Gaston Dorren's Blog, page 5

November 9, 2018

Vietnamese (12): Lindsay’s take

[image error]Lindsay Williams ‘learns, teaches, blogs, vlogs, eats, sleeps and breathes everything language’, as she herself puts it. In a word: Lindsay does languages, and that’s the name of her website. Earlier this year, she went to Vietnam. She did interviews with some Vietnamese people (including one of my teachers) about their language, she spoke to me about my learning efforts, then made the following podcast and video.


Enjoy!


Other episodes of Lindsay’s series of Language Stories are listed here.

You can read more about my Vietnamese adventures .


https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/16db6bb3-cd88-4925-be4f-8612e25b3883/ec8b41b1-8178-4c59-b8ed-1a893c3a6a67.mp3


 

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Published on November 09, 2018 14:29

November 8, 2018

Spoken tomahtoes, sung tomaytoes

[image error]My English has a Dutch flavour, especially in speech. I’m not much aware of it while I’m talking, but when I listen to my recorded voice (here for instance), I can hear the tell-tale signs. Scratch off that non-native layer, however, and you get something akin to British English. A deeply unhip variety that befits my greying temples, to be exact: something closer to traditional Received Pronunciation than to modern London speech.


However, some words are likely to come out in a more American way, probably depending on where I picked them up. I’m not trying awfully hard to be consistent, and if I say ‘din-asty’ and ‘add-dult’ one moment, ‘pry-vacy’ and ‘zeebra’ the next, so be it. Still, there are limits. My can’t never rhymes with rant, nor my dance with romance. I’m a ‘tomahto’ bloke, not a ‘tomayto’ guy.


Or so I thought.


This summer, I wrote a song in English, which has the words ask and masks on two long notes. And I can’t seem to get myself to pronounce them with the /ɑː/ of can’t and dance, even though that is what I would normally do. It just doesn’t feel right. It sounds pretentious, ridiculous, most inappropriate. Saying /ɑːsk/ and /mɑːsks/ while reading the lyrics? No problem. But singing /ɑːsk/ and /mɑːsks/ during six beats each? No way.


Which suggests that pronunciation standards are not merely regional, but also… what? Functional? Perhaps pop music is so thoroughly American, never mind the British Invasion and Britpop, that Received Pronunciation is badly out of place here. Or is it a class thing? Is RP a standard that I accept for conversations and public talks, whereas I want to sound folksier when performing my songs? All questions, no answers.


So now I’m keen to find out. Is this whole thing just a personal foible? Or do you, native speaker or not, feel the same way about it?

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Published on November 08, 2018 02:25

November 6, 2018

Around the world in ten publishers (and counting)

[image error]The good news keeps coming in! An Italian publisher, Garzanti of Milan, has acquired the translation rights of BABEL – as well as those of LINGO! And a few weeks ago, the Cracow-based publishing house Karakter bought the Polish translation rights of BABEL. That makes ten publishers for BABEL, and eight for LINGO, in twelve different countries in all.


Wow. I feel like a one-man multinational. Here’s an updated map of the Babel campaign:


[image error]


 


 

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Published on November 06, 2018 12:51

November 5, 2018

The Table of Babel

Click to view slideshow.

I’m much more comfortable writing than cooking. But a new book being released calls for a celebration, and that implies food. 


[image error][image error]When Lingo came out, my wife organised a surprise party, with friends, relatives and a professor. She sang a song in my mother tongue, the publisher sent a congratulatory video and a friend baked a special cake.


A few days ago, Babel hit the shelves, and as I announced in my previous blogpost, I threw a dinner for a handful of neighbourhood friends. I’m not at all a foodie, and my cooking is usually of the ‘chop, mix and eat whatever’s there’ sort. But for this occasion, I sought out a whole range of Recipes, so as to serve my friends actual Dishes. As a belt-and-braces safety measure – after all, recipes offer no guarantee – I also bought some fool-proof stuff, mostly comforting drinks, such as wines, beers and sake, and ditto sweets, including figs, biscuits and baklava.


But in the event, everything went surprisingly smoothly. I spent six hours in the kitchen – easily a personal record – and the only things that some of the guests didn’t like were things I had not prepared myself: the biscuits (sticky communion wafers) and the Chinese plumwine (sickly sweet). In a word, I was quite the ‘kitchen prince’, as we say in Dutch. For a day, anyway.


Should you find this whole story a bit tantalising, think of it this way: you missed the binge, but you can still read the book. And you could even organise your own Table of Babel, if you are so inclined. Feel free to send me a message for more information about the dishes.

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Published on November 05, 2018 06:28

November 3, 2018

Table – Around the World in 20 Cuisines

[image error]Two days ago, without much fanfare or fireworks, my new book came out: Babel – Around the World in Twenty Languages. To celebrate, my wife and I will have a few friends over tomorrow for a theme dinner. All of Babel’s 20 languages will be represented on the menu. It will be the ultimate fusion experience, driven by a non-culinary work of non-fiction, prepared by non-chefs.


Since these 20 languages are spoken natively by half the world population, half of all global dishes may seem to be potential ‘Babel fare’. But it isn’t quite as simple as that, for three reasons. First of all, much of Europe is not represented in Babel (if you’re into European languages, see Lingo, my previous book), so Italian pizza and pasta, Dutch stamppot, Swedish gravad lax, South Slavic ćevapčići and Greek tzatziki do not qualify. Secondly, while I’ve engrossed myself in Asian languages for the past three years, I have precious little experience cooking Asian dishes. And thirdly, what should I even choose to do justice to Tamil Nadu, the Punjab, Bengal, Korea or Persia?


Yet I’ve tried, and after a long quest online and a hunt through a supermarket, an Asian specialty shop (toko), an organic shop and a Turkish bakery, I’ve piled up the snacks, the ingredients and the drinks that should, in principle, meet the case. There are Indonesian starch crackers (krupuk) and Vietnamese biscuits, a Chilean wine, German beer and Portuguese porto, French cheeses, Arab figs, Turkish baklava and Javanese satay. We’ll cook Tamil, Bengali, North Indian, Malaysian and Punjabi dishes (most but not all of them simple), make Persian and (ever so slightly) Korean salads, we’ll bake a Zanzibar spice cake, there are Chinese plum wine and Japanese sake, and even that is not a complete list. In a word, I’ve gone overboard on global delicacies. From Britain, there will be lemon curd, Marmite and cider.


I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to invite more friends the next day. I’ll let you know soon.

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Published on November 03, 2018 07:27

October 17, 2018

Dialects, a fossil and nothing in between

[image error]In, I wrote that the abyss between the formal written language and the informal spoken language is particularly wide, and that I had heard this claimed also about Welsh. In response to this latter observation I received two comments which deserve to be rescued from the obscurity of the comments section to the full light of a proper blogpost. (I’ve shortened them very slightly.)


Number one was by Siôn Williams, who wrote that my aside about Welsh “is indeed true“, and continued:


“Consider the following in descending levels of formality for ‘I am’ ( > ‘I’m’): yr wyf,  yr wyf i, rwyf, rwyf fi, rydw i, rwy i, dw i andw i. 


Then you have the ‘other’ verbs – which have two forms: the periphrastic form (with the auxiliary verb), which is preferred in speech, and the short written form, which is used in the formal literary language. Let’s take the verbal-noun (the ‘true’ form of the Welsh verb, as there is no infinitive), canu (‘singing’).


Canaf = I sing / I will sing (present-future tense)

Dw i’n canu = I sing / I am singing pPresent tense)


Canasent = They had sung (past perfect tense)

Maen nhw wedi canu = They are after singing ( = They had sung) (past perfect tense)


Native speakers (and learners) only ‘learn’ the short forms, almost like a second or foreign language, once they have mastered the periphrastic forms, which are more common in speech. 


Why is the formal (written) so different and difficult compared to the informal (spoken) language? Many reasons, I guess – including that the written forms hark back to the translation of the Bible in 1588 (making Wales officially a Protestant nation under Queen Elizabeth I of England) – a book which did so much in ensuring the language’s survival after the subordinating of it under the “Act of Union” of 1535. Further, and also as a result of this “Act of Union” and subsequent English and British State policy in imposing the English language and driving the Welsh language out of the classroom, subsequent generations of Welshpeople became illiterate in their mother tongue and could not write it. My great-grandmother (d. 1947) was illiterate all her life (in both Welsh and English; her will is signed with an X), and my own mother (b. 1925) has never felt at ease in writing or indeed reading Welsh – and will always look up English versions of forms etc. before she signs anything.


A good many of my compatriots then would not be able to ‘unpackage’ such forms as canasent (see above), yet would quite accurately and without as much as a blush be able to use the form mae nhw wedi canu in order to explain a concept of ‘a past-in-the past’ for 3rd person plural.”


To this was added to by Iwan Standley, who wrote, “I think one of the reasons formal Welsh is still in use is that there are many dialects of informal Welsh, some with significant differences. I have a Swedish relative who’s learnt some Welsh, and she’s remarked that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are far more similar to each other than the dialects of north and south Welsh are.


Historically this was because the regions of Wales are fairly isolated from each other due to the terrain. It’s really only been since the 1960s that a national Welsh-language press and media have arisen, and public bodies have started using Welsh in official documents; public affairs were conducted in English previously.


So the question they face is, which version should they use? They would obviously like to be widely-understood, but if they use an informal register it would mean picking a geographical dialect – which could be seen to be favouring one area over another (not a good look for a national public body).


So they generally play it safe and use a somewhat-fossilised formal language, which is seen as being neutral (because nobody speaks it) at the cost of being removed from everyone’s day-to-day language. This formal, literary Welsh has now become the ‘standard’ even though no-one actually speaks it. It’s a sort of lingua franca I suppose, but one that very few are entirely comfortable with – the example you give of perfectly intelligent people being unsure if they can write a letter sounds very familiar.


A brief look at Quora and Wikipedia suggests Vietnames also has several very different dialects. I wonder if their use of formal language is for the same reason, then?”


That is a very good suggestion, because it’s perfectly correct that speakers of some dialects have trouble understanding each other. Only yesterday did I hear a story about a Vietnamese from the North who couldn’t make head nor tail of the information a hotel receptionist in the Central City of Huê was giving her. After asking five times to repeat what she had said, the guest gave up. Perhaps she should have asked her to write it down!

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Published on October 17, 2018 04:41

October 16, 2018

Vietnamese (11): fear of viết (writing)

[image error]Nearly every conversation with Huyền, my former (and, who knows, future) online Vietnamese teacher, throws up new linguistic surprises.


The other day, I asked her if she would mind translating a business letter into Vietnamese for me. She wouldn’t mind, she answered, but she wasn’t sure she could do it. Writing Vietnamese was not her strong suit.


I was absolutely gobsmacked. Here was a university-educated polyglot, an easy talker who runs her own successful little company – and she felt that writing her mother tongue, which she speaks every day with dozens of other native speakers, was not her strong suit? How on earth could that be?


‘Well, I’m perfectly fine with the spoken language, but written Vietnamese is quite different’, she said. ‘Much more formal.’ I realised I had actually experienced that myself: many times when I had learnt some new word, say sử dụng for ‘to use’, she would comment that, yeah, that’s correct, but it’s very formal. What we actually say is … upon which she’d teach me another word, sometimes similar (in this case dùng), sometimes entirely different. Of course, other languages too, including English, have their formal and informal registers, but it looks as if in Vietnamese, the abyss is particularly wide. (I’ve heard the same thing claimed about Tamil and Welsh.)


Anyway, Huyền was willing to give it a go. But when she sent her translation back a few days later, she suggested that I submit it to my other former Vietnamese teacher, Loan, for revision. She studies literature, and surely she would be better at this sort of language. Loan was happy to help, but as it turned out, she likewise felt that she lacked in skill: before sending her edited version back to me, she asked a university teacher for another revision.


I probably have a more than presentable letter now, which suits me fine. But the whole thing gives me a lot of pause. What’s going on here? Why do well-educated Vietnamese people feel that writing an acceptable letter is beyond their competence? Is it because of a wide difference between the formal and the everyday  – with companies insisting perhaps on all business correspondence being in the choicest style? Is it because Vietnamese culture frowns more deeply upon mistakes, linguistic and otherwise, than my egalitarian Dutch culture? Is it due to a wide linguistic gulf between young Vietnamese people – outward looking, speaking and studying in English – and the establishment of the older generations, who grew up during either the war or the austere, repressive socialism that held sway for a good decade thereafter? Or is it because of something else still? I don’t know; my gob hasn’t been unsmacked yet


In today’s Skype conversation between Huyền and myself (or ‘between me and Huyền’, as Vietnamese etiquette would have it), a fresh surprise came up. But that’s for the next blogpost. For now, let me just mention that she and I (I and she) will be giving a talk about her language at the Polyglot Conference in Ljubljana later this month: me in person, she on screen. The title: Ten Reasons to Learn Vietnamese (and Five to Regret It).

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Published on October 16, 2018 10:33

Vietnamese (11): fear of ‘viết’ (writing)

[image error]Nearly every conversation with Huyền, my former (and, who knows, future) online Vietnamese teacher, throws up new linguistic surprises.


The other day, I asked her if she would mind translating a business letter into Vietnamese for me. She wouldn’t mind, she answered, but she wasn’t sure she could do it. Writing Vietnamese was not her strong suit.


I was absolutely gobsmacked. Here was a university-educated polyglot, an easy talker who runs her own successful little company – and she felt that writing her mother tongue, which she speaks every day with dozens of other native speakers, was not her strong suit? How on earth could that be?


‘Well, I’m perfectly fine with the spoken language, but written Vietnamese is quite different’, she said. ‘Much more formal.’ I realised I had actually experienced that myself: many times when I had learnt some new word, say sử dụng for ‘to use’, she would comment that, yeah, that’s correct, but it’s very formal. What we actually say is … upon which she’d teach me another word, sometimes similar (in this case dùng), sometimes entirely different. Of course, other languages too, including English, have their formal and informal registers, but it looks as if in Vietnamese, the abyss is particularly wide. (I’ve heard the same thing claimed about Tamil and .)


Anyway, Huyền was willing to give it a go. But when she sent her translation back a few days later, she suggested that I submit it to my other former Vietnamese teacher, Loan, for revision. She studies literature, and surely she would be better at this sort of language. Loan was happy to help, but as it turned out, she likewise felt that she lacked in skill: before sending her edited version back to me, she asked a university teacher for another revision.


I probably have a more than presentable letter now, which suits me fine. But the whole thing gives me a lot of pause. What’s going on here? Why do well-educated Vietnamese people feel that writing an acceptable letter is beyond their competence? Is it because of a wide difference between the formal and the everyday  – with companies insisting perhaps on all business correspondence being in the choicest style? Is it because Vietnamese culture frowns more deeply upon mistakes, linguistic and otherwise, than my egalitarian Dutch culture? Is it due to a wide linguistic gulf between young Vietnamese people – outward looking, speaking and studying in English – and the establishment of the older generations, who grew up during either the war or the austere, repressive socialism that held sway for a good decade thereafter? Or is it because of something else still? I don’t know; my gob hasn’t been unsmacked yet


In today’s Skype conversation between Huyền and myself (or ‘between me and Huyền’, as Vietnamese etiquette would have it), a fresh surprise came up. But that’s for the next blogpost. For now, let me just mention that she and I (I and she) will be giving a talk about her language at the Polyglot Conference in Ljubljana later this month: me in person, she on screen. The title: Ten Reasons to Learn Vietnamese (and Five to Regret It).

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Published on October 16, 2018 10:33

October 9, 2018

Baby shower of Babel

[image error]

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Published on October 09, 2018 13:09

September 24, 2018

‘English’, „German”, « French » and «Spanish»

I’m not a big fan of the adjective ‘jaw-dropping’, but I actually caught my mandible falling just now. So there: here is a jaw-dropping map by Jakub Marian.


European languages are of course widely, often wildly different in many ways, from grammar and vocabulary to phonology and spelling. That’s what my book Lingo was all about. But somehow, I seem to have overlooked the matter of punctuation. Okay, the famous Spanish ¿ and ¡ get a look-in, but that’s about it. Nothing about commas, colons, semicolons, single versus double spaces and, singularly regrettable, nothing about quotation marks. And what a gap that is, I now know. I was aware that English, French and German tend to write these humble signs very differently, but I had no idea that Europe as a whole was such a fascinating jungle of punctuational diversity.


The picture here is just a detail; click on it, and you’ll get Marian’s map of the whole continent, with a few paragraphs of explanation. Enjoy!


[image error]

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Published on September 24, 2018 08:00