by Yesterday I mentioned Lake Balaton, which I flew over the day before. Well, I’ll probably pass by it (it depends which way I go) on the way to Maribor next Thursday. It has an area of 600 km2, compared to Lake Geneva’s 580. I thought I’d check Taupo, and that turns out to be a fraction bigger, at 616 km2.
This is one of those occasional posts where I focus on language. I’m more likely to do that if I’ve just been away or I’m about to go away or, as is the case right now, both.
On the plane back from Luton I took this picture of an ad by Babbel, a language learning app. You get six months free but only if you pay for the first six months. If you have to buy A to get B free, B is not bloody free!
There’s plenty to unpack in these translations, which aren’t always exact. Something that monolingual English speakers don’t appreciate is that, more often that not, English is just weird. Look at the translations for “There’s sand in my mouth”. They all say “I have sand in (the) mouth.” The verb have is always there, and there’s no sign of the possessive that we use in English. You could say “I’ve got sand in my mouth” in English if you wanted to, but in all the other languages “have” is the default option. English is the odd one out, as it is so often. In fact, other languages (including Romanian) use “have” in all sorts of ways that we just don’t. This morning at the market, a lady asked for the price of some flowers. She asked “Ce preț au?” or “What price do they have?” In Romanian, as in many other languages, you say “You have right”, “This doesn’t have sense” or “I have 44 years”. Another thing to note here is that the Spanish for sand is “arena”; that comes from Latin and is the source of “arena” in English – ancient amphitheatres were covered in sand.
Now look at all the words for shark. It’s one of those weird words, like “butterfly” and “left” (the direction), which translate completely differently even in similar languages. Butterfly is papillon in French, mariposa in Spanish, farfalla in Italian, Schmetterling in German, and fluture in Romanian. (At least the Romanian for shark, rechin, is basically the same as the French.)
Another thing is punctuation. Here English is in the majority, for a change. We put our question marks and exclamation marks directly after the last word in the sentence. Spanish does too, but they also write an inverted question (or exclamation) mark at the start. ¿Flamboyant, isn’t it? ¡Olé! French differs in a more subtle way from the norm: they make do with just the one mark, but put a space before it.
Now Slovenian. At first glance it seems less interesting than Serbian, the last language I took a keen(ish) interest in. Both languages are Slavic and therefore related. However, Slovenian is always written using the Latin alphabet, whereas Serbian can be written in either Latin or Cyrillic. Slovenian also lacks one or two letters that Serbian has. (For instance, there aren’t both hard and soft equivalents of the English ch and sh sounds.) A very funky feature of Slovenian, present in Maori (I think) and very few other languages, is dual number, in addition to singular and plural. Just like Serbian, nouns can be masculine, feminine and plural, and masculine nouns are also grammatically dependent on their animacy or inanimacy. The Slovenian numbers are similar to Serbian and most other Slavic languages, with one big exception: in numbers above 20, the tens and units are reversed, so for 24 you say “four and twenty” just like German and Dutch do and English used to do (sometimes at least), as in the nursery rhyme in which four and twenty blackbirds are baked in a pie. Perhaps the most interesting feature of all is the number of dialects Slovenian has, considering how geographically small its catchment area is.
How should you pronounce Kamala? Americans say, look it’s easy, it’s just “comma” + “la”. But that does not work for British English speakers like me, nor for Kiwis and Aussies for that matter. This video explains all. (Geoff Lindsey, who made the video, is brilliant by the way.) I dearly hope we hear a lot of that name between now and (at least) 2029.
Finally, a word I’ve been hearing a lot lately: performative. I can’t remember hearing it ten or even five years ago, but now I can’t get through a news article without seeing it. If I look at the definition on Wiktionary, I see it does have an original meaning: “being enacted as it is said”, such as when you say “I do” in a wedding ceremony. But the modern meaning is rather different: “being done as a performance in order to create an impression”. I’ve sometimes seen the word in the context of “performative work”: work done not to achieve anything important but purely as part of a game. In my experience of the corporate world, a lot of performative work went on and it was exhausting. Here’s a Google ngram showing the frequency of performative over time; my instinct that it has greatly increased in frequency was correct:
