17 September 2007

Lo que fuera


Learning a foreign language likely counts as one of the cooler experiences that I have had. I remember having to write weekly essays in our "diarios" for my high school spanish class and in them trying to use all of the different locutions we had learned in class. Thinking back on the last two years of my high school spanish experience, learning Spanish was like building a mountain out of legos; the base was large and extensive, representing the importance of a good foundation, and gradually with each new verb tense or set of vocabulary the mountain crept upward into the clouds. For the sake of posterity, I can't say that I will ever reach the the peak of my spanish language mountain, but each part of the language that I learn (or relearn) always seems essential.

I've always believed that by learning a foreign language I have begun to understand the English language better. I think I should probably better acquaint myself with the proper terminology, but perhaps I have embraced my indolence because there's a certain pleasure in referring to the rules of spanish relative pronouns when speaking English. Using them a lot in English (where they are not as crucial as in Spanish) is almost directly related to my understanding of their usage in Spanish. Yet it's interesting that even though English grammar is classically Latin-based, the language has grown in such a way that English speakers can effectively communicate well even without using perfect grammar when they speak.

I recall hearing about the subjunctive well before learning about it in Spanish class. I heard from people in more advanced classes that it was pretty difficult and hard to understand, but I didn't really know what they were talking about until I learned it in class myself. I never knew that besides tenses, there were verb moods; perhaps the best thing for me to hear when I first learned about the subjunctive was that we don't really use it in English (well, I guess we do, but it's super simplified). In Spanish, verb conjugation is crucial because using subject pronouns isn't mandatory. It is to say, in English we have to use subject pronouns with verbs or who the speaker is would be unclear. The sentence I went to the store wouldn't make sense without the subject pronoun I (although colloquially, anything goes). Removing the subject pronoun I, the sentence reads went to the store. In English we have to use subject pronouns because often there aren't many verb inflections (I went; you went, he/she/it went, we went, you all went, they went). However, Spanish verbs have many inflections, such that the subject pronoun can be dropped because verb endings are different for each subject pronoun.

To show the variety of Spanish verb inflection, a basic example is the present indicative conjugation of the Spanish verb ver (to see):

yo veo [I see]
tú ves [you see]
él/ella ve [he/she sees]
nosotros vemos [we see]
vosotros veís [you all see]
ellos/ellas ven [they see]

But to avoid digressing further into pronouns, I'll say why I started writing this today: I think the subjunctive is cool. What I also think is cool is that in English we don't conjugate verbs any differently when expressing emotion, preference, desire, etc. However, in Spanish expressing emotion, preference, or desire calls for the use of the subjunctive. On my way to the library I was listening to the Silver Jews song "Death of an Heir of Sorrows" in which David Berman says "mostly I wish, I wish I was with you". I find it funny that he could also have said "I wish I were with you" and nothing would have changed at all as far as the meaning or the grammar. Yet, grammatically speaking, were is the only evidence of the past subjunctive left in English.

Studying the loss of the subjunctive in English would really require a lot of research if I were to want to discuss it much more. But, in the meantime, perhaps take a moment to think about how many times you hear was instead of were, and vice-versa, in conversation. Also, do you find that in certain instances you would use was instead of were, just as David Berman did? According to Dr Goodword's Language Blog, the past subjunctive is in its death throes, yet a lot of idiomatic expressions use were (e.g. as it were, if I were you) which leads me to wonder: are idioms the most effective means of preserving language?

04 September 2007

Typiquement



Sometimes I think about slang expressions and neologisms. Take, for example, the question "are you going to nuke it?" Out of context one might think it to have a different meaning but somehow it has become generally acceptable to say that you are going to "nuke" a food item when you are simply going to reheat it in the microwave. Yet, I hear it all the time and only recently have I thought about how silly it sounds. I won't argue the convenience of saying "nuke" instead of "microwave" or "reheat" but I guess personally for me it seems odd.

When I first read the chapter entitled Wordplay in Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, I thought it was interesting to read of the different instances of wordplay in English. He explains that someone in the UK might come across a crossword clue of "a city in Czechoslovakia" and have to figure out that the city is Oslo (Czech-oslo-vakia). Also, the playfulness of palindromes means the phrase "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas" is read identically whether spelled backwards or forwards. By and large, I suppose the origin of wordplay isn't as important as the ability for language to grow and be semantically pliable.

While living in Spain with a couple of french guys I learned a lot about French and slang expressions. Of course, I learned all the vulgarities (even though to my ears they sound too nice to be vulgar) but also some other interesting things about wordplay in French. One day I discovered my favourite phrase in French, ce type (meaning, roughly, this guy; pronounced sə ti:p), and asked what the equivalent phrase would be for this girl; they told me that it would be cette meuf (pronounced set: møf). The usage of meuf is highly colloquial and I found out that the word meuf was actually created by inverting the consonant sounds of the French word for woman: femme (pronounced fɑ:m). [Please do tell me if I've made mistakes with the phonetic spelling]

After talking with a friend (americaine) who has spent a considerable amount of time living in France, I found out that a lot of slang words in French are hard to figure out because the words are inverted versions of the originals. For her, the trickiness of inverted sounds and duality of meaning made learning slang slightly less intuitive. There is an article on Wikipedia that explains that this type of wordplay in French is known as verlan. In fact, the word verlan is, in itself, a play on words because if you invert verlan you get lanver (l'envers), which means the inverse in French.

The Wikipedia article explains how verlan is employed as well as some idea of what it would be like if we tried to do the same sort of thing in English. Take a look for yourself, it's rather amusing.

It is also worth mentioning that Lunfardo, an argot originating in and around the Rioplatense regions of Argentina and Uruguay during the 19th century, is similar to verlan in the sense that it reverses the syllables of words to form new words and expressions. Thus, tango is also known as gotán. There are others found in its Wikipedia article. I personally enjoy feca con chele for café con leche.

Also, for anyone who has taken a look at the url of this blog and wondered what keyornew is supposed to mean, I'll only say that it is the name of a song on Mathieu Boogaerts' album Michel. I bought the record, liked the song, and then realised that it is, in fact, the name of an american city, put in verlan. Can you figure it out?

02 September 2007

Comme ça


So, today I decided to be pro-active. I picked up the two french language books I borrowed from the library, found a blank notebook and a pencil, and began to study French. I often daydream about second language acquisition and exactly how effective certain studying methods can be. There are the computer software packages and grammar books for autodidacts and then there is simply pure immersion by way of moving to a different country. I'm a big fan of the immersion method. From the point of view of an armchair linguist (really, is there any other kind?), it's amazing to think about the many pieces to the puzzle of learning another language. For me, recognising the parts of language acquisition is hard enough because it's so easy to digress onto other topics. I find it hard to get past Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar - especially after having so many friends say that they simply have no aptitude for learning language - though I'm not sure if I wholly agree with it. So, I start to wonder about the debate of nature vs. nurture, and from there my thoughts are free to drift into any one of various fields that is somehow related to linguistics. After a few minutes I've got everything jumbled, so I let it go and feel content with liking that I like the topic.

My point is that I feel most comfortable getting to know a language (the basics; introductory stuff) in a classroom environment. I suppose this is so because it was in a classroom that I began to learn Spanish. I remember a weekend in 2005 when I decided to make flash cards to jump-start myself to study Hungarian. Sadly, it didn't work out. Though it was a half-hearted attempt, I do admit.

Being able to speak Spanish has given me this incredible ability to understand things in a bunch of other languages like French, Italian, Catalán, Portuguese. It's so involuntary at this point that to me it feels kind of like a super power. So, after taking an intro to French course at University, living with two french guys (and hanging out with all of their friends) in Spain, and already speaking another romance language, I figure that with a little extra effort learning French on my own shouldn't be completely impossible.

I started by working on the important stuff pertaining to french verbs - conjugations. I feel like the indicatif présent, passé composé, and conditionnel should nourish me for a bit, especially because French verbs don't have a ton of inflections. I've studied French before and understand certain things that I read and can get the gist of a conversation (I owe a lot to context), but I've never taken the time to learn about verb conjugations and grammar from a book. My favourite moment of studying today was learning about the passé composé and how the phrases I have bought and I bought in English can be expressed together with one phrase in French, j'ai acheté. The passé composé relies on an auxiliary verb (j'ai; avoir; to have) + a participle (acheté; acheter; to buy) in order to express the past tense. I think that's really cool because in Spanish we don't have auxiliary verbs and in English we do. I also find it fascinating that the passé composé is technically the present perfect tense (I have bought) but somewhere along the line it merged with the preterite, or passé simple, (I bought) to form the passé composé. Thus, the phrase "j'ai acheté" can now be translated into English as I have bought and I bought. The preterite (passé simple) still exists in the French language but is primarily used in literature, as stated in the book I'm reading.

I have another book I'm reading, 1001 Pitfalls in French, that explains some interesting things about vocabulary, namely the history of certain words that have a circumflex (^) or an acute accent (´).

1. A circumflex indicates where an S once existed in old French. (ex. forêt)
Note: as stated, this would imply that the modern word forêt, which means forest in
English, was once actually spelled forest in old French. Yet, this would not change the
pronounciation because words ending with -est and -êt are pronounced the
same way.

2. A word that begins with É or E indicates that at one time the word in Latin began with S.
ex. établissement [Latin stabilis]
école [Latin schola]
esprit [Latin spiritus]

3. The final E is always a Y in English. (ex. faculté [English faculty])

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Simple pleasures.