For my Polish friend

A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license. First, of course, she had to take an eyesight test. The optician showed her a card with the following letters:

C Z W I X N O S T A C Z

“Can you read this?” the optician asked.

“Read it?” the Polish girl replied. “I know the guy.”

Self de luxe

I recently came across Geoffrey Pullum’s “The Miserable French Language and Its Inadequacies” and enjoyed it immensely. It points out things that immediately disturb one when one begins learning French but which one is afraid to point out lest one be thought an ignorant philistine.

This is a language used by people who are supposed to be the big experts in love and kissing and sexy weekends of ooh-la-la, and they don’t have words for “boy”, “girl”, “warm”, “love”, “kiss”, or “weekend”.

Still, they seem to get along okay.

A friend of mine just came back from Paris and brought me a copy of L’Express, complete with a separate “Styles” section. Writers on fashion and the arts tend to be frequently allusive, liberal with jargon and wordplay, and it was interesting to see this manifested in French. Words that were apparently English poked up everywhere in the most baffling contexts. Apparently a “checking” is a cash register, a “self” is a cafeteria, “hype” means fashionable, and “look” appears in multiple contexts, such as in the phrase “total look” (whatever that means) and, most ridiculously, fitted with French verb and adjective endings: “relooker” and “lookées.”

Out of 50 restaurants featured under “Restaurants aussi beaux que bons,” fully one-quarter of them have English or part-English names: Eatme, Caviar House & Prunier, Sensing, Tokyo Eat, Mood, Cristal Room Baccarat, Black Calvados, Rich, Ze Kitchen Galerie, No Escape, Gold, Canteen, and Noodles.

One of the most amusing activities I did when I taught English in France was to give the students lists of French words used in English and teach them how to pronounce them and what they meant. It was a hoot.

Anyway, all this makes me rethink the Académie Française. Perhaps it is better for them to stick with pure French after all, to save their dignity.

Happy inefficiency

“It is seldom the efficiency of a writing system or script that determines its longevity and influence, but rather the economic power and prestige of those using it” (Fischer).

I had no idea that the Korean writing system was not just another logography, but rather an ideal script. The characters systematically represent the sounds of the language, much like Tolkien’s Fëanorian script. I didn’t realize there was a working example of this in our messy world. It took the edict of King Seycong in 1446 to replace the hand-me-down Chinese logographs his country was using, which were inadequate to represent the Korean language, with what Fischer calls “the most efficient system ever devised in the history of writing.” It is attractive as well.

It’s strange how we take our writing systems for granted. Of course we would write English with the Latin alphabet... But countries have switched from Arabic systems to Roman systems to Cyrillic systems at the whim of their emperors. If it happened to us, it probably wouldn’t be that big a deal. We adapt.

English spelling is notoriously awkward. But diglossia―having a written language that is essentially a different language from the spoken one it is supposed to represent―is the natural result of time’s passing, and the whole world lives with it to various extents. There are benefits to the way written language tends to stay the same while spoken language mutates. We still easily understand Shakespeare’s texts, even if he wouldn’t recognize the sound of his words in our mouths.

At least our script has had a systematic relationship to spoken modern English across the centuries. The poor Japanese conquer scriptological insanity to become literate. From what I can understand, they borrowed a script (Chinese characters) that did not necessarily correspond to the sounds it represented in Japanese and could not convey all the grammatical information that Japanese words had to convey (this was the same thing the Koreans were dealing with before King Seycong). The Japanese continue to use Chinese characters, but tack on a couple other scripts to indicate inflectional endings, grammatical particles, glosses, and speech sounds. They can write their language using any one of the scripts, but apparently they prefer to mix them. The Roman alphabet can also be used.

One can always find a silver lining in one’s circumstances. Having all the Chinese characters is kind of like our having homophones like bear and bare; the script contains information that the speech does not, and Japanese, like Chinese, is full of homophones.

Many populations besides the Japanese function with an ill-fitting script. Yet few nations shackled by language become Boston Tea Partiers in response. Part of it is powerlessness, of course, but could it also be that we love our languages for their absurdities, not despite them? “Written language, so East Asian writing teaches us, is not subordinate to spoken language,” Fischer says. I talked earlier about the the aesthetic pleasure of Chinese characters. The idea that a well-formed character has merit in itself, aside from its linguistic function, fascinates me.

Many important things in life are inefficient: art, love, sports, children. Fischer says, “It is well known that because of its writing system, Japan forces its young to endure many more years of education―placing demands on its young people and at great cost to the state―than are necessary in other countries. Yet this may also explain, if only in part, Japan’s manifest success. One thing is clear: in no way has Japan’s writing hindered the intellectual growth of its users.”

In a different way, French culture has proved to many of us that it’s worth taking time to do small things well. We are still left with the question of which small things to choose.

Forests of symbols

I’ve been reading Steven Fischer’s A History of Writing ever since Christmas and finally finished it. It’s sort of hard to follow (I think he could have used a more systematic editor), but it has prompted much reflection on the nature of writing.

Writing fascinates me. Learning new alphabets is fun; handwriting is important enough to experiment with and remodel from time to time. Letters are exciting. Living in another era, I would have been temperamentally inclined to credit the myths that described writing as a sacred gift from the gods.

In truth writing probably began with accountants, who made knots in ropes, scratched notches on sticks, or inscribed clay tokens to symbolize unwieldy animals. It was when the marks they made assumed a phonological significance apart from the objects they represented that this became complete writing. Fischer emphasizes that this was a groundbreaking technological innovation, not an evolutionary process. He suggests that complete writing was invented only once in all history: a rare idea indeed. All the diverse instances of it around the world, from the most awkward to the most ingenious, are variations on the unique idea of complete writing that popped up in Sumer around 3700 BC:

1. Its purpose is communication.
2. It consists of artificial graphic marks on a durable surface (or electronic medium).
3. It uses marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech.

It is not that unromantic that we owe accountants for the concoction of letter magic. After all, what is a story but an account? In French, a compte rendu is a summary of something you’ve heard. And a conte is a pure fairy tale.

To populate our tales (a word that used to mean counts, just like tallies,) we need all the races of letters―gothics and grotesques, romans and moderns and humanists, capitals and uncials and minuscules. We delight in their anatomy of bowls and crossbars, ears and crotches, legs, arms, apices, vertices, tails, terminals, hairlines, stems, spurs, and spines. Not to mention heng, shu, and the other limbs I haven’t learned yet, to make beautiful creatures I mentioned earlier.

With picayune pecunia we assemble the words that form our armies of arguments. We can take nothing for granted in our accounting. The tale of writing is rich.

An ear for German

I was reading some Rilke to a friend two nights ago and was happy to hear her say it was beautiful. I have always wanted to prove to someone that German is a pretty language, or at least could be thought of as pretty. Most people think it isn’t. But would they think so if everyone else hadn’t told them that from their inception? Is it really an objective truth?

Take a word like Friedrich. If you say it right, it’s the gentlest rippling of air through your mouth, a relaxing of control to let a soft breeze pass along your throat, tongue, and teeth. You have to smile to say it.

Now German is the poorer for lacking our exquisite th sounds, but it has other sounds that fall in the same class of feather-soft, downy, maternal whisperings.

As for Rs, I think German’s uvular R is superior to the French velar one. It is liquid rather than raspy. I enjoy hearing my German-speaking friend pronounce her French Rs à l’allemand.

I think what people hear and dislike about German is a lot of stops and fricatives. But German is about control of the vocal passages. Americans don’t have to open their throats, and we become unpleasantly nasal. However, German is a rhythmic river of sound, a carefully restrained singing.

Useless characters

Recently my mom sent me a story from The New Yorker about a guy who made miniature palaces. He was a big hit with the king who hired him. This artist could carve not only an apple the size of a grain of sand but the fly on the apple. He got better and better, carving the fly’s hairs and the molecules of the hairs. His work got steadily more and more precise until neither he nor anyone else could actually see what he was carving. They didn’t fire him, just shut him up in a room alone and had food brought to him while he carved his amazing but pointless carvings. He was perfectly happy, obsessively happy.

Sometimes I think I could be like that. I consider myself a writer by nature and I have a job that involves writing and layout and graphic design. I enjoyed drawing as a kid, and I used to create newspapers for fun, so it’s all right up my alley. But sometimes I feel like my tastes take a turn that is obsessive, minute, approaching uselessness.

Most people who consider themselves “visual” or “creative” can come up with great schemes or ideas. There are days when I have good ideas and grand schemes. I think I am reasonably productive. But the grand scheme is not my greatest joy in life. I am happier staring at a black-and-white page of type (the right type, set in an attractive manner) than at a colorful poster. I am happier staring at a single perfectly curving letter than at the flashiest full-color effect that a Photoshop artist can produce.

People who consider themselves writers often have plots and ideas. Sometimes I have plots and ideas, but I’m best at just amassing words. People will complain about too much information on a page and I will nod my head, completely uncomprehending. I love spreadsheets and pages of words. Or I look at closed books and revel in all the wisdom and adventure and beauty that I know, without even opening them, is inside.

When you read about the carver of miniature palaces, it does occur to you to wonder if the things he is carving really exist, since even he must be unable to see them. But that is not the conclusion that I reached at the end of the story. I believe that he really could carve things that minuscule. I believe that his gift continued to approach the ever-more-slightly tinier limit of perfection until he died.

I am interested in Chinese calligraphy right now. Chinese writing is remarkable because it conveys meaning that speech alone cannot convey. To us, written language is an imperfect system for representing speech. Chinese script, however, is more perfect than speech.

In China, calligraphy has historically been an art form as eminent as (or even moreso than) poetry or painting. The characters are important for their appearance, not just their meaning. A specimen of calligraphy is described this way: “reeds on the shoreline of a quiet lake―the slender strokes bent by the night breeze rustle in the still twilight,” or compared to dancers, farmers, forests, waterfalls, in Johan Bjorksten’s book pictured above.

I could get lost in this arguably useless world forever. Fortunately I have a marvelously broad range of tasks at work, including talking to people, and ample extracurricular activities that keep me away from home, so there is no immediate danger of ending up in a lonely room with food passed to me under the door. I know I would probably hate it if I actually did have that much solitary time on my hands. But I admit I dream of it sometimes.

Herbsttag

Keatsmas is coming fast, and I’ve been meaning to build up to it with at least one other poem. Here it is:

Herbsttag

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
Und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.

Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
Gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
Dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
Die letzte Süsse in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Here is my very unscholarly translation. (Feel free to improve it, Scharnhorst!)

Lord: It is time. The summer was enormous.
Lay your shadows along the sundial,
And let the winds loose across the acres.

Tell the last fruits to reach full size;
Give them yet two southerly days,
Bring them to perfection, and chase
The last sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house will not build now.
Whoever is alone will stay that way for a long time,
Will wake up, read, write long letters,
And wander up and down the avenues,
Restless, when the leaves follow.

I found an interesting walk-through translation of this poem, in case you’re leery of mine. Of course you lose everything in translation. A particularly problematic line is the first one of the last stanza, which is unforgettable in the German and impossibly awkward in English.

I have no end of admiration for Rilke’s rhythm and beauty of language. I wonder if this poem is something to the Germans like “To Autumn” is to us. It seems likely, and I was delighted to see it on my friend’s German mom’s blog, along with—what joy!—an excellent picture of stubble plains.

Cree

Quote from Great Plains by Ian Frazier -

The fact that their culture tended to fragment itself into so many different tribes and bands was probably a disadvantage to the Indians in the long run. But it certainly was a big help to early pioneers trying to come up with colorful place names.

Cree was the name of one of those tribes. Which practically cries out for inclusion in the Crawdad word ladder. Frazier says there were Plains Crees, Woodland Crees, and Swampy Crees. Though there is a Cree tribe still around today, evidently the original tribe didn’t call itself by that name. They used variations of the word Iyiniwok, which means “the people.”

If you want to hear Cree spoken, there's a treasure trove of stories here.

Brel

I have admired Jacques Brel for a long time, but I’ve been afraid that maybe it was a passing crush I would be ashamed of later. He seems like the kind of singer only old women would like. (Why should that stop me, I suppose I should ask?) And he was ugly. The perpetual cigarette may have been charming to his misguided contemporaries, but it doesn’t work on me. And besides, his songs are so melodramatic. But still, I persist in my admiration of this monkey-faced, chain-smoking, philandering dead Belgian. I must try to explain why I am certain he is great. I must confess my love.

“As poetic as Bob Dylan, as introspective as John Lennon, as virile as Bruce Springsteen,” said the program for Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which I dragged my mom to see with me in Fort Worth a couple years ago. Unfortunately, this musical was a false gospel. The English translations of the songs lose all nuance. “If all you have is love” becomes “All it takes is love.” The change of emphasis in the song shocked my tender, Brel-trusting heart when I heard it. Had I misunderstood the song? Had the fact that French is not my first language made the words seem more mysterious and subtle than they were?

Yes, Brel is dramatic. Most of Jacques Brel’s songs drive me crazy, they’re so frantic. Maybe you know his famous song “Madeleine,” which takes you on a riotous ride from hope to obsession to bitterness to despair. You have to give him points for his energy and enthusiasm. But our era is so fond of understatement that he just seems over the top.

By all means, don’t listen to the cheesy “If you only have love.” It talks about healing all our wounds, rebuilding Jerusalem, making the desert bloom, drinking from the Grail, melting all the guns... none of which is in the French. The original song talks about having no other riches than our love and our belief in each other, about offering love in prayer for the evils of the world, simply, like a troubadour. I suppose you have to have a certain tolerance for cheesiness to like it too. But it is still much more subtle.

Let’s leave the humanist manifestos — soit en anglais, soit en français — aside, and analyze one of Brel’s most subdued songs. I’m not sure how legal this is, but it looks like you can download it here.

“Le plat pays” describes a modest subject, Belgium. Its melody is the same three or four notes repeated in a monotonous pattern. Some kind of hokey flute accompanies dear Jacques as he intones his plotless, characterless description of a landscape. He repeats the same word four times in the first three lines, nearly every line begins with “with,” and the second-to-last stanza makes four statements about the sky and even repeats both attributes it is mentioning twice.

In the last stanza, after line by plodding line of landscape features, he begins to show emotion. The volume builds slightly. There is life in his voice, and, finally, a smile breathed into the word “chanter” — singing.

I tried translating it, but am not fully satisfied with my translation. If I manage to make it acceptable, I will share it. The words are simple. Each word is important. And when Brel sings, each word lives. Listen to it even if you don’t know French.

For a fascinating variation (which you don’t have to download), you can listen to him singing the same song in Flemish.

It takes on a different rhythm and color. His love for the words themselves is evident. I don’t care if he is overdramatic. How could you want him not to do what he does?

Kids & Language

A small group from our church spends Monday nights with a Musketian (I probably spelled that wrong) Turk family (and whoever of their friends happen to be in the apartment at the time) trying, through conversation, to help them learn English. They are ethnic Turks from the former Soviet Union, and they speak Turkish and Russian. The apartment complex is home to several Musketian Turk families, as well as other international people, quite a mini-UN.

At a recent visit, the daughter we know (let's call her S) had a friend over who turned out to be from Egypt (M). I asked M, "What language do you speak?"
"Arabic."
"Does S speak Arabic?"
A shake of the head "Turkish."
"Do you speak Turkish?"
Another head shake "Arabic."

I assume M doesn't speak Russian (maybe I should've asked that too), which means they have no common language, other than a very little English. Yet they're still friends. Kids!

Retraction of irritable rant

Eats, Shoots and Leaves has won me over. First of all, I had to get over the author's peevishness (see freethepeeves.com for an admirable campaign against grammatical peevishness). Then I slowly realized that she wasn't offering a systematic philosophy of punctuation. Her main purpose was to entertain, and she was doing a magnificent job of it. "If there is one lesson to be learned from this book," she writes (p. 125), "it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation." What makes her readers love her - no matter what they think of the serial (Oxford) comma - is simply that she cares about these things, and she's very, very funny.

Irritable rant about grammar

I have started reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves and am already annoyed with it. There are a lot of people who think that the English language needs to be protected from the people who use it, and they're just wrong. I loathe the slimy and manipulative way she snuggles up to the reader and implies that we are all part of this elite layer of society that understands what no one else understands. It is ironic that she wrote her book for what she thought was such a narrow audience and then it became a mad success. Everyone likes to think they're included in this mysterious secret tribe of sneering grammarians. I'm very curious what she's going to actually do in the book, because the introduction is not promising. I know I should wait until I've finished it before I comment.