Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics - Tennis - The UK

We should leave it at that

October 16, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The rain is lashing down and I’m grateful for it – I’d have really struggled on the tennis court. I played two hours of singles with Florin yesterday; when time ran out I was up 6-1 6-2 4-6 5-0. That second set score was deceptive – the set was a real battle of attrition, full of long rallies and close games that I somehow won. My efforts left me bereft of energy for the third set, in contrast to the Energizer bunny almost two decades my senior down the other end. I then got a second wind from somewhere. Before tennis I had three lessons – one maths and two English. My 16-year-old English student reiterated what he’d said before, that if Russian forces hypothetically attacked Romania in a couple of years’ time, he’d do all he could to flee the country rather than defend it. He said, “What is there to defend?” Yeesh, where do I start?

So New Zealand has voted in a new National-led government. It was on the cards. I felt sorry for Chris Hipkins, who seemed to me a thoroughly good chap and a very hard worker, leading a dysfunctional party and in the end flailing around trying to make something happen to turn the tide that was rapidly going out on Labour. Because that’s really what that election was – a resounding vote against the incumbents rather than a positive endorsement of National. Indeed, National got a smaller share of the vote than they did in 2017 when they lost power to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour. Crucially this time though, they had some partners to (comfortably) get them over the line. What an opportunity Labour squandered. They won a rare majority in 2020, a mandate for real change, and then they pissed around on fringe issues that didn’t help to make people’s lives better, instead of say, let me see, building homes that people can actually afford. This all serves as a warning to the UK Labour Party. The next UK election is a year or so away, and with the Tories being frankly disgusting right now, Labour should win. But if they don’t use that power to bring about positive change (and boy does the country need it), it won’t mean a thing, and the Tories will likely be back in charge next time around.

On Monday I met a lady from New Zealand (an Aucklander) who lived in Timișoara from 2006 to 2010 and was back visiting the city as part of a round-the-world trip. She was staying with Dorothy. She was pleasant enough, but we just didn’t have that much in common. In the evening I had a new maths student – a 15-year-old girl – who came here for a two-hour session. The following day – the day Dad arrived in London – was a shocker for me. I didn’t quite plumb the depths of 31st January, but at times I got close as I felt overwhelmed. The “emergency” online maths lesson with Matei, which finished at 9:45 that evening, helped to calm me down. Work was going OK; it was just everything else that was a mess. Wednesday was the miraculous day of the Barclays money. Thursday was a weird one. I rode to the north of the city for my lesson with the spoilt teenage girl, but she wasn’t there. I rang the doorbell and called her on the phone. Nothing. I hung around for 20 minutes and went home. Oh dear. Did I offend her so badly that she wanted nothing more to do with me? Did she tell her father and they decided to get back at me? Just after I got home, she sent me a message to say that her phone had died, and we had an online lesson in the evening. On Friday the electrician was supposed to come but he didn’t. Later that day I had an allergy test – 24 pricks on my arms – which confirmed what I thought, that my sinus problems aren’t allergy-related at all. When the receptionist gave me the bill for the test (525 lei, equivalent to NZ$190 or £90), my jaw literally dropped. Now that allergies are out, I’m free to get my prescription for various pills and sprays, which I’ll take until Christmas.

I had a good chat last night with Dad. I usually do have good chats with him. His days are dominated by bus trips to see his sister at a private hospital in Cambridge. He’s able to take advantage of the £2 bus fares that the government introduced earlier in the year, and which I also benefited from in June. My aunt has ups and downs but the trend is clear. She isn’t going to bother with chemo now. In fact she told him that she’d like to pop off in her sleep, sooner rather than later. I spoke to my brother on Friday, and we both sort of agreed that it might be better not to see her. In July he brought the little one over to her place, and it was the highlight of her year. She called me immediately afterwards, and the way she spoke about meeting her great-nephew was quite touching. Perhaps it’s best to leave it at that.

Language learning

Travel and language — part 3 of 3

October 13, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Travelling was fun while it lasted, but I’ve now been back for as long as I was away.

In a recent lesson with a man in his late forties, I discussed the phenomenon of shifting stress patterns as suffixes are added to certain English words. By stress here, I mean accent, or emphasis. For instance, photograph has stress on the first syllable, photographer on the second, and photographic on the third. The trio of politics/political/politician behaves in the same way. I then mentioned that there are sets of Romanian words that do the same thing, citing barbă (beard), bărbat (man), and bărbăție (manliness). He then said, hang on, barbă and bărbat have nothing to do with each other. He was wrong – even though he’d never made the connection in over 45 years of speaking Romanian, they absolutely are related. The interesting thing though is that as a native speaker he had no need to ever make the connection, whereas the link was handy for me as a learner: barbă is beard, bărbat is a bearded person, in other words a man. It’s just like how native French speakers don’t think “earth apple” when they hear pomme de terre (potato), or “small lunch” for petit déjeuner (breakfast), or “sixty-thirteen” for soixante-treize (seventy-three). (As an aside, the name Barbados means “bearded ones”, although people are unsure whether that refers to actual people or a species of bearded fig tree.)

One thing I love about long-haul travel (on the rare occasions I do it) is that I get to see other languages. I dealt with Māori in the first two posts in this series. Indonesian (at Singapore Airport) was a fun one. Air minuman, which sounds like an airline for Hobbits, just means drinking water. But two languages that became friends of sorts were Hungarian and Turkish.

Hungarian is a deceptive beast. It’s part of the Uralic language family that includes Finnish and Estonian, but it went off at a pretty steep tangent many centuries ago, and now bears little resemblance to anything else. It’s written in the familiar Roman alphabet but no matter how hard I stare at it, I can’t get a reading. Even words that you expect to be almost the same everywhere, like restaurant, are completely different. The spelling is phonetic but it has some unusual traits. The letter s on its own represents the English sh sound, while sz denotes the s in silly. Weird, right? (Hungarian zs represents the final sound of massage, while cs denotes the ch in chips.)

Hungarian has a feature called vowel harmony whereby front vowels (vowel sounds created with your tongue near the front of your mouth) go together in the same word, and likewise back vowels. You can’t mix them. (More or less. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.) Hungarian has no grammatical gender, just like English, but it seems to have pretty much everything else, such as a whole bunch of case endings. Plurals work in an interesting way. Both singular and plural nouns exist, but when you mention a number you always use the singular: “look at the horses” but “five horse”. In a way, this makes sense: as soon as you say five you know it’s plural, so you don’t repeat that fact. On that arduous journey to Budapest I had rather too much opportunity to try and pronounce the names of stations my train pulled in at: Tápiószentmárton. Sülysáp. That last one – s is pronounced sh, remember – is something like shooey-shap.

Turkish was roughly as difficult as Hungarian to make head or tail of. Interestingly, although it is from a different family to Hungarian, both languages happen to share both vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender. For over 600 years under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish was written using a form of Arabic. In 1928 under Atatürk – the great reformer – Arabic was replaced by a version of the Roman alphabet with a few extra dots and squiggles to accommodate Turkish phonology. This was a great success: literacy rates shot up and the economy grew. It’s hard to criticise a reform that paid such dividends, but after staring at a few Turkish signs I felt they could have done a better job.

In the last year or two there has been a push by the Turkish government for the country to be called Türkiye in English, not Turkey. No more birds. I’m not a fan, to put it mildly. Who are they to dictate what we call it in English? I don’t see the German government telling us to call Germany Deutschland. Then there’s the question of pronunciation. Turkey-yay? Turkey-yeah? Then there’s the spelling. Think Türkiye has just one awkward letter, the u with an umlaut? Think again. That innocuous-looking i causes all kinds of headaches. You see, Turkish has both a dotted and a dotless i (ı). The dotted one is the standard i sound you find everywhere, as in the Italian vino. The dotless one is a less common sound, similar to the vowel in Romanian în but with the tongue further back. So that the distinction is always maintained, the dotless i stays dotless in both upper and lower case, and the dotted one retains its dot even in upper case. I realised this when I saw a sign at Istanbul that read VISIT TÜRKİYE. (Istanbul, by the way, is İstanbul in Turkish.) This whole business of dotted and dotless i could have been avoided with one or two different choices a century ago. I for one will avoid all this hassle and keep calling Turkey Turkey.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Mess and a miracle

October 12, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m now into year eight of my time in Romania. Who would have thought? Since I last wrote, I’ve felt tired and overwhelmed. I’ve coped OK with work, which I’ve had plenty of, but otherwise it’s all been a mess. Literally, in the case of this flat. The living room is a pigsty, to use Mum’s usual term for the bedroom I shared with my brother until I was 13. The central heating saga drags on and on, and I’ve now gone two weeks without hot water. We’re still getting unseasonably warm weather, but the temperature will soon plummet. On Tuesday I simply lost it as my six lessons were punctured by messages and phone calls about gas meters and plug points and contacting this or that person.

Then yesterday something miraculous happened. The Barclays money turned up in my Romanian account – the one I set up last month that’s denominated in pounds. I checked it at around 3pm; it had gone in at 11 that morning. It was all so highly unlikely – Barclays hadn’t even told me that they’d made the payment – but there it was. I’ll now have to decide whether to accept their derisory £200 “compensation” offer or try for more. Fight for something like I feel I deserve (at least one more zero), or just get on with my life. It isn’t an easy decision.

Dad landed in the UK two days ago. Mum emailed me last night to say that he’d seen his sister. She’s in a bad way – if not quite as bad as we thought last week – and won’t be having chemo. I might still decide to go over there before Dad goes back to New Zealand in early November.

The horrific terrorist attack by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent retaliation have unsurprisingly dominated the news. I’ve been watching YouTube videos, trying to understand the complex history of the region. The more I see, the notion that there are good guys in the conflict becomes more ridiculous.

New Zealand’s election is a day and a bit away. From the opinion polls and the general sentiment I got when I was over there, I expect National to win, although there are a few wrinkles involving this weird party run by a guy with more than a few wrinkles himself. They just can’t get rid of him. In the short term, a change of government is probably for the best, but in the medium term I can’t see it making much difference. I can’t see National doing much to alleviate the housing crisis, for instance. They might even worsen it. After a period of calm on the election front, I can look forward to several in succession. In Romania, the presidential, parliamentary and local elections are out of sync, but next year the stars will align and we’ll be treated to all three. Then of course next November will be the biggie – the one that puts the future of democracy fully on the line.

Last weekend I only had one tennis session. Just as well – I was so tired. After my lessons on Saturday, I spent most of the two-hour session playing with three members of the same family who were all at a good level. During the points I managed surprisingly well, but in between them I had to drag myself around the court. On Sunday I met Mark in Dumbrăvița, and then Dorothy at Scârț, a bar which has a museum of communism downstairs. I really just wanted to be alone, not just on that day but for several more. No instant messages. No risk of having to communicate. Then I had a Skype chat with my cousin in New York state. He said that Joe Biden is doing a better job than most people realise, and that was my feeling too. We talked about our parents – his father had slowed down noticeably when I saw him recently.

I’m now off to the other side of town for a lesson with that very shallow 16-year-old I mentioned last time. Should be fun.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

My aunt: not looking good

October 7, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning my brother called me to say that our aunt now had a chest infection. He forwarded me an email from her consultant (third-hand by this point) who said among other things that getting her home is “looking increasingly unrealistic”. (I recently bemoaned people’s poor writing skills. This consultant’s writing, on such a delicate matter, was exemplary.) Dad arrives at Stansted on Tuesday afternoon. She might not even make it that far.

Last night I had a cyst (a double cyst, as it turned out) removed from my back. It had been there for around six months without causing any pain. My usual doctor assured me that it was benign back in July. The private clinic was state of the art, with signs everywhere written in Trajan, the all-caps font that has been used in hundreds of big-budget movie posters. Some of these signs were in a sort of English: “German rigurosity with Latin spirit”. The font almost fooled me into thinking that “rigurosity” was a real word. There were forms to fill in, as always. I didn’t know if my health insurance would cover me; I guessed not. The surgeon led me into his room. He had colossal biceps, one of which was tattooed. He clearly had a good command of English but we conducted the whole thing in Romanian. I lay down on my tummy, he gave me an anaesthetic, and then 10 or 15 minutes later it was gata – done, bits of cyst lying on a tray. The admin stuff that followed took longer to resolve than the excision. In a twist on the millennium bug, their system calculated my age as minus 57 years old, and correcting that absurdity took considerable faff. Everybody in Romania has an ID card with a long number that incorporates their date of birth as six digits – mine is 20 04 80. (Can you see where this is going?) The first digit of your ID number is 1 for male and 2 for female, if you were born in 19-something. Those born in 20-something get a 3 (male) or 4 (female) instead. But foreigners like me are classed as a different species so we get something else at the beginning; my number starts with a 7. It seems their system included a simple code – “ID number starts with 3 or above means you were born in 20-something, otherwise it’s 19-something”. As for my insurance, it paid for the consultation, but not the surgery (the bulk of the cost) or the painkillers. It total I had to pay just over 900 lei (NZ$325 or £160). I’ll have to go back in two weeks to get the stitches removed. Before that I’ve got an allergy test for my long-term sinus problem.

This morning I had another look at that bike in the barn in Dumbrăvița. I liked it and it seemed to ride well, but after last night I felt strapped for cash. The asking price was 1250 lei, I offered 1000, the guy wouldn’t budge one leu, and I rode away on my rather more rickety machine. My brother suggested I should, you know, get a bike from an actual shop and not some dodgy barn, and he’s probably right.

I had a bizarre online lesson yesterday with a girl about to turn 16. It was only our second session; last week I met her face-to-face in their very smart place in the north of the city. Her father is a doctor, her mother a dentist; by Romanian standards her family is swimming in money. When I asked her in our first meeting if she’d travelled much, she reeled off seven European cities. Marseille was dirty, Berlin was a bit boring, Barcelona was great. I assumed she meant she’d been to these places over a period of years, but she then clarified that she visited them all just this summer. Crikey. Zanzibar was last summer, and of course she’d been to Dubai. I spent some time going over the grammar rules of talking about travel experiences. Yesterday’s meeting was just weird. She’d just been to tennis training. She didn’t need to tell me where; it’s where all Timișoara’s haves go. Are you a good tennis player? “Yes, I am.” Right. I decided to ask her some discussion questions from my “teenagers” topic. That didn’t work well, because she shut the door on me at every turn. Look, this is like a game of tennis. If you don’t hit the ball back to me, we won’t get far. I actually said that. Next she made a series of arrogant statements with little to back them up – it was hard not to take the piss – then she revealed that she spends 500 lei per week at the mall and is currently pining for an iPhone 15, priced at around 4000. It isn’t your fault that you’re this shallow, I thought. Switching the topic to “Have you ever…?” was a good move on my part, because it then became all about her.

I might be making a trip to the UK before too long.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

A typical Saturday

October 2, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

All of a sudden we’ve hit the last quarter of the year, the one that includes – gasp! – Christmas. It also includes sodding Halloween, which I’ll soon be forced to discuss in my lessons with kids. I don’t have a problem with Halloween in itself, but in Romania we could do without yet another American import.

Yesterday I had five hours of lessons in Dumbrăvița. I’d planned to head to the English Conversation Club after that, then onwards to tennis. Despite taking ages to organise myself I left in plenty of time, but then I realised I’d forgotten something important and had to come back for it. That meant I had time to grab some biscuits from Kaufland to take to the club, but not enough time to also drink a coffee from the vending machine. Normally I have two coffees on a Saturday morning in quick succession, one from Kaufland and another from Matei’s dad. Yesterday though Matei’s parents were out, so I ended up going without coffee altogether. I did quadratic graphs with Matei, interspersed with random chat, then I dashed back to Kaufland for a mochaccino and a quick bite to eat before my two hours with Octavian.

I worry that 16-year-old Octavian’s rather non-native-sounding accent may now be set in stone. Is that my fault? In part, probably yes. Or more accurately, when I started teaching him six years ago (!) I was too inexperienced to know I needed to focus more on that aspect of his English. He also still makes a lot of word order mistakes – We went yesterday fishing – which I can’t beat out of him however hard I try. It’s all a little frustrating given how good his reading and listening are. Octavian made two big overseas trips over the summer. He spent four weeks in the UK, then another three with his family in the US – they visited New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and probably somewhere else I’ve missed out. I chatted to his mum about their US trip and she was shocked at the extreme poverty in so many parts of the country and the depressing lack of nutritious food. She was glad to get back home. Octavian enjoyed it more I think. As for the UK, he said that his favourite place was Norwich. How interesting. I only visited twice and liked it a lot, too. The market with brightly-coloured covers over rows of stalls, all on a slope, was gritty and crazy at the same time. Best of all I liked Norwich’s position, away from the hopelessly congested area surrounding London. The air was noticeably different there. The second time I visited Norwich was for a job interview in 2002. It was at Norwich Union, an insurance company that now goes by Aviva in all its dismal symmetry. The firm was (and presumably still is) big – its offices occupied several edifices in a row on one street. I enjoyed the train journey from Cambridge to Norwich and the lunch I got from the market. In between was the interview which wasn’t so great, in part because I didn’t really know what the job was about.

When I was done with Octavian – we worked on an IGCSE reading paper – I had an hour with his six-year-old sister. You need to bring a lot of ammo to a lesson with someone that young. A colour-the-fish sheet might last five minutes if you’re lucky. While I was in the lesson, Dorothy messaged me to say that the English Conversation Club was off (yet again) because people had decided they had better things to do. Post-Covid everybody seems to have better things to do all the time. Not too far away is a place that sells second-hand bikes, and the cancellation allowed me to pop in there. Only two were for sale – apparently it’s the end of the season. I liked the look of one of them which was going for 1250 lei (£220 or NZ$450) so I may go back there. I then had time to kill before tennis. I went past the wooden-stick-making factory for the first time since I gave those lessons there years ago. The factory is still there, but so too is one of the many small malls that have sprung up around the city in the last five years.

Tennis. Singles again, with the same guy. From 2-2 and 15-40 on my serve I won the first set 6-2, despite not serving very well (with the exception perhaps of those two points in the fifth game). In the second set I led 2-1 but then he hit one of those purple patches to win the next four games. I closed to only 5-4 down and played a scrambling point to reach 30-all on his serve in game ten. I then made errors on both the next two points; it was disappointing to concede the set in that manner. What we managed of the third set (before darkness fell) wasn’t easy for me, but I’d built a 4-1 lead by the end. In theory you should only lose one time in nine with that lead, assuming both players are of equal skill and there’s no advantage in serving.
Update: We played again this evening. We had the court booked for an hour, which only gave us time to play one long set after we warmed up. We went to a tie-break which I lost 7-4. I thought I played fine but he’s such a tough opponent when he’s on form. I look back at the people I played in that season in Wellington and all the passing winners I was able to make. No such luck with this demon at the net. The key game I felt was on his serve at 4-4. I led 0-30, he hit the baseline to win the next point, then played an extraordinary point that I thought I’d won several times, then found the baseline once again to move to 40-30. I lost the game five points later without doing a heck of a lot wrong. If he keeps this up I’ll really have my hands full. If the weather isn’t too hot, he ties his King Charles spaniel to a post while we play, but he’s now been told not to bring it (her) anymore. We laughed about how life gets harder with each passing week as barriers are continually put up around us. Next to us were some girls playing volleyball. One of them wore a top that read “Scorpions 1993 World Tour”. She wouldn’t have been born for another decade and a half. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon – that’s what it is – on here before.

I now have no hot water. That’s the next stage in the long and circuitous process of getting my central heating set up.

Someone trying to sell a saxophone (and other instruments) at the market last Sunday

Some quite beautiful baroque music on the Bega last night
International travel - Language learning

Travel and language — part 2 of 3

September 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was already going to talk about this topic – Why is it that most people can’t write anymore? – but ten minutes ago I got this automated out-of-office email from a Barclays employee:

I am now out of the office untill 2/10/23 and your email may not be responded to.

I will endevour to response to your email upon my return

Bugger me. Even “your email may not be responded to”, while correct if you allow “may not” to include probabilities of 0%, sounds pretty terrible. I’ve had a few emails from this lady now. She’s one of the more helpful members of Barclays’ staff, but she doesn’t have the faintest scooby when it comes to the English language. Even activating spellcheck, which she does sometimes, doesn’t come close to hiding that fact. You see this crap every day and everywhere, even from – especially from – people who handle really important matters, such as your money. For instance, the woman who runs Dad’s gallery in Geraldine – bringing in a tidy 48% commission – sends him emails that are beyond abysmal. Being utterly shite at using your own language used to be at least some kind of barrier to attaining money, status and power. Not any more. Social media must be partly to blame, as it is for most things. Barf out a couple of lines that you don’t even look at, then press “send”. Voilà.

Many of the people I worked with at the insurance company in Wellington were dreadful writers. They had all the fancy phrases down pat – furthermore, in the interim, core deliverables – but they could never get the basics right and couldn’t properly express themselves. Then I moved to the council and the water company and something extraordinary happened. People there could write. I could logically see why. The sort of person who works with drainage systems, and maybe even enjoys going down the odd manhole occasionally, might also be the sort of person who reads Terry Pratchett. Or, for that matter, reads at all. A career-obsessed, KPI-focused middle manager at an insurance firm, maybe not so much.

I’m still watching those MIT linguistics lectures. Such bright minds, and such good humour too. If the students are any barometer of America’s future, the country should be in safe hands for the next couple of generations. If only that were the case. (Also, it’s Boston. I was lucky enough to spend over a week in that amazing city in 2015. When the professor makes references to the T – the city’s subway system – or other Bostonia, he brings back happy memories for me.)

I wasn’t going to mention Māori again, but I stumbled upon this photo I must have taken at Tekapo. The quality isn’t what it could be.

If you look closely you can see some Māori words. Glass is karāhe, recycle is hakurua, and rubbish is rāpihi. What’s going on here? Well, two of the three words (karāhe and rāpihi) have been taken from English and then transmogrified into something acceptable in Māori. By acceptable, I mean adhering to the rules of how Māori words are formed. Māori has only ten consonant sounds (h, k, m, n, ng, p, r, t, w and wh) and five vowel sounds (a, e, i, o and u), while English has way more than that (about 12 pure vowels, 7 or 8 diphthongs, and 24 or so consonants). Then there’s the question of phonotactics, which means what sounds can go where in a syllable or a word. For example, swift is a word in English. Twift and slift and swipt aren’t words, but they could be, because they follow the rules of how English sounds fit together. But srift and swifk can’t possibly be words, because even though you could pronounce them without too much difficulty, you just can’t have sr or fk together, except in compound words like classroom. Swifl can’t be a word either, because although the fl combination is fine in lots of places, is isn’t OK at the end of a word. English therefore has various restrictions, like all languages do, and that’s phonotactics. Māori has much stricter phonotactics than English – all clusters of two or more consonants are banned, and all words must end in a vowel – as well as a much more conservative inventory of sounds in the first place, and that all means that if you want to Māorify an English word, you’ll have to do a lot of messing around with it.

Take rubbish (rāpihi). It’s interesting they had to resort to an English loan word. Doesn’t Māori have a way of expressing “unwanted thing”? Whatever, that’s what they did. There are no voiced consonants in Māori (except the nasals and w), so b is replaced by p, its unvoiced counterpart. Sh is a sibilant – none of them in Māori – so that gets replaced by h. The short u vowel in English is converted to a, which isn’t far off, and made long probably because it’s stressed in English. Then the vowel i is added so as not to break the no-final-consonants rule. For glass (karāhe) the change is even more dramatic. Two extra vowels need to be added. The puzzling thing for me is why karāhe gets a final e while rāpihi gets a final i. Does the difference come from the fact that the h in karāhe originates from an English s, while the h in rāpihi comes from an English sh? (If they’d gone for the American English trash instead of the British rubbish, what would the Māori version have been? Tarāhi?) Then there are names. Rōpata (the Māori version of Robert) gets an a at the end. Wiremu (William) gets a u. Who decides this stuff? Finally there’s hakurua. Recycle. It looks like a real Māori word, unloaned from anywhere. But what does it actually mean? I’ve googled it and keep coming up blank. A mystery.

That was supposed to be the end of me talking about language, but it definitely isn’t I’m afraid.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Why am I so damn tired all the damn time?

September 25, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It was amazing in New Zealand. I’d wake up after a good night’s sleep (or even after a less than stellar night’s sleep) and feel refreshed. Now I’m back in Romania and I’m constantly tired. Yesterday I had to apologise for yawning in a lesson. I’ve mentioned this and two people have given the polluted city air as a reason. Could it also be the warm weather here? (Yesterday we broke 30.) What about the screen time? Or maybe it’s all the talking I have to do in my job? But back in 2018, say, I had busy work weeks one after another – often having to yap away for hours on end – and didn’t feel nearly as tired as I do now. Perhaps I was still energised by the relative newness and excitement of my lifestyle change. This fatigue seems to have coincided with my move to this apartment 16 months ago, so maybe it’s something about being here. Though my sinus problem doesn’t help, I can’t really blame that because it didn’t exactly go away in NZ where I felt much less tired.

On Friday I took a look at a car – a 19-year-old Dacia – just off Piața Bălcescu. It was just after lunchtime and the square was chocka. That made up my mind for me. There’s no way I could handle the stress of a car right now. For getting around the city, a car would be more of a burden than anything – and just think of all the added bureaucracy – so I’m going to wait until March before looking again. I should be pursuing two wheels rather than four; my latest old city bike has just about had it. The uneven roads and paths in Timișoara require something more robust, and it is slightly ludicrous that my main mode of transport – the thing I rely heavily on – dates from when I was in primary school.

Tennis. I was back on the court this weekend for two sessions of singles against my usual opponent. When you’re fatigued, singles will make you feel horribly exposed. Yesterday, something wasn’t right with the guy at the other end, and I led 6-0 6-2 2-2 when our time ran out, tiredness and all. Tonight though was an entirely different matter. I won two close games to start, then I lost seven games out of eight as he hit a deep purple patch that left me floundering despite not even playing that badly. From 3-6 0-1 he went off the boil just enough, and I came back to win the second set 6-2, at which point the heavens opened.

Lessons have been interesting. Many of my students have looked at my photos from NZ and expressed disappointment at the lack of pythons and crocodiles and spiders as big as your hand. A parrot? Telling them it can rip your wiper blades off does little to impress them. There’s also been a general sense of bafflement at the whole snow thing. Most Romanians simply don’t get that there’s another side of the world where seasons are reversed. One student asked, “Are they aware that we have Christmas in winter?” Oh yes, and most of their Christmas cards even depict winter scenes. That made him even more confused. “What about daylight savings?” Yep. I resisted the temptation to talk about Australia’s time zones that include half-hour offsets and some-do-some-don’t daylight savings.

Yesterday I worked with the top-2%-ers in Dumbrăvița. First I had two hours of maths with Matei who spent time with a Spanish family in Toledo over the summer, just like I did in France at a similar age. His family now have a conservatory which they’ve filled with exotic plants. Matei has got himself a record player and he played a few bars of Kanye West for me. I’d like a record player too (they call it a pick-up here), though certainly not to play even one bar of Kanye West. After Matei, I had two hours with Octavian who spent seven weeks combined in the UK and America (his pronunciation hadn’t improved as much as I’d hoped), then my first one-hour session with his six-year-old sister who knew more than I bargained for.

Language learning - New Zealand

Travel and language — part 1 of 3

September 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been watching – with a tinge of sadness – a series of lectures from an MIT linguistics course, which are available on YouTube. I say a tinge of sadness because 25 years ago it could have been me attending those lectures, if not at MIT then somewhere, but alas that’s not the path I went down. Now I know enough bits and bobs about linguistics to sound semi-knowledgeable in my lessons, but there’s so much I don’t know, having never formally studied it. At one point the impressively bearded professor apologises for being old: “You can tell I was born last century.” He taught the course last year, so I suppose all his students, or almost all of them, really were born this century. Yeesh. You can tell he’s in love with the subject in all its guises, and he can actually speak several relatively obscure languages. He interacts very well with the students, who are clearly much smarter than our bunch in Birmingham a quarter-century ago.

Long-haul travel, and spending a whole month in another country, gives you an almighty hit of linguistic phenomena. Ten years ago on my old blog, I wrote quite extensively about Kiwi pronunciation. I’m happy to report that all the traits I mentioned are still present, some of them in an even more exaggerated form. John Key’s “shtrong and stable” is now quite common; for people with this tendency, it affects words containing either of the strings /str/ or /stj/, for instance shtreet, shtupid, shtew, Aushtralia, or ashtute. If you quit smoking but then relapse, you might say that you’ve gone ashtray. I also noticed that a divide – young versus old, city versus country, sophisticated versus somewhat less cultivated – has opened up in the way Kiwis pronounce certain words, mostly those ending in the /ri/ combination.

How many syllables do these words have for you?

battery
broccoli
mandatory
necessary
pottery

For me they have 2, 3, 3, 4 and 3, respectively. But I betcha a hyper-online (and perhaps slightly woke, though I hate that term) 22-year-old student might want to replace his or her (or their?!) laptop bad-der-y, where I’d replace my batch-ree.

But the biggest linguistic phenomenon by far affecting New Zealand is the rise of Māori. If I went back there to live, I’d need to enrol on a Māori course toot-sweet, because my pronunciation would be hopelessly dated. (Dated is a word my parents love to use when browsing House & Garden.) Māori seems simple – it has a small inventory of only five vowel and ten consonant sounds – but what’s going on with combinations like ea or oa, as in Aotearoa? What do they morph into exactly, and why? (Those particular digraphs are a distinctive feature of Romanian, by the way.) Then what about au? Why is it Lake Toe-paw all of a sudden? I wonder if some of these “new” sounds are the result of phonetic changes – a vowel shift, if you will – just like what has happened with the consonant wh. The wh, as far as I can tell, is spelt that way because it was actually pronounced like the wh in wheat when it was first transcribed, but since then it has turned into an f sound. (Interestingly, the English wh has, at the same time, turned into a simple w sound for most speakers, though in some places like Scotland the old sound still proliferates. Mum’s mother used the old wh in words like white, but Mum uses the simple w.)

The increased use of the Māori language rubs a lot of people – especially older people like my parents – up the wrong way. They do have a bit of a point. At times it can actually impede communication. Writing Keep Left in Māori is downright dangerous for foreign tourists. (That raises an interesting question. Did the Māori have the concept of left and right? Not all cultures and languages do. Some don’t have the concept of relative direction at all, and you’d have to say Keep East if east happened to be on the left in that instance.) Sometimes it’s just older people not liking change, and I perfectly understand that, but often it’s part of a more general anti-Māori sentiment, which again I understand, and is starting to create a very unhelpful us-versus-them in New Zealand society.

I’ve often wondered why someone hasn’t invented a nice efficient Māori syllabary, a bit like hiragana in Japanese, in which each symbol represents a syllable. (Maybe somebody has.) You’d need 55 symbols: one for each of the 50 consonant+vowel combinations, plus one for each of the five vowels on their own. That’s just over twice what the English alphabet has, and a handful more than hiragana itself has, so it should be doable. I also think it would be quite cool. You could still use macrons (horizontal bars) to show long vowels, as you (increasingly) see in the standard Roman-alphabet version of Māori. Here’s my attempt at a start:

My choice of more angular shapes for ri and especially ki is deliberate. The i sound is a close vowel, and feels more angular than a, an open vowel.

Next time I’ll talk about some of the language phenomena I saw on the way to and from New Zealand, rather than when I was there.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand

More from my aunt, and a rocky time in Geraldine

September 20, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

A beautiful autumn day here, though the forecast 28 degrees is in fact a degree less than Mum and Dad’s unseasonably warm Wednesday. This afternoon I’ve got my appointment with the ENT specialist. Maybe he can crack the problem of my sinuses – so far nobody else has. I must remember to bring all my scans and reports and what have you. I’m over my cold now, so that’s something. Last night I saw the doctor who told me who to see to get the cyst removed from my back.

A pretty hefty earthquake shook Geraldine this morning (NZ time). It was a long, rolling shake that measured 6.0. My parents didn’t feel a thing because they were in a car. It was funny to see Geraldine plastered all over the front page of Stuff.

My aunt is going to get a course of chemo that (in my cousin’s words) won’t be too invasive and might give her another few months. In hospital she’s been on morphine and antibiotics for her crippling pain caused by an infection. She’s also gone cold turkey on booze and cigarettes – that can’t have been much fun. So Dad has booked a trip over there, leaving on 9th October and coming back five weeks later. I might even make a visit. Thankfully his itinerary won’t be as onerous as mine – no clapped-out trains, and instead a 16-hour leg (!) on an Emirates A380. My fun and games in the mysterious depths of Hungary would just about kill him. My cousin has been very good to my aunt while she’s been in hospital, but she’s never had much time for him – her interest ended when he was shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight (!?).

Here’s an interesting YouTube video by a bloke called Noel Philips, who quit his IT job to travel and make videos about travelling, mostly on unusual routes and older planes. He even has a private pilot’s licence. In this video, he was daring enough to fly on an Indonesian airline with a one-star safety rating, out of a maximum of seven. Fascinating to watch – the airports reminded me of travelling through Indonesia as a kid.

I still don’t really know what’s happening with my central heating.

Update: I saw the ENT guy. When I entered his clinic, I saw my name hand-written in his big book, with the number 969 alongside it. He was happy to do everything in English. Normally I hate that, but when it’s my health I’m fine with it. His English was very good, apart from the time he pushed probes up both my nostrils and told me it wasn’t painy. Sorry, but it bloody is painy. He said that surgery won’t do me any good, then asked me to take an allergy test (the last time I got tested for allergies was in 2017) before taking a spray twice a day and a pill only in the evening. I’ll have to take these drugs for two months, then after seeing him again I might end up taking them for life. So that’s where I am with that.

Family

Sad news about my aunt

September 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Dad’s sister had been in hospital for over a week, undergoing tests. There had been no news, mainly because her family is so dysfunctional. But last night my brother got in touch with our cousin, and he told me that they’d taken a bone marrow sample and the results had come back: she has leukaemia. Blood cancer. She’s in extreme pain and distress. They tried to move her to another (bigger) hospital, but she refused. A basic search tells me that the prognosis of somebody of her age with leukaemia is terrible. After a steady decline over the last few years, in which time she’s become a recluse, this looks like being the end of the line. She’ll be 76 at the end of October. It’s all so very sad. I spoke to Dad this morning; he can’t even face the prospect of making a trip over.

This morning I saw my nephew, bright as ever, on a WhatsApp call with my brother, his age no longer a nothing but a something. He’s got more and bigger and shinier toys than anything we ever had. His latest is an all-singing, all-dancing, garage-and-car-wash set.