Saturday, July 9, 2016

Sound Recycling

A few years ago, I finished a degree which made me, in effect, a qualified linguist.

Among other things, this means (at least in theory) that I'm qualified to go and live in a remote community whose language has never been written down or codified, and create the first written record of it. 

The number of languages for which no-one has ever created a dictionary and/or a written grammar is higher than you may think. Finding one usually involves going someplace quite remote in Asia, Africa or the heart of Australia, so it means adopting a lifestyle quite different to what you're used to  although last night in Copenhagen, I met an American guy who told me that a ‘linguist friend’ of his worked on an undocumented language in regional Sweden just a few years ago.

Nice work if you can get it :-)

Btw, about Copenhagen: I stayed there for six days, enjoying the utterly fantastic hospitality of my friends Matt and Ally. I can't honestly say the city blew my mind it struck me not as the kind of place where you walk around going "Wow, amazing!" on your first visit, so much as the kind that works its way gradually into your affections.  


Copenhagen - A Grower, Not a Shower ;-)
Copenhagen, Denmark, 08.07.16




















I've had that experience with a number of cities (Helsinki springs to mind), but obviously it takes more than six days. Matt and Ally emigrated to Copenhagen from Sydney almost a year ago, and it has definitely worked its charm on them. Since both are old and dear friends, it made me very happy to see them so delighted with their new home :-)

Meanwhile, in between catching up, meeting one or two of their new friends and applying for a Ukrainian visa (always an adventure), I got to play tourist for a couple of days. I walked around the city, which is pleasantly spread over several islands, visited the 'free city' of Christiania (more about that in another entry), spent an afternoon at the Louisiana contemporary art gallery on Copenhagen's outskirts, and took a train out to Roskilde, to soothe my inner Ragnar at the Viking Ships Museum.


Prow of A Viking Ship
Roskilde, Denmark, 07.07.16


















The museum was obviously a clear highlight. It's here because, some years back, an amazing discovery was made on the Roskilde fjord: five beautifully preserved, thousand-year-old boats were piled up on top of each other at the bottom of the fjord, apparently in an attempt to prevent other vessels from entering the harbour. 

Archaeologists dredged up the first boat and then tried to work out how they could preserve it in the open air  an undertaking which required them to invent completely new techniques for the preservation of wood.

Now well established, the museum acts partly as a research facility to support the theories of historians (at the moment, they're re-creating a voyage from Denmark to Greenland, in a reconstructed long boat). They also periodically offer two-day courses in how to sail Viking ships  a fact which had me in a state of high excitement, until I realised that I'd missed this year's course and would have to come back another time.

Probably the best thing about the place, though, was simply being able to get so close to the incredible artefacts. Incidentally, that's why I chose a close-up shot above: you all know what a Viking long boat looks like, but imagine being this close to one, being able to smell it, seeing the curve of the hull, all the imperfections in the wood etc. etc. That was pretty magical :-)

Also, as a fan of the Vikings TV series, I got a little bloodrush when one person on the guided tour asked "Are there more ships under the fjord?", and the guide replied "Yes, we think there are a lot more, especially if you go out to Kattegat.

As he said that, he pointed in a direction that indicated "It's over there, a bit further out on the fjord". But it was the place name that caught my attention: 

Kattegat? Really? We're near frikkin' KATTEGAT? 

I silently lost my shit for a second. 

If you watch the show, you'll know why: the story of Ragnar Lödbrok (a hero pulled from the Norse sagas) begins there, and I never imagined I'd be in a place that probably shares the same postcode. So that was a bit of a thrill.

Later in the local graveyard, I saw the burial monument below, and thought "You know, you can take the paganism out of Northern Europe, but you can't actually take the paganism out of Northern Europe." This part of the world may be nominally Christian, but the withering eye of Odin still watches over it, without a doubt.


Burial Marker in A 'Christian' Cemetery
Roskilde, Denmark, 07.07.16


















Something else which I've spent a lot of time doing this week is going "Ah, this thing works so well! I must be in Northern Europe!". I've said/thought this about all sorts of stuff, from billpay websites to school yards to public transport systems. The ingenuity of Nordic design is an endless source of satisfaction, and it applies in every area of life. And when you're constantly thinking to yourself "Y'know, whoever created this really thought it through, and now my life is a tiny bit easier", it almost acts as a partial antidote to cynicism. So that was fun too :-)

But hey, I massively digress.   

Let's get back to the 'qualified linguist' thing.

Of course, you don't see too many job ads for the kind of field work I described before, so most probably I won’t spend a couple of years of my life being the first person to write down a lexicon and grammar description for Language X.

That leaves me with ... well, a nicer CV, I guess, and a few extra tools when I argue with other teachers. (We sometimes like to debate the more contentious points of English grammar, especially while drunk. Unless you're a committed masochist, avoid us when we do that.) 

Beyond this ... um, really not that much. But one thing I do quite enjoy, and which the degree certainly helps with, is simply considering words. It’s fun for a Word Nerd like me, especially when I’m travelling around and coming across different languages.

It may sound odd, but I'm often struck by the sheer number of words that are out there in the worldI mean, you’ve got about 5,000 or so human languages, each with a huge vocabulary. And humans can only make about 200 speech sounds  many of which are the ‘exotic’ ones like African pygmy clicks, that turn up very rarely. So with the small number of sounds we have left, how do we manage to make enough words to fill all those vocabularies?

There are lots of answers to that, but one is just that different languages use the same combinations of sounds for different purposes – which is to say, we recycle the same words and syllables, but give them different meanings. 

Today I’m experiencing a rather fun example of that. When I woke up this morning I was still in Denmark. I then took a train to the southern tip of Sweden, before jumping on a ferry which is currently approaching the north-western coast of Poland. And all day, I’ve been using this combination of sounds: “tak”.

It’s an enormously useful syllable in this part of the world. In Danish and Swedish (spelled with an extra 'k' but pronounced the same), it means thank you. So you're always using it there. In Polish, tak is just as useful, because it means “yes”. So I’ll be continuing to use it over the next couple of days, but for different reasons. 

But it doesn't end there. When I get to Lviv (Ukraine) the day after tomorrow, I'll be in a bilingual, tak-friendly environment. Some people in Lviv speak Russian, and they use tak to mean “so” (especially when they're thinking aloud – you can walk around a room going taaak ... taaak ... taaak ... while stroking your chin thoughtfully, or moving newspapers and cushions in the hope of finding your keys). Others prefer to speak Ukrainian, in which tak has both its Russian meaning and its Polish one. And many locals are inclined to switch between the two languages. So it's going to be indispensable for some time to come. 

This, as I mentioned, is one of the ways we humans manage to stretch a very finite number of sounds and syllables out over thousands of languages and lexicons.  Call it 'sound recycling' if you like :-)

It’s also, incidentally, why certain words from one language can sound a bit rude in another. A memorable example is the word 'Fahrt', which is journey in German. You can wish someone a ‘guter Fahrt’ in that language, and enjoy a moment of adolescent amusement (though, to be fair, Germans use gute Reise, which means ‘good travel’, far more often). And Vater (meaning father and pronounced "farter") is at least as pleasurable.  

I get this all the time when I speak English around Russian-speakers: I'm chatting away when someone starts laughing, and I ask “What’s funny?”. I'm then told that a totally innocuous word I’ve just used sounds a bit sweary to the Russian ear. It could be a child’s word for genitals, or a very strong verb describing a particular sex act, or whatever. Russian seems to have a limitless stock of these words, making it almost impossible to avoid saying “So, how have you been? Have you blown anyone lately?” at some point.

So yeah ... these are the random thoughts that assuage my mind as I sit on the ferry to Poland, doing my second sea voyage for the summer (and still rather loving it as a form of transport).

I should probably get an early night tonight. This is what sleep deprivation does to my brain ;-)

See you!

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