It's been almost two months since the last language log post. In the meantime, we've had a road trip, covid, and a ton of hospital appointments, so it's not been a very active period on the language-study front. At all.

Nevertheless, I've come across a lot of useful language links, which I'll just quickly document here:

CHINESE LANGUAGE HISTORY

Sam Olsen produces interesting podcasts on all sorts of things to do with China. This one, where he talks to Andrew Methven (from Slow Chinese), offers insights into the extraordinary level of continuity with the past that the Chinese language demonstrates.

If you dig back into English history, for example, you soon find yourself needing to understand a different language. "Whereas in Chinese," Methven says, "the characters that you're reading now, and the expressions that you read, and then use now in spoken language, some of them are thousands of years old, [and] they still basically mean the same thing... I think pretty much any idiom that you would use in spoken contemporary Chinese language today, will have a history lineage, of anything from several 100 years to 2,000 or 3,000 years." For example, much of the language that Confucius used, more than 2,000 years ago, is still in use, and can be encountered in newspaper articles or business meetings in China today: "So it's a lot more relevant. There's a much greater connection through the language between China and Chinese people now and the deep past."


Liuzhou, 2006



He illustrates his point by looking at some of the expressions employed to talk about the June Shopping Festival (one of China's main online retail events), which often hark back to themes like warfare and agriculture. If you're a bargain hunter, for instance, you're "plucking sheep's wool"; if you don't get your bargain, you have "failed-retreated" -- a phrase that dates back to the Han Dynasty 1,800 years ago, and was used to describe the retreat of a defeated Chinese general and his army from a battlefield.

Methven continues: "What's also interesting is that everyone in China that learns Chinese knows all those stories. You learn the Chinese characters, they're learned through writing them and repeating them, you learn idioms, and you learn them through stories. So every idiom has a backstory, therefore -- the depth of understanding of not only the language, but the historical context and the cultural meaning -- and all these different stories everyone knows them."

(See Methven also for the lineage of that "playing with fire" phrase that was all over the news a couple of weeks ago...)

In similar vein, Jing Tsu has recently written a book on Chinese characters, which sounds fascinating: "There’s a huge philosophical background and discourse that comes with the Chinese language. The origin of the characters -- that the ghost wailed and heavens rained millet on the night that characters were born, that a four-eyed sage actually was inspired by the formation of clouds and the patterns of the universe to construct a symbol system for the human language that could also resonate and harmonize with -- it’s very different. It was never abstract to begin with, the way we think about the Greek alphabet and what it adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, because the characters were very much meant to be part of the natural world, not something that stands against it or let alone have the will to power to control nature."

It's this kind of thing that makes me want to keep going with Chinese, even in my utterly inadequate fashion.



INTERPRETING AND TRANSLATING

-- What's involved in being an interpreter? There is SO no way I could have done this...

-- There's a thing called the European Parliament Speech Repository (mentioned in the above video). I haven't used it yet, but it looks interesting.

-- Why are interpreters invisible in some cultures, and rock stars in others?

-- Ithaca, the poem by Constantine P. Cavafy that provides the byline adopted by Purple Tern, has been hilariously sent up by Brazilian poet Angelica Freitas (and there's an excellent English translation by Hilary Kaplan).





APPS AND THINGS

-- Clozemaster now limits users to 30 sentences a day in each of your languages. We'll see... This might ultimately mean a parting of the ways. Then again, you shouldn't spend too much time on these apps anyway.

-- This week I tried out the Portuguese version of the Toucan browser extension. I've seen it recommended several times, but for me it's just not good enough at distinguishing between homonyms to be really useful. Uninstall, therefore, I'm afraid.


My former blog, Toucanized

OTHER PEOPLE'S LANGUAGE-LEARNING EXPERIENCES

-- This is an excellent run-down on working with multiple languages at once. I like this suggestion: "I usually have TWO focus languages for each 3-month period. One focus language is a language where I'm a beginner and need to do a lot of hard study, and the other language is one of my intermediate or advanced languages where I do less brain-intensive activities." Worth a try, in some shape or form.

-- This immensely moving piece by Saudamini Deo talks about language-learning in covid times: "I first enrolled myself in French language classes in August 2020, already well into the pandemic, as a way to do something... In English, Hindi, and Bangla -- the languages I use daily -- we spoke only of death and distress. At a time when everything was bad news, it was only in French that I could talk about something simple, like a cat or a game of Ludo... By the time the second wave truly engulfed India, the French language was no longer just something; it was my railing in the blackout. I realized that it is possible to inhabit a language the way one inhabits a city. It is also possible to take refuge in a language... It seemed almost certain that, in the near future, my life would still be in a state of flux and the world would still be facing unrelenting crises but, if I remained alive, I would at least know more French. It may seem like escapism, but to escape horror is survival. Oftentimes survival is resistance..."

-- I also liked this Roll Call of Abandoned Languages by Malaysian writer J.R. Ramakrishnan. It reminded me a bit of my very first language log post...