City names

I don't know how city names get translated into different languages. For those that use the Roman alphabet, frequently the spelling is the same and only the pronunciation differs: Paris (PARE-is vs. Pa-REE), Berlin (Ber-LIN vs. Bare-LEEN). But why is Braunschweig (Germany) translated as Brunswick in English? Or Firenze (Italy) as Florence?

My Mandarin teacher and I had a lot of fun this morning reading a sample weather report and trying to identify the cities, most of which she knew only by their Chinese names. Most often the Chinese is just a phonetic representation of the city, e.g. 芝加哥 (Zhī jiā gē) for Chicago, or 巴塞羅那 (Bā sài luó nà) for Barcelona. Tokyo, however, is 東京 (Dōng jīng), literally "eastern capital" in both Japanese and Mandarin. I had a great time trying to guess the city from the Mandarin name; if I couldn't figure it out from pronunciation alone, she'd give me hints like "It's in Canada," and I could usually figure it out.

The only one I absolutely couldn't get was 德黑蘭 (Dé hēi lán), which my teacher said was a major city in Germany; she thought it was the capital. I suggested both Berlin and Bonn, neither of which was right; finally she asked me just to name a bunch of major cities in Germany because she'd know it if she heard it. "It's a very famous city!" I tried Hamburg, Frankfort, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, but to no avail. I thought "Dé hēi lán" sounded a bit like Deutschland, but that didn't make any sense; that's not a city.

Finally, we admitted defeat and looked it up online. 德黑蘭 is Tehran.

"Tehran?!" I exclaimed. "That's not in Germany! That's in Iran! Iran is in the Middle East!"

"Oh, that's why I see it in the news all the time."

A personal update

I always advise those who ask that self-study is by far the least effective way to learn a new language, and that goes for me too. Though I'm still determined to go through with my plan for learning Arabic, which was to be language #8, I can't seem to make any meaningful progress without the aid of a teacher and conversation partners. So, that goal will be deferred until next summer or fall, when my schedule becomes more flexible and I'm able to enroll in at the Esteban Language Center.

A few months ago my husband and I were contemplating a trip to Italy at the end of the summer, so the new language #8 was Italian for a short time. Learning Italian when one is already fluent in Spanish and competent in Latin is like a violinist learning to play the viola or the mandolin; a few tweaks are necessary but it's pretty close to what you're used to. (Learning Arabic, however, was more like learning the French horn for me!) But those travel plans have been delayed in favor of a family trip to Taiwan in the fall...

...so I'm backtracking and working on improving my competence in Mandarin (which was either language #7 or language #3, depending on whether you count my childhood "baby" Mandarin). After getting most of the way through the full Pimsleur course last year I've got basic conversational abilities, but I can't read more than about fifty characters or discuss anything remotely substantial. It's time to get better.

Most schools these days will teach simplified rather than traditional Chinese characters. I, being from Taiwan, am primarily interested in learning the traditional characters. (To quote my mother, "Simplified character has no character!") I've found an online course which will teach them, but the Taiwanese-run school near my home only teaches children. I hope that between the former and enrolling my daughter in the latter, I'll be able to learn what I want.

My Chinese coworker gave me some interesting insights this morning when we were discussing the effect of technology on the traditional vs. simplified character debate. Back in the days of low-resolution VGA monitors, it was actually quite difficult to display traditional characters on a computer screen ("they just look like a black blob"). However, one argument in favor of simplified characters is that they're faster to write by hand, though that's moot in the age of computers where input is performed by pinyin or Bopomofo. I recommend reading the debate linked above; it's quite fascinating.

V.S. = Very Stupid

String sections in an orchestra commonly have their parts marked so that all players switch bows at the same time. This job is usually performed by the principal player in that section. In my former community orchestra, however, the conductor decided to have a professional violinist---who happened to be my private violin teacher---bow the parts instead. I noticed that she wrote her initials, "V.S." at the bottom of one of the pages, which I thought was a little strange; it's hardly a difficult or creative enough task that it justifies a personal signature.

Years later, I've discovered that V.S. in fact did not stand for her name, but is an abbreviation for volti subito, or "turn page quickly".

Color naming

While trying to explain the color of fuchsia to my five-year-old daughter recently, I was reminded of something I learned in a linguistics class at Harvard many years ago about how color terms in a given language are predictable based on the number of color terms that exist. Though I don't remember the source, it's likely that the work presented was that of Berlin and Kay, in Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. According to the authors, languages that have only two color terms specify only black and white. If a third color exists, it is red, followed by green, yellow, blue, and brown.

The idea is plausible, though I haven't read the book itself, and the study does have its critics. I've known since I was a child that Taiwanese and Mandarin make no distinction between the colors of green and blue. And according to the Wikipedia article on color naming, dark and light blue are considered separate "basic colors" in Russian and Italian, much the same way that red and pink are in English.

The engineer in me finds the precision of the RGB color model quite appealing, but I can also spend hours paging through Avon catalogs looking at all the different names given to subtly varying shades of pink, purple, and brown. I can't say that "Sinful Passion" is terribly descriptive, though.

When gender matters

Not too long ago, a friend of mine asked if I could answer an Italian question for her. I agreed, with the caveat that I don't speak fluent Italian---in fact, I wouldn't even say I speak Italian at all. But the question was easily answered by anyone with a background in any Romance language: she wanted to know whether it was correct to address her friend as "il mio caro Antonio". "Is it 'mio' because he's male, or 'mia' because I'm female?" I explained to her that it's only his gender that matters, and for the male Antonio one must use the masculine form 'mio' regardless of whether the speaker is male or female.

The question seemed initially simple, but it made me realize that the only case I can think of where a speaker's gender matters is Hebrew, where a verb takes different forms for male and female subjects. And yet, upon further research, I learned that this is really just a case of standard subject-verb agreement. It's not the speaker's gender that's important, but the subject of the verb (which is identical to the speaker in the first person, but isn't always). In the present tense, Hebrew doesn't have separate forms for first, second, and third persons, thus "I walk", "you walk", and "he walks" will all be expressed the same way if the walker is male, but a different way if the walker is female. This seems very strange to those of us used to Western languages. And on the opposite spectrum there are the far Eastern languages like Mandarin, where the gender of the subject is almost never expressed explicitly; I'm sure this is why many Chinese, when speaking English, frequently confuse "he" and "she".

My friend's Italian question reminded me of another curiosity, which is that possessive adjectives like "my" are used in conjunction with the definite article ("the my dear Antonio"). Surprisingly, this is not the case in French or Spanish, and Latin---from which Italian is most directly derived---doesn't even have definite articles. Ancient Greek does, however, and the construction is similar.

Monsieur Saint-Saëns

Can anyone explain to me why we pronounce the final "s" in the name of French composer Camille Saint-Saëns? All the authoritative references agree that we should, but it seems to violate the rules of French pronunciation. Am I mistaken on the rules? Is it one of those cases where a family member simply decided it WAS TO BE SPOKEN THUS and the (mis)pronunciation became accepted?

Every time I think about this I'm reminded of my junior high orchestra teacher, who during a rehearsal of the "Carnival of the Animals" quipped, "We're going to play Saint-Saëns sans conductor!" Unfortunately, her remark went right over the heads of the roomful of twelve-year-olds who'd never studied French.