Un chiste bilingüe

What's a snowman's favorite color?
¿Cuál es el color favorito de un muñeco de nieve?

¡Hielo!

Qui-sauce

As a highly visual person, I rarely notice when words sound similar if they're spelled quite differently. During dinner this evening I was playing the wonderful Cuban song "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás", which I rediscovered at a recent concert of the fantastic Sol y Canto and have been singing around the house since. My daughters wanted to learn it, and joined in on the final "¡Quizás, Quizás, Quizás!" after which my five-year-old pointed to her ketchup and said, "Sauce!"

Rules and corpora

Over the years, I've watched the ways in which my two daughters acquire language and have come to the conclusion that they do so very differently. Kiera, the seven-year-old, has an unbelievable vocabulary; once she hears a word, it's incorporated into her speech. She's like a sponge, absorbing everything she hears. Kyla, the five-year-old, appears to learn in a more rule-based way, with a deeper understanding of grammar. I believe this because she often makes errors in applying a rule of English language to a case when it doesn't apply, e.g. "I beated* Kiera in the race." She seems to have internalized regular patterns like "add '-ed' to put a verb in the past tense."

Kiera, on the other hand, has never made such errors that I can remember. As a toddler, though, she did frequently confuse the first and second persons, apparently deciding that "you" always referred to her, and "I" to the speaker. She also often refers to herself in the third person, and to me in the third person even when she's addressing me. I suspect it's because she has accumulated sort of a corpus of valid English words and phrases that she draws from. Since she's never heard incorrect forms like "beated", she's never inclined to use them---but she has heard both "you" and "Kiera" to refer to herself, which is why it took her a while to understand that she should use "I" rather than either of those.

I think my own acquisition of language is much more like Kyla's. I have a deep understanding of grammar, which facilitates learning new languages in a structured environment, but makes it harder to pick them up based on immersion alone. While boarding a plane to Mexico after studying Spanish for a year, the flight attendant asked me which row I was in and I absentmindedly answered, "Diez y cinco", invoking a rule that applies only to numbers sixteen and above; I felt a little sheepish when she corrected me, "¿Quince?" And last weekend, at my Mandarin lesson, I was asked to translate the time "eleven-thirty pm" and I said, "yi shi yi dian ban", even though I know that "eleven" is just "shi yi". Subconsciously, I'd misapplied the rule that applies to numbers twenty and over, where the tens digit is explicitly named.

In the public square

Despite all the contexts in which I've used my Spanish, and despite my characterization of myself as (mostly) fluent in the language, I'm well aware that I don't have the eloquence and command that a native speaker would possess. That's why I decided some time ago that the goal I once had of being a professional interpreter wasn't realistic. But I've found numerous other ways to fulfill my deep love of practicing foreign languages, particularly as I become more involved in spirituality and justice. The demographic landscape of the United States is changing before our eyes, and we must start becoming not only multicultural but multilingual if we are to keep up.

The golden rule of translation is that one always has one's native language as the target language. I can translate Spanish into English, and German into English, but I really don't have any business translating from English into other languages for anything important. For interpreting (interpreters speak, translators write) in informal contexts, when the goal is to make oneself understood as quickly as possible and nuance is less critical, it's okay for me to go in both directions. But for translation, I simply don't have the intimate knowledge of all the subtle connotations and idiomatic phrases in any other language to do justice to an original text.

Nonetheless, because of the linguistically isolated circles in which I move, I'm occasionally starting to find myself in a position where I'm the go-to person for a Spanish translation. Last Friday evening, I received a call from my minister, who was preparing remarks for an immigrant rights rally we were attending the next day; he wanted to be able to deliver them in both English and Spanish (which he can pronounce but not speak). I warned him that I wouldn't be able to render as elegant a translation as he'd get from a native speaker, but relented when I realized that I was the only person he felt comfortable asking for help on such short notice.

I must have labored for an hour on less than a hundred words of text, trying to capture his tone and spirit and making sure everything was absolutely free of grammatical errors. The next day, right before the rally, my minister showed the translation to a Latino clergyman, who said it had been well done. I felt proud; my minister has given me so much in the way of pastoral care and spiritual nourishment that I was happy to be able to give something back to him in return. And it occurred to me later that it was the first time I've written something in Spanish that was delivered to 3000 people for inspiration. Like all writing, translation is an art, and I think I just had my first major showing.

Bits and pieces

My life's been rather hectic lately, but fortunately my language activities are in far better shape than my blogging frequency would suggest. I've finally committed to improving my Mandarin and learning to read and write it, and have hired a wonderful tutor who's pushing me through the very excellent Integrated Chinese text. I was surprised to discover how much aesthetics matter while writing characters (especially traditional characters, which I insist on learning); it's like drawing, and definitely teases the right half of my brain.

My Spanish is getting a good amount of practice with all the work I've been doing lately in immigrant justice, and my church recently hired its first Latina minister to begin in the fall. I'd been steadily losing my conversation skills since moving out of California, but I feel them returning rapidly.

Here are a few interesting language tidbits I've found recently:

• I went to a fabulous restaurant called Pangea last weekend in New York City. Pangea (or Pangaea) is the name of the supercontinent that existed before it split into the seven continents we know today. I'd never thought much about the name, but while staring at it I suddenly realized it's from Greek παν-, meaning "all", and γαια, meaning earth. Makes sense!
• A translation/interpretation professor I had many years ago once said in class that in Spanish there's a verb meaning "make the sign of the cross", but I never knew what it was. Finally, I had the chance to ask my future Latina minister, and she told me it was "persignarse". I think that's one of the few cases in which the Spanish uses fewer syllables than the English.
• I learned the four tones of Mandarin Chinese as a child from my parents, but never made the distinctions well and was always confusing the second and third tones. Studying the language more formally in adulthood, I saw a rendition in music notation, and I've found them much easier to keep straight ever since.
  

¡Hablando español, otra vez!

One aspect of my job that I dislike is the lack of diversity in my work environment. Because we do work for the Department of Defense, everyone has to be a U.S. citizen. Whereas working in the semiconductor industry I had plenty of coworkers from Asia and Europe, here it's pure American.

Yesterday I met a couple of guys from Puerto Rico who work in the Speech and Language Processing group. I'd love to work for this group, but I couldn't even get an interview because I had no relevant experience. I told these men about my love for languages, to which they responded that they didn't actually do much with language, but it was mostly signal processing and pattern recognition. I said I knew that, but I just needed to be around different languages, and I'd heard nothing but English for the last four months. One of them said, "Oh, we can help you with that, if you want to learn a bit of Spanish." When I said I already knew Spanish, they told me about a Spanish conversation group that meets for lunch every Thursday and invited me on the spot.

It was one of the best times I've had in a while. I've been worried that I'll lose my Spanish without opportunities to practice, and spending an hour every week chatting with native speakers puts those fears to rest. Sorry, officemates...you'll have to do without me every Thursday from now on!

Spanish language podcasts?

I knew this was going to happen when I moved out of California, but I'm losing my Spanish. Boston doesn't have quite the concentration of Latinos that the San Francisco Bay Area does, and the only time I ever speak Spanish these days is with my roommate's Colombian nanny, and then it's only quick conversations about the weather or what the kids are doing. I'm hoping to join a visitation program for detained immigrants within a few months, but in the meantime I've decided to stop trying to make progress on any new languages and just try to hold on to what I have.

Does anyone know of a good advanced-level podcast in Latin American (preferably Central American) Spanish? I still listen to my old Puerta del Sol audiomagazines, but they're mostly in Castilian Spanish, as is the only advanced-level free podcast I've found on iTunes, Notes in Spanish. I'd love a news-oriented, NPR-type podcast that features native speakers at normal speed and vocabulary, rather than something oriented for language learners. If anyone out there has recommendations, please pass them on!

¿No habla inglés? ¡No se permite manejar!

Apparently some officers on the Dallas police force have been ticketing drivers for not being able to speak English.

As a former software engineer who has spent a lot of time fixing poor user interfaces, I do think it's entirely plausible that rookie cops might select an option from a pull-down menu called "non-English speaking driver", thinking it was an informative note rather than an instruction to issue a ticket. At least, I prefer that possibility over the idea that police officers might actually believe this to be a real law and seek to enforce it. The police chief seems extremely cool about it all, which is a refreshing change from how these types of challenges usually go down.

Mistaken identity

Today I called my friend Jocelyn, a sociologist who specializes in Latin America and speaks fluent Spanish. We'd been playing phone tag, and I was a little surprised when she answered her cell phone "Hola". But she has caller ID and she knows I speak Spanish as well, so I figured she was just being silly. I returned the greeting, "Hola, Jocelyn, ¿cómo estás?" and after a pause I heard her say in English, "I'm sorry...who am I speaking with?" Apparently her caller ID hadn't been functioning and she'd assumed I was her Colombian nanny.

It reminded me of a similarly funny incident that happened to me as a teenager once when my father was out of town. He'd usually call home every night, so one evening I answered the phone to hear a familiar voice ask in Mandarin whether my father was there. I thought, "Ha ha, very funny" and responded in a little girl's voice, "我不知道" ("I don't know"). He kept playing along, asking why I didn't know, to which I responded, "我聽不懂!" ("I don't understand!") Suddenly, I heard him speaking to a woman in the background who then got on the line to talk to me, and I realized in horror: This is not my father. By then I was mortified, and beyond the limits of my Mandarin, so there was only one possible course of action.

"MOM!!!!!"

That's the thing

This evening, my six-year-old daughter remarked of her sister, "Mommy, Kyla's four and she still can't say 'th'. She can't say the word 'thing' right."

As we tried unsuccessfully to get her to say it correctly, I had some interesting insights about the way people mispronounce the "th" sound. There are actually two versions of it, the voiced (as in that, this, the) and the unvoiced (thing, theory). Kyla mispronounces both of them, but she preserves the voiced/unvoiced character when she does: "Dat's de fing." The voiced "th" is replaced by "d", which is also voiced; the unvoiced "th" is replaced by "f", which is unvoiced.

My Taiwanese parents also have difficulty with the "th" sound, but they have different voiced/unvoiced substitutions: "Tzahs tze sing." My Russian violin teacher substitutes a voiced "z" and an unvoiced "t": "Zat's ze ting." Although I haven't yet done an exhaustive study, I suspect that all foreign accents that replace the "th" sounds do so in a way that preserve the voiced or unvoiced aspects as appropriate.

It seems to me that this kind of voice-aspect-preserving substitution makes up a huge fraction of the consonant differences we perceive in foreign accents. A native English speaker trying to speak Spanish will frequently confuse the voiced "b" and "v", (haber and a ver are actually homonyms) or the "d" and voiced "th" (todo is generally pronounced more like to-tho).

I wonder if I could predict how a native speaker of a given language would pronounce English without ever meeting one, simply by studying the voiced and unvoiced sounds that exist in that language.

Order of adjectives

By the time I started learning Spanish, I'd already studied three languages formally. Two of them, Latin and ancient Greek, have extremely complicated grammar. So I was well-versed in all terms grammatical---all the parts of speech, noun and adjective declensions, verb tenses and aspects and voices and persons. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the structure of the languages I know.

I was shocked, therefore, when a fellow student in Mexico brought up something I'd never even considered before: order of adjectives. You can't say "a black small cat"; it has to be "a small black cat". I don't remember learning this in my English grammar classes, but as a native English speaker I can tell you what sounds right and what doesn't.

There is, in fact, an accepted order of adjectives in English, depending on the quality described. Size comes before color. Other languages have their own orders (see here for a description in Spanish), which seem more or less similar, with accommodations for non-English constructions like postpositive adjectives.

What I find curious is the fact that I never learned order of adjectives explicitly, not in English or any of my foreign language classes. Is it because it's more of a custom than a rule (though making the distinction is always a little dicey)? Or because there's some inherent hierarchy based on how humans perceive material qualities (I find this a little hard to believe)? I do see the subject mentioned occasionally in ESL classes. I'd love to know from my readers who learned English formally in other countries whether this topic was ever discussed.

Last night at the pet store

Last night after work, I decided to pop into PetCo to pick up some much-needed flea shampoo for my cats. It was supposed to be a five-minute stop, but then I saw a clerk wandering around the store asking people, "Do you speak Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?" No one ever asks me, an Asian woman, whether I speak Spanish, so I called out, "I speak Spanish, do you need an interpreter?" He accepted my services with relief and I spent the next fifteen minutes helping him help a young Hispanic woman buy some fish for her little boy. Apparently the fish she was eyeing were rather difficult to take care of, requiring that she put other fish in the tank for six weeks first to "balance it" (excrete some bacteria or something), but there was no way he was going to be able to explain that with hand gestures. Eventually she settled on some red cap goldfish, which are much easier to raise, and all parties were happy.

I never get to be the one who saves the day. I can't stand up when a flight attendant asks, "Is there a doctor on board?", and I'm never the one who happens to have a Swiss Army knife in her purse with just the right tool. Even when I was on my former company's emergency response team, the only thing I ever had to do was give someone an ice pack. And so okay, while helping someone buy fish isn't exactly a lifesaving gesture, I was happy to be able to help when no one else around could.

The clerk told me that he was so glad I'd been there, because the woman had been in several times before but no one could ever speak to her, and he wanted to make sure she got the right fish for her little boy. I was touched. In my daily life I see so many instances where people who don't speak English---usually Hispanics, in my part of the country---are simply dismissed, or even yelled at, and here was a young white guy doing everything he could to help her. He could have just sold her the original fish, which would have died without proper care, or decided she wasn't worth it as a customer and just tried to get rid of her, but he didn't. He recognized her humanity despite their lack of a common language. Once again, I say that it is not language that creates barriers; it is people and their attitudes, and this little incident restored my faith in the innate goodness of many.

I learned the Spanish word for fresh water, agua dulce (literally "sweet water"). And the clerk gave me a ten percent discount on my flea shampoo for helping them out. We were winners all around.

Dora the Explorer around the world

When we were in Taiwan, we happened to catch Dora the Explorer on TV. In the original show produced in the United States, Dora and her friends speak mostly English, with occasional Spanish words like "¡Vámonos!" or "¡Delicioso!" sprinkled into conversation. The Taiwanese version, however, had Dora speaking mostly Mandarin with a little English. Apparently this is what most other countries do, replace English with the dominant language of the country and Spanish with English. I guess the implication is that English is the most important second language for kids to learn.

There are a couple of exceptions to this rule. In Ireland the bilingualism is Irish-Spanish, which makes sense since English is a second official language anyway. And in Serbia, the show is in Serbian and Spanish as well.

FreeRice.com

This site is one of the best I've ever seen for combining education with entertainment. It's a simple concept, elegantly executed. You're given a series of vocabulary words with multiple-choice definitions, and your level goes up or down depending on which words you answer correctly. There's even a charity aspect to it; for each word you get right, ten grains of rice are donated by the advertisers to the United Nations World Food Program.

The adaptive nature of the game means it's suitable and instructive for people with all levels of English ability; my four-year-old daughter plays at levels 1 (puppy, ship) and 2 (concentrate, employee) while my husband and I compete in the upper 40s (ratiocinative, adumbrate). I have made to 50, the highest level, only once.

I knew I'd be able to guess many definitions based on my knowledge of foreign languages, but I was surprised when I noticed that my Spanish was helping me far more than my Latin: arruga for rugose, nido for nidus, ala for alate. Then I realized it's simply because my Spanish is much better than my Latin; I just didn't know the Latin words for wrinkle, nest, or wing! In fact, they are identical or similar to their Spanish counterparts.

Enjoy! But be warned, the site is addictive!

Foreign accents and more than you ever wanted to know about verbs

When someone is perceived to speak English with a foreign accent, there are at least two different elements involved. The first is what the American Heritage Dictionary explains as

A characteristic pronunciation, especially:
1. One determined by the regional or social background ofthe speaker.
2. One determined by the phonetic habits of the speaker'snative language carried over to his or her use of another language.

This is what most accent reduction programs seem to focus on: individual vowel and consonant sounds, syllabic stress, etc. Another element, however, is the set of characteristic grammatical errors made by speakers whose native language is not English. It is this aspect that allows me to detect when something I'm reading has been written by a native Chinese speaker, for instance. Because Chinese has no articles and no inflected forms for plural nouns or verb tenses, native Chinese speakers frequently omit these constructions when speaking or writing English. "Yesterday I went to the store and bought an apple for fifty cents" would become, "Yesterday I go to store and buy apple for fifty cent".

Examining these characteristic errors can also provide insight into the grammar of a particular language. I've never studied Russian, but I've noticed that many Russian speakers make excessive use of the present progressive. My violin teacher, who grew up in Moscow, says things like, "When I am practicing this passage, I am thinking about relaxing this finger" whereas a native English speaker would use the simple present, i.e. "When I practice this passage, I think about relaxing this finger". I finally began to wonder whether there's something about the Russian language that emphasizes the progressive aspect of verbs, and sure enough, there is.

In elementary school grammar we usually learn only about a verb's tense, which is simply where the action occurs in time, i.e. past, present, or future. But verbs have another quality called aspect, which describes the state of completion of the action. It can be incomplete (imperfect), as in "I was going to the store, or complete (perfect), as in "I went to the store". This is the difference between the Spanish imperfect ("iba a la tienda") and preterite ("fui a la tienda"), or the imperfect and aorist in Ancient Greek. Based on the superficial knowledge of Russian verbs I've managed to gain by perusing sites like this one and this one, in Russian the aspect of a verb is more important than its tense, and most verbs come in imperfective-perfective pairs. I'm guessing that when Russian speakers learn English, they're somehow taught that the equivalent for their imperfective verb is formed by the English present progressive (to be + present participle), whereas the simple present tense is much more idiomatic and often conveys that progressive aspect implicitly.

By the way, the term "perfect" when used to describe a verb has nothing to do with the connotation of "flawless", as I wondered when I first encountered the term many years ago. They do have related etymology, however, from the Latin "perficio" meaning "to complete". The word seems to have evolved to its more common meaning in that something completed, or brought to full development, is presumed to be of high quality.

Think before you spell

I didn't follow (or blog about) the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year as I did in 2006, but I was prompted to think about it when I found out that a friend's daughter had been eliminated in one of the early rounds. I was still happy for her, as I never made it to the nationals myself. The farthest I ever got was the state bee of Kansas back in 1988, when I stumbled on the word "jaundiced", spelling it "jaundist".

There are many instances in which I think people would spell better if they actually understood what they were spelling. I had never heard the word "jaundiced" before, and when I asked for a sentence I was given the context, "He held a jaundiced view of...", using the meaning of "prejudiced". I spelled it incorrectly because I associated the word with other world views like "socialist" and "capitalist", and to this day I'm satisfied that I went through that reasoning process even though it ultimately failed me. If I'd been given instead the sentence, "The baby's face was jaundiced", perhaps I'd have guessed the correct spelling.

I'm still puzzled by the number of people who misspell "deodorant" as "deoderant", though they surely can spell the word "odor". Do they not realize that the words are related? One can tell a lot about how a person is thinking (or not) about the meaning of an expression when he substitutes a nonsensical homonym; I recall a tae kwon do classmate asking if anyone was planning to participate in the "Beta Breakers" race. It's actually "Bay to Breakers", a course that begins at the edge of the San Francisco Bay!

I noted in one of my very first blog entries that the letters V and B are pronounced identically in Spanish. A common Spanish expression is "A ver", frequently written incorrectly as the infinitive verb "Haber". But the expression means "Let's see", which should serve as an easy reminder for the word "ver", which means "to see". Again, I don't see how anyone who is aware of what he's writing can make this mistake.

Ice cream, the panacea

I love my work as a volunteer interpreter at the Rotacare Free Clinic, but I find it difficult to fit it in with all my other activities. I try to schedule myself twice a month, because any less than that and I start losing my language skills in between sessions. But May was particularly busy and last night was the first time I'd managed to go in four weeks. Despite this, I was surprised at how easily the Spanish was coming out of my mouth...until I suggested to a patient that she put ice cream (helado) on her chest instead of ice (hielo) to ease her pain.

Well, I have long been of the opinion that sufficient ice cream can cure anything. That, plus the patient's laughter---the best medicine---leads me to believe that maybe I didn't screw up so badly after all.

Un cero a la izquierda

I learned the most charming Spanish idiom this week from Juan, my Puerto Rican buddy with whom I volunteer as a Spanish interpreter at the Rotacare Free Clinic: "Ser un cero a la izquierda", whose literal translation is "to be a zero to the left". In our mathematical notation system, of course, placing a zero to the left---typically only done before a decimal point---does nothing to change the value of the number. Hence, a person who is un cero a la izquierda is someone who is useless, or of no account.

What kind of web shall we weave?

I identify myself as an atheist, but I find a lot of value in the ideas of Unitarian Univeralism, and I've been active in my local congregation in Fremont, CA for nearly five years now. I've recently begun an initiative to address the lack of racial diversity in my congregation, and as part of my research and networking process I visited the San Jose church last Sunday, which is unique in offering a ministry entirely in the Spanish language. The sermon I attended was entitled "Diversidad Y Prejuicio" (Diversity and Prejudice) and it was interesting and encouraging to discover that the nearly 100% Latino population that attends the Spanish-speaking services also feels a need for increased outreach.

Unitarian Universalists "covenant to affirm and promote" seven guiding principles. In my work to improve awareness of racial issues, I most frequently quote the third and sixth principles, which include phrases such as "acceptance of one another" and "the goal of world community". Last Sunday's sermon, however, focused on the seventh principle, which reads "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part". It was surprising because to me and most other UUs I've encountered, this particular principle evokes images of nature---the "web of life"---and is most frequently employed when encouraging UUs to speak out and act on behalf of environmental concerns.

Here's the thing: The Spanish version of the principle is "El respeto por el tejido interdependiente de toda la existencia de la cual somos parte"; the word "web" is translated not as tela (used, for example, in tela de araña, "spider web") or even red ("net"), but as tejido, which has more the connotation of "fabric". In fact, the speaker used as a visual aid a brightly-colored weaving with a Native American design on it. When I thought about the Spanish words, I thought not of insects and animals and trees, but of a tapestry made rich by the number of different-colored threads running through it, working together to form a beautiful work of art. From there, the analogy to the value in having a racially diverse congregation was apparent.

I'm constantly amazed by how much our thoughts can be influenced by language, particularly with regard to interpretations of religious material. I'm only half kidding when I claim that fundamentalist Christians should all learn Greek and Hebrew if they want to adhere so closely to the words of the Bible. Divinely inspired or not, everything changes at least a little in translation.

Hard, naked, and raw

Well, that post title ought to get me a few more search hits (though not likely from the audience I'm hoping for)...but I'm actually talking about data. I was watching the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" recently with Spanish subtitles turned on, and noticed that the expression "hard data" was translated as "información desnuda", or literally "naked information". The Spanish version seems more illustrative when we're referring to unembellished fact; in English we also sometimes say "raw data". I'd never thought much about the meaning of "raw" in this instance, but perhaps it does not mean uncooked but rather unprocessed or in a natural state, as in "raw wool". We also have the expression "in the raw", which is synonymous with "naked".

Incidentally, having these Spanish subtitles on proved to be quite useful for Debby, our German exchange student. No, she doesn't speak Spanish, but---like everyone in the civilized world---she thinks in metric and Celsius, and she wouldn't have been able to make sense of the data (raw or otherwise) without the conveniently-displayed conversions.