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 world. I 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!

Escape to Rethymno

Hello everyone!

So ... I finally got my chance to escape the resort hotel and see a bit of Crete!

Unfortunately, I didn't have nearly as much time as I would've liked. I had great plans to hike through a wild gorge, visit a former leper colony on a remote, windswept piece of coastline, and take a boat tour through a sea cave. ("Mmmmmm, caves!!", you can almost hear me thinking.)  

None of those things happened. 

That's ok, though, because I'm leaving Greece with a very positive impression – I really like the 'vibe' of this country. And given that it's sort of on the way from quite a few places to quite a few others, I don't imagine this will be my last visit.

Shaded Alley with Motorcycle

Rethymno, Isle of Crete, 02.07.16

What I did manage to do was to explore the town of Rethymno, which is one of the few sizeable townships on Crete. 

Rethymno's extensive Old Town is one of those places where motor scooters predominate over cars, as narrow alleyways do over wide roads and boulevards. It's also a place where the locals have found ingenious strategies to shield themselves from the blistering heat ... so when you wander down these alleyways, you enter a cool, shaded world.  

It's also a place where, in labyrinth of the Old Town, you can find plenty of picturesque courtyards like this one, which could easily make it into the pages on an in-flight magazine:

Courtyard Inside the Labyrinth

Rethymno, Isle of Crete, 02.07.16

It's the kind of place where (as in much of 'Old Europe') straight lines and precise corners don't seem to have been the main priority of many builders, but simple, rustic elegance was always high on the list.

Crooked Alley

Rethymno, Isle of Crete, 02.07.16

And where you can almost forgive yourself for peering nosily into people's windows, just to see what daily life might be like for those living inside. 

Nosy Tourist Gets A Living Room View

Rethymno, Isle of Crete, 02.07.16

So yeah ... with just an afternoon to spare, that was how I spent most of my time: wandering about, detouring down the smallest alleys I could find and peering into windows. 

I particularly liked this one – the window of a bakery, where the baker had at some point decided to get creative and make loaves in the shape of a semi-nautical, wholly mythical creature with her hungry brood:

Bakery Monsters

Rethymno, Isle of Crete, 02.07.16

Then finally, I retreated back to the gate of the Old Town, near the bus stop where I could catch the bus back to Resortland. Stopped there for an hour or so to enjoy a cappuccino (which turned out to be from a Nescafe machine – yeuch!!) and to use the FREE WI-FI proudly advertised on the door.

You have to imagine the words "FREE WIFI" sparkling and dancing here, because this is something that the hotel where I'm staying pointedly refuses to offer. Or rather, they do offer it, but it doesn't work. When you talk to the manager about this, he shrugs his shoulders and says "We have 800 guests in our hotel. What can we do?" 

I have several answers to that question. All of them contain offensive language.

Heraklion Port and Mountains at Sunset

Heraklion, Isle of Crete, 03.07.16

But now, thankfully, my resort days are over. I'm on an overnight ferry across the Aegean, arriving in Athens tomorrow morning. 

Travelling by sea is something I've done a bit of in recent years, and I find it quite relaxing – especially when compared to flying! And the sunset over Heraklion port as we departed tonight was pretty stunning, I have to say. So that set the mood for a very pleasant voyage :-)

I'm also aware that this is an incredibly safe ferry, since we have The Lord on Board with us. How do I know that? Well, because of the rather frighteningly colourful Greek Orthodox chapel located just inside one of the doors leading to the outside deck. Provided enough of the passengers stop in to pay their respects, there's simply no way anything can go wrong ;-)

We Got The Lord On Board!

Crete-Athens ferry, 03.07.16

Now it's totally dark outside, in the way that only the sea can be dark. As I sit on the upper deck sipping my Ouzo and lemon (a highly delicious mix, which the barman at the hotel introduced me to), I can't wait for the next adventure. 

Tomorrow I'm flying to Copehagen to stay with friends ... but not until I've finished my breakfast at the Acropolis!

See you :-)

Anthony.

Volodya

Volodya stumbles out of the breakfast room, stuffed with sausage and bacon and bread rolls. His belly hangs in front like a huge vertical stingray with its tail missing, nestling its head on his rib cage.

Volodya’s sunburn evokes fiery dried chilis hanging on a porch in some country where people appreciate spices a lot more than they do where he himself comes from. And yet, before he reclines on the banana-shaped sun lounge, does he erect the flaccid umbrella handily positioned right next to it? No, he does not. 

He's on a mission, and umbrellas are definitely not part of it.

Volodya is from one of those parts of the world where people are SO conscious of the apparent lack of sunshine that they will drench themselves in it at the slightest opportunity. They will do this even if it ultimately ages them beyond their years, and even if it takes a sizeable portion of their annual salary to get them into position under the brutal UV rays. 

They will even pay by the hour for access to tiny, sterile beaches in soul-destroying non-places like Sharm el-Sheikh, where sun lounges are packed together like commuters on a London tube, or like male Emperor penguins circling the Pole while balancing eggs on their feet.

And in a way, this is exactly what Volodya is. He is one of an apparently growing number of people who disappear from their homes in Russia, Ukraine, Germany and other self-identified sunless countries each summer, to cram themselves with cold cuts and trudge around in small circles - sometimes on the periphery of the impeccably manicured sunbathing lawn, and sometimes in the centre. 

Personally, I have a few different reactions to this, and none of them are good.

First off, I find it possibly the single most depressing thing about Europe (other than the resurgence of the xenophobic Far Right), that when they find a stretch of coastline which might reasonably be called a ‘beach’, their standard reaction is to stack it with these sun lounges, then pile middle aged people on top of said lounges, so that they may spend roughly a sixth of their year desperately trying to become redder than a bleeding walrus. 

And secondly, I wonder: are these people really as sunshine-deprived as they think they are?

I mean, certainly the Russian and Ukrainian winters are long, and the body’s supplies of Vitamin E or D or whatever-that-sun-vitamin-is probably become a little depleted during this time. But actually, despite the low temperatures, there’s plenty of sunshine in those places. 

In fact, some of the most beautiful mornings I’ve ever woken up to (and this is coming from someone who’s avowedly not a morning person) are the crisp, cold and gloriously sunny mornings you get during a Russian or Ukrainian winter. Not only that, but when spring and summer roll around, there’s as much sunlight to go around as there is in most other places. 

And as for Germany: in their case, I just don't get it at all. They have relatively mild winters and long hot summers when the Sun hangs around until 10pm, even in August.     

So why this desperate flocking to the beach? Because “desperate” is exactly what it is, and that’s what makes it such a sad spectacle. There’s a sense that, if you find a square metre of sand adjoining a body of water that has any kind of tidal motion, you should immediately organise to put yourself on it and to stay for as long as possible, even if it’s actually pretty crap and you’re being charged extortionately for it by the locals.

I don’t know the answer to this. But I’d like to.

Meanwhile, I’m sharing one corner of the island of Crete with a few hundred Volodyas. My summer school had to downsize one of its camps in Finland, and reduce the number of teachers. So they asked me to come here and do this camp instead. 

The Gates of My Sun-lounge Prison

Skaleta, Isle of Crete, 22.06.16

The island itself is beautiful, in a harsh and red-hued way (though the weather is appalling - 35 degrees every day!). But rather than hire a school or college, the summer camp people chose to hold this camp in a resort hotel, where the Volodyas gather to do their sun-worshipping rituals.

My dislike of resort hotels (already quite considerable, as you’ve no doubt noticed) is growing almost by the hour ... but I'm only here for about 12 days, and there should be at least one or two opportunities to get out of this sun-lounge prison and explore the island properly.

In the meantime, at least it’s a resort hotel in a country that understands food. So the meals are good, if nothing else.

See you :-)

Huge Cocoons and Tiny Stars

Hello!

It’s a funny word, "cocoon", don't you think?

I ask that because I’m sitting in one now. 

Today is one of those brutal travelling days that your mother warned you about ... or at least, she would've done if she'd been a hippie backpacker in the 60s, who'd spent several years trekking through Asia and Africa and possibly some time on a kibbutz. If not, then she probably focused her warnings on other stuff like running with scissors. 

But anyway, it is (brutal, I mean).  

I only managed about two hours' sleep last night, and the journey started at 6:15 this morning when I left my flat in Almaty. There’s a hotel room in Athens with my name on it, but that room (and more importantly, the bed it hopefully contains) is still more than ten hours away – four and a half of flying, an hour on the Athens metro, and about five hours of sitting around in airports like this one in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

So far, my five-hour transit stop at Heydar Aliyev airport has been about as much fun as a transit stop can be – which is to say “not that much, really, but there have at least been a few entertaining moments to leaven the boredom”.

Zvjozdochka

(larger than actual size)

The first of those moments happened shortly after we landed, while I was unloading my pockets to walk through the security screening thingie. Inspecting my minutiae, one of the staff there noticed with some delight that I had a zvjozdochka in amongst my keys and loose change. 

The word zvjozdochka  translates as sth like ‘tiny little star’. Ex-Soviet peoples use it to refer to a miniature tin of kampfa (a.k.a. 'tiger balm'), which comes emblazoned with a bright yellow Communist star on the front. 

When she saw it, the security guard let out a little gasp, grabbed the tin and opened it. She held it up to her nose and inhaled, savouring the kampfa smell. And I got the distinct sense that this was a nostalgic moment – as if the zvjozdochka was something she remembered from her childhood but hadn’t seen for a long time, and taking in its aroma was sending her back in time.

That in itself fascinated me, because the zvjozdochka is one of those things that’s absolutely ubiquitous in the ex-Soviet countries I’m familiar with – especially in Ukraine, where babushkas sell them in the street. In my mind, it almost qualifies as a symbol of those countries. 

But Azerbaijan, since it frantically boarded the escape pod and jettisoned itself out of the imploding USSR in 1991, has turned more towards the Turkic world. It was a natural move – both Turkey and Azerbaijan are Eurasian Muslim nations, and their languages are closely related (the Azeris speak a language often called ‘Azeri Turkish’, and just reading signs in the airport was enough to see the striking similarities). I suspect there may also be a kind of ‘enemy of my enemy’ type bond between them, given that both countries have what you might euphemistically call a 'rocky relationship' with neighbouring Armenia.

It's also done better economically than most of its former ‘sister republics’. To an extent, I imagine this has made it possible for the Azeris to throw off the old trappings of Soviethood – and perhaps the poor zvjozdochka has been a casualty of that process.

Anyway ... I offered the little star as a gift to the security guard, but she declined with a smile, even after my second attempt. 

I guess her unwillingness to accept gifts from passengers in the security screening area could be seen as a good sign for Azerbaijan, too :-)

I then arrived in the transit lounge, where my first concern was to find the smoking area. After that, I took a wander to acquaint myself with the space where I was going to be spending the next four hours. It was then that I spotted the words  “cocoon area” on a sign, right under “toilets” and “worship room”, with an arrow pointing diagonally left.

Obviously, this was a sign that I had to follow.

A minute later, I was surrounded by these rather unusual things:

Cocoon Cafe  

Heydar Aliyev Airport. Baku Azerbaijan, 20.06.16 

Basically, what you've got here is a bunch of two-storey oversized cubby houses, a couple of them with cafes or shops inside and most with seating upstairs and downstairs. They're in a rather large hall with an ornate patterned skylight, a few scattered trees and some songbirds. 

Now, I'm not going to say this is the greatest architectural masterpiece of our age, but I do think it's quite nifty. When you've got an airport building, you can either make it a series of bland rectangular halls, or you can, y'know, do something interesting.

Obviously the second one is preferable. And the cocoons are kinda cool – they're playful, 'organic' in style, and interestingly, slightly Islamic-looking at the same time.

As it happens, I've had several conversations this year with people who wanted to attack modern art, architecture etc. etc. I always find this a tiresome thing to talk about, because I'm a fan of both classical and modern architectural styles. I get tired of defending the latter from this weird belief that a building can only be 'beautiful' if it was built (or looks like it was built) more than 100 years ago.  

When it comes to visual art, the conversation is even worse; here I'm a committed modernist, with zero love for, say, classical painting, or impressionism, or pretty much anything that came before the surrealist movement. None of it speaks to me, or ever has.  

In fact, if you want to have an argument with me, here's a tip: just repeat the line which appears in nearly every media story about modern art. You know, the one about how today's artists are talentless wankers, incapable of doing anything apart from painting a few black squares on a canvas, writing some meaningless nonsense about it and selling it for a million dollars. 

I'll tell you, in turn, that you're doing the work of the Dark Side by encouraging people to remain relentlessly conservative and literalist in how they view the world. I'll then go on to explain that I find Monet less interesting than most traffic signs, that I simply could not care less about van Gogh's use of light and shade, and that looking at a Cezanne painting reminds me of that moment when the hypnotist clicks his fingers and you immediately fall into a deep sleep*. 

Mission Accomplished: the argument is on ;-) 

Empty Nest

Heydar Aliyev Airport. Baku Azerbaijan, 20.06.16

But I don't feel argumentative today. More than anything, I feel sleepy! So I'm just going to quietly appreciate Baku airport's modest example of the joys of modern design, meditating on the fact that when you let a modern architect off the leash, you don't always get the functional concrete monstrosities that people complain about. Sometimes you get big fun coccoons :-)

Btw, the other cool thing about today is that it's the first of 58. I'll be visiting half a dozen countries, working in two of them, staying with friends in another, and no doubt collecting some tales to tell along the way. So in all likelihood, I'll be ranting wildly over the next 7-8 weeks.

Hope you'll join me for some, if not all, of the journey :-)

Bye!



(* Notice, though, that I didn't say any of those people were bad. They clearly weren't. I only said that I don't like them, which is a key difference between me and most 'anti-modernist' folk.)