Summer’s here... There are cherries to pick, and, in general, you spend more time outside, less time in front of the screen. All is not lost, however. Here’s a piece from my biweekly Szóbagoly1 newsletter on languages and language learning (in Hungarian). You can subscribe to it here if you’re interested in that kind of a thing, getting a year’s worth of thoughts and inspiration. Especially as it’s also summer on Aldebaran, and we may miss a week here and there with this newsletter... Have nice summer days. If it gets too hot here, well, the Arctic is always awailable for us, word-owls.
Source: Zdeněk Macháček, Unsplash
Diagnosis: Bilateral Seriousness
Difficult things are often called “serious” problems. A disease can also be serious. There’s even the expression: “dead serious”. If serious things are so bad, why do we get so serious in different areas of life? In learning, for example. Seriously! “Did you pass your language exam? Oh, my God!” “What’s your test score?” “Go away, I have no time for fun! I have to study!” Is it possible we could get more done with a lighter attitude?
My Hungarian friends from Serbia sometimes jokingly used a Serbian phrase with each other. “What did you say?” “Mentalnij ranjenik.” “What does that mean?” “Well, it means I’m mentally handicapped.” “Wow! That seems like a pretty useful phrase when you don’t understand what’s being said. Eyes upturned, mouth opened, palms upturned in hopelessness: “Ja sam mentalnij ranjenik.”
It got added to my list of favorite phrases in a new language: “I’m just a stupid foreigner...” “Isn’t that how they say it on this planet?” “You saved my life!” "You think I’m dumb? You should see my friends!” - And so on.
When you admit your imperfection, a great weight is lifted off your shoulders. How the hell am I supposed to say it right when I’m trying to pronounce it for the first time? How would I know when I’m just learning?
When other people see that you’re not in a state of convulsions, that you’re not taking yourself too seriously, it’s so much easier for them to ease up. In fact, if you manage to make native speakers laugh, Bob’s your uncle. From then on, there’s a good chance that they’ll hang around, hoping for another laugh. All the while acting as a dictionary and teacher, teaching you the language without too much effort. Oh yes - and you also had fun while doing it.
Source: Kojo Quaicoe, Pixabay
Yağmurun narin sesi[1]
All day in the tractor trailer in the rain we’re listening to Turkish pop music, a very interesting experience. At one end of the scale, it creeps close to the wonderfulness of Iranian classical music; there are worlds hidden inside. It sounds like a somewhat rearranged version of folk music. At the other end is the local manele (Rumanian gipsy pop), or rather the other way round: probably grittier Turkish pop music could be one of the sources of manele. I should note that, like some of my friends in Hungary, I don’t share the Romanian intelligentsia’s hopefully snobbish opinion of manele. When they hear that some forms of this modern folk music could almost be considered listenable in certain circumstances, they faint with a loud scream. Of course, they are not familiar with the Hungarian equivalent, ‘geranium-rock’, which really is a successful jazzing up of the intolerable combined from all musical styles. (Having hitchhiked across the Carpathian Basin, I feel I have a sufficiently broad range of experience to make that claim.) In Turkish music, while it can get a little boring after a while, even the poppy end outshines manele. And it keeps pushing the sounds and melody of the language into my ears.
Source: Takuro Obara, Pixabay
Talking garments
As a child, you must have dreamed of a secret language that you knew fluently and that no one but a few initiated friends understood. One of the less mystical, but more realistic, ways of doing this is to master an existing language unknown to outsiders. In the old days, Hungarian middle-class parents, if they wanted to keep a secret from their children, spoke to each other in German. “Nicht vor dem Kind!”2 Today, in such a situation, Hungarian parents in Transylvania switch to Rumanian, I suppose those in the Highlands likewise to Slovak, and so on. Then, of course, there comes a time when the child deciphers the code and this tool no longer works. You have to learn a new language...
The obvious solution for a community that wants to isolate itself from the rest of society is to learn a smaller, less common language at a native level. Humankind is rich in beautiful, expressive, exciting languages that are completely unknown outside their geographical distribution, but no groups actually take the trouble to adopt one, even though it would improve their thinking and enrich their cultural background. The situation is different when the knowledge is already existing: Navajo soldiers serving in the US army in World War Two used their mother tongue as a secret code when transmitting, completely perplexing the Japanese. And, of course, certain professions rely heavily on a language: doctors, for example, use Latin to amaze their audiences. “Dermitis” sounds a lot better than “red skin”.
The other solution is to develop a language. “Our language”, a combination of English and Hungarian features that arose spontaneously in my family, can be grasped with almost instantaneous fluency if you speak both languages. This lingo, developed initially to hinder understanding of parents and then that of others, is alive, well and thriving today thanks to two active speakers and a few admirers. Then there’s the super-easy mele, which requires only a knowledge of Hungarian. It’s based on the substitution of certain sounds for others with some syllable tricks, yet it hasn’t kicked off. Why? Although it could be mastered with half an hour’s practice, and would roll off the lips fluently in a few days, it has never managed to conquer more than one speaker.
Source: Pixabay
Lesson: if you want a secret language, make it up with some friends. It’s important that it be consistent and simple. If it’s not a combination of languages (which limits the number of potential speakers), phonological substitution seems the most obvious solution. Word substitution is impossible, there are too many words. This can only work for a few key phrases. In Frank Herbert’s famous Dune series the word ‘garment’, logically inserted into the speaker’s sentence, means “a dangerous enemy is observing us in secret.” There’s an American film, in which a group of blackjack players make money by counting cards. They also use code words to communicate with each other. You see, clever use of language keeps the dough rolling in. You, too, can become a secret tongue-savant.
1] Az eső finom hangja (Baba Zula számából, lásd www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejyajnoPWEE)
A pun on snowy owl / word-adept
Not in front of the child!