost fell off my chair. I had to go out for lunch and had a hard time keeping the food down.

My parents arrive here tomorrow night. They’ll be staying with me until next Tuesday; we’ll have a very low-key Christmas. I’ve blown up some balloons and hung a bit of tinsel around the place, but really I haven’t been arsed. It will be great to have them here though.

Tennis

Handicap tennis

December 18, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

I played in a handicap tournament at the tennis club last weekend (and nearly didn’t because I was still a bit, um, handicapped after the tumble I took in my interclub match). Tennis has never embraced handicapping in the same way that golf has. I think that’s because tennis between players of vastly different standards isn’t much of a game, and giving one player a head start doesn’t magically change that. In golf you’re playing your own game, which isn’t affected (except maybe psychologically) by whatever ridiculous shots Jordan Spieth pulls off if you happen to be playing alongside him. There’s no golfing equivalent of “getting his high kicking serve back” or “combating his heavy topspin”. However, it’s fun to try handicapping in tennis once in a while, and last weekend’s tournament had a certain novelty factor which I enjoyed.

We didn’t use normal tennis scoring; instead we simply played up to 31 points, swapping serves after every five. I played six matches in all:

Singles:
Round 1: started 10 points behind (‒5 to +5), won by 12
Round 2: started 5 points ahead (0 to ‒5), lost by 2.

Mixed doubles:
Round 1: started 5 points ahead (0 to ‒5), won by 8
Round 2: started 5 points ahead (0 to ‒5), won by 11
Semi-final: started 10 points ahead (0 to ‒10), lost by 5.

Men’s doubles:
Round 1: started even, lost by 13.

There are more “levels” in tennis than people think. A better player can easily overcome a ten-point handicap against a weaker player, even in a first-to-31 match. In my first-round singles match I needed to win 36 points out of 61, or 59% of the points. I comfortably managed that, winning 72%. Naturally I was disappointed to lose my second-round match by just two points. My opponent wiped out my head start on a few occasions, but each time I was able to win the next point, most notably at 24-all when I served an ace. He did get his nose in front for the first time at 28-27, but I won the next point and then hit an angled return winner to lead 29-28. At that stage I thought I would do it, but crucially he hit my backhand sideline in the middle of a long rally on the next point, and he always had the upper hand on the last two points.

The men’s singles draw was spiced up somewhat by the presence of a ten-year-old by the name of Angus. He’s at the club with his dad all the time; he can’t get enough of the game. He scored two wins over fully-grown men, one from scratch, the other giving away five points! I’d have played him in the semi-finals, giving him ten points, had I won my second match. One of Angus’s victims (the one who had the head start) was from the UK; he said he’d tell his mates back home that Angus was six foot four with biceps and pecs that you wouldn’t believe.

My mixed doubles partner, who was all of five foot two, was something of a surprise package. She was very consistent and had some unorthodox shots, as I do sometimes. In our second match we seemingly had a zillion match points up our sleeve and needed about half a zillion as our male opponent found some form right at the end. Some way through our semi-final we still had our ten-point buffer, but starting from 0 to ‒10, instead of 5 to ‒5 as my first singles opponent did against me, made it a longer match. I knew they had a long time to catch us up which they jolly well did. It was a good match all the same. Starting the men’s doubles at scratch was a bit of a joke; they were strong doubles players and we’d both have been amazed if we’d got within cooee.

Britain’s recent Davis Cup triumph was their first in almost 80 years. It was rightly celebrated, but it shouldn’t disguise the fact that Britain has a dearth of top tennis players: just two men and two women inside the world’s top 100. Having lived in France (where they currently have ten men and three women in the world’s top 100), it’s easy to see why. In France, it’s seen as a game for everyone; in the UK it’s seen as a game for toffs. Unless the image of tennis changes radically in Britain, Wimbledon and Davis Cup wins are likely to remain once-in-a-lifetime events.

Tennis

Interclub tennis – Week 5

December 10, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

Week 5 was 3½ weeks after Week 4, and Week 6 won’t be until February. I didn’t make the schedule.

As usual, we played the doubles first. I seemed to have a target painted on me; whenever my partner served to the deuce side, the returner aimed straight at me at the net. I’m surprised I don’t see that tactic more often. I’m not a good net player and before long I retreated to the baseline. The first set was nip-and-tuck but we eked it out 7-5. We probably only won half the points, if that, but all three of the crucial sudden-death points went our way. So did a fourth in the second set which we won 6-2. There wasn’t much between us but we had the better of the longer rallies.

My confidence in the singles was boosted when my opponent sat down to send a text during the change of ends after just one (albeit long) game. I led 2-0, but on the last point of the third game I fell on the concrete and scraped my hand and both knees. I managed to get some plasters so that I could at least continue playing, but on the resumption I fell 4-2 behind. I was physically hampered, my ball toss was terrible, my forehand was starting to elude me, my opponent’s game was too similar to mine, I was getting very few cheap points, and things simply weren’t looking good. He chucked in two double faults to begin game seven, and I was able to capitalise. I saved a break point in the eighth game to tie things up, and I never lost another game all evening. I won ten games on the trot to win 6-4 6-0 without, in truth, playing all that well. As a team we lost 4-2. I’m feeling quite sore now.

So far this season I’ve won nine matches out of ten. I certainly didn’t expect that in Week 1. My most satisfying match was the 6-1 6-1 win I had in the singles in Week 2, coming straight off a heavy loss in the doubles (my only defeat). If I even have a zone, I was in it for those 45 minutes.

Donald Trump. It’s great to have someone sticking two fingers up to the establishment, isn’t it? Uh, no. Mr Trump, of the monstrous Trump Tower I had the privilege of seeing in Chicago in September, is very much of the establishment, and he’s a very dangerous man, currently benefiting from a very messed-up political system.

Work. The two-hour meeting we had this afternoon made it clearer than ever that I can’t keep doing this shit. Seriously.

 

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.