Know-it-all Liza

What’s confusing is  

1. This letter used to represent the glottal stop. But the (current) Arabic glottal stop, called hamza, is not a ‘real’ letter. Hamza often sits on an alif (don’t get me started on the rules for hamza seats--I still haven’t learned them). Somehow via the Phoenicians, this hamza-on-an-aaa sound (or anti-sound, really*) got conflated in Greek into the vowel-sound “aaa”, and since the Greeks were the first to represent vowels in writing, they imported and appropriated the word and ox-shape Alif for their letter Alpha, passing it on to the Romans as A.

2. Not-really-a-letter hamza looks sort of like a c ء and is related to its mirror, the greek “soft breathing” mark ᾽ (psili) which, like hamza, only sits on vowels. Here is hamza on an alif أ and psili on an alfa ἀ. Many many Arabic words begin with أ

3. If hamza = ء and alfa = A, why is alif a vertical line, ا ? Because although alif is often pronounced like long aaa--as in the definite article, “al” ال , it’s not really equivalent to our A; the definite article “a-” sound is often elided into the previous word, and alif usually serves as sort of placeholder, carrying the hamza as previously mentioned, or any of the short vowels a, i, u, or even another alif, balancing it crossways on top آ . 

         ____

*A glottal stop is the ‘t’ sound in the Cockney pronunciation of “bottle”, but we also do it at the beginning of words, though since it has no semantic significance in English, it’s hard to tell that when you say “Apple”, you’re starting with a hamza) 

Did you know that the word (and letter) Alfa come--via Semitic letter Alif--from the verb meaning “to be familiar with” including the sense of “to tame, domesticate”?

Contrary to myth, the fearsome Ayn ع is not the shibboleth of Arabic.

After a few years of learning the language, I notice a tiny bit of progress in my reading, understanding and spelling. Ghayn غ is harder for some even than Ayn to pronounce (luckily for me it’s like Greek γ) but one can almost always hear those letters, if not reproduce them accurately.

AIRLINE MEALS: British-Open Skies 

These were the 2 worst meals ever, especially in a Premium Class (BA codeshare Open Skies, Orly to JFK) Horrible in every way. The best thing was the explanatory note from Paris Air Catering, providing an entertaining translation and actual explanation for dairy-absence. Sad, however, that Parisian cooking snobbery presents this horror as a ‘meal’ and cannot think outside the boxes of prepackaged soy-full puddings* when even in Paris, land of convention and boulangeries, there exists one of the best GF bakeries ever, Chambelland.

Gluten-free food on various airlines. 

I’ve found that if flying Business, or even Premium Economy, the GF offerings are so horrible that you might want to chance your luck with the ubiquitous steak/fillet mignon--you can ask for it without the sauce that they put on later--and other salads/fruits etc on the nicer,  higher-class trays. I have, with no terrible gut discomfort.

GF food is usually the same for Economy and Premium Economy, and sometimes even the same lame little special meal in some Business. Tasty it is not, as it’s often lumped in with fat-free, dairy-free, salt-free and TASTE-free, to cover all one’s dietary bases. Just throw in another saran-wrapped (yet always stale) rice cake, they say, that’ll be GF. Often along WITH a normal bread roll....

Whatever happens in Greece, we’ll have the sun.... (Sometimes too much for fair-skinned people who burn like me) I decided to keep a ‘sundial’ of my favorite hours at my favorite rocks.

Two memory-related ideas....

1. I’ve been checking out various memorization and flashcard aps recently, and was talking with my friend about his friend who is one of those extreme-memory people recently featured on a 60 Minutes doc. We were pondering how that would help in learning language--I'd like to see studies on whether these people have a special language-learning ability; my gut feeling is that "perfect memory" is not enough.

2. As a Tony Judt fan, I was fascinated by the essays he wrote in the last year of his life, published in the NYRB and collected in the book The Memory Chalet whose title refers to the menmonic technique of attaching memories and descriptions of them to specific rooms in a castle, where one can use visual cues to retrieve them later, a technique Judt describes using to compose these essays during the sleepless nights of his paralyzing ALS.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jan/14/night/?pagination=false

Which bring me to the website Memrise, which uses crowd-sourcing to input mnemonics (in English) for memorizing foreign language vocabulary words.

Although this is a clever idea, I have some issues with this approach for language learning, though I don’t deny that mnemonic devices work for other types of memorizing (as in the memory chalet).

My problem may be particular to learning Arabic (highly inflected, complexly-yet-regularly structured, with an unfamiliar alphabet and a multitude of synonyms), as well as my personal inclinations for language learning.... Basically how Memrise--at least in its "game" or "testing" phase--works is that for each word there’s an associated (English, usually) mnemonic phrase or acronym. E.g for the root A-D-M meaning “to be destroyed, to disappear,” you’re given the phrase “A Deadly Mouse destroyed them” to help you remember. This is clever and is not unhelpful in anchoring unfamiliar words within ones native English. But, although some of these mappings stick in my brain, I wonder if it's satisfactory for longer term useful learning--especially past the beginner level. Here are some problems:

1. At a beginner level you have such a small vocabularly anyway that it’s no big deal to learn the words as a one-to-one translation. Why bother to learn it as a multi-stage process?

2. There’s a fundamental problem with mapping a single foreign word/root using an English phrase; for me it creates a stronger trace of English and not of Arabic: instead of “destroy” as a concept, I now have an image of the English sentence on the blue webpage and an idea of an evil mouse in my brain….Plus,  the “englishness” of it is underscored by Memrise this set using transliteration rather than Arabic letters, which almost certainly is a barrier to getting the arabic word-shape into my brain (my goal being--hopefully, eventually!-- to make the leap into reading in “chunks” and seeing whole words rather than laboriously sounding out individual letters). Possibly the technique works better in an isolating or less inflected languages like Chinese, or when animations aren’t word-based, but image-based, so at least there’s not the restrictive “englishness.”

For instance, a specific problem in the "Arabic root" set on Memrise--apart from the englishizing transliteration (what to do with ayn and hamza as always problematic to us learners unfamiliar with the IPA or other conventions)--is that Memrise seems to list the Arabic word roots you're learning in English alphabetical order!  Not only is this unhelpful in understanding the Arabic alphabet or how to use an Arabic dictionary--the basic triliteral root system--but also the context of word usage is completely erased!

Yesterday I spent the day at The National Bank of Greece (known among anglo-greek-speaking friends as the Ethnic Trapeze). The amazing thing is that I accomplished what I had set out to do there in a single working day*!

Most banks in Greece do not give monthly statements, paper or electronic, they give you a cute little paper booklet in which all transactions are recorded every time you go to see a teller inside the bank (as opposed to the ATM). It's a nice place to keep your account balances all in one place, and there's only one per account. The booklet for a joint account that I have with my siblings had gone missing for over a year, so I decided to try and get a new one. Here's a summary of my experience.

Me: Excuse me, where could I get a new booklet? here's my photo ID and the booklet for my other account, so you can identify me and my account numbers.

Bank Lady #1: What happened to your booklet?

Me: We [the owners of the account] can't find it

BL1: Well, what happened to it? why did you lose it?

Me: I can't see that it's any of your business, but if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking for a new one…

BL1: (grudgingly) Well, let me see….oh, this account was opened in a different branch, branch number #139. You have to go there to get a new one.

Me: There's no way to get it at this branch?

BL1: No, branch # 139.

Me: Could you tell me which branch that is?

BL1: You don't know where you opened your account? How am I supposed to know?

Me: As far as I can recall--this account being about 10 years old--my sister opened this account, and I don't know which branch #139 is…can't you look it up on your computer?

BL1: Well, you should remember which branch you opened the account in! (Looks on her computer.) You actually opened this account in 2004.

Me: Well, ok, 8 years ago, that's not really the issue--where is branch 139? Do you have a list of branches on the computer?

BL1: Well how should I know? (leaves her desk to ask the Bank Lady #2 at the large front desk grandly labeled "HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?")

Me: Well, you are an employee of the NBG and you have computer in front of you...(The two women search through their drawers and BL1 finds a paper copy of a list of branches)

BL1: It's the Kolonaki branch.

Me: Is there any way you can tell me the precise address? I know of at least 3 branches in Kolonaki [it's like saying "the Wells Fargo in downtown SF"]

BL1: Well how should I know?

Me: I would have thought, maybe, on the computer, now that your whole bank is computerized and you have internet banking and all….

BL1: (impatiently) No, I told you. Kolonaki.

Me: Ok, thank you, I'll try all three branches I then tried nicely asking BL2 (she hadn't seen my interaction with BL1) at the front help desk, but she only gave me a bovine stare, averted her eyes and didn't speak. She has 2 computers on her desk, and in the numerous times I've been in that bank I have never seen her touch either, and she has never known the answer to such questions as "Excuse me, whom should I see about such-and-such an issue?" I'm convinced she has no idea how to use a computer. In other words, a typical example of someone totally unskilled with a (no doubt nepotistic) sinecure in the public "service" sector who should be immediately fired. So then I went off to Kolonaki; luckily my first branch try was the right one, and the (younger, friendlier, slightly more capable-seeming) Bank Lady #3 at their front help desk actually knew which branch we were in, though she wasn't really sure where to direct me for a lost booklet. After waiting a while, asking her again, as well the guy  (Bank Man #4) I was waiting for if that was the right desk for a lost booklet (both said "yes,  wait here") I waited some more. When it's my turn to see BM4 and I told him about my lost booklet, he said, "Oh, you have to go to Bank Man #5 for that." I went there, where I encountered no line but another inquisition about how and where I'd lost the booklet ["where did you lose it?", has to be one of the stupidest questions, sort of an a redundancy but the opposite. I wonder if there is a literary term for an anti-tautology] only to be sent back to BM4. He hemmed and hawed, but guessed he could help me after all, and then went and had a consultation with BM5, and then I signed a document** (only one!) and there and then they gave me a brand new booklet! I was never so happy in my experience with the Ethnic Trapeze, as immediate gratification* is almost inconceivable in this place of "oh, sign here and here and here, go get it stamped from Mr So-and-So over there,  and we'll send it off and then it'll take 5 business days."

* only 2 branches, 5 employees, 3 hours in-bank time

Two of my favorite things, now together: IKEA and the old, slow ferry to the Cyclades*

The "slow" boat to the islands is like slow food: a far superior travel experience to the unimaginatively and generically named Speedrunner and Highspeed (they come in various numbers, which are completely forgettable)

I was delighted to see that the charming old Agios Georgios sports the stylish URBAN chairs from IKEA, instead of the ubiquitous "gypsy" (so-called in Greece) white plastic stackable chairs. The colors and style perfectly complement her blue-white-orange color scheme, which, along with the salt-baked hot metal deck, faintly smelling of motor oil, is so redolent of Cycladic travel as it should be.

There are thousands of fascinating language blogs out there, and I'm sure someone has already done a scientific analysis comparing alphabets. As a language geek currently obsessed with Arabic, one late night I decided to count up the different letter-forms in the alphabets I know, in order to get an idea of the comparative difficulty of learning to read and write them.

Meanwhile, here's my statistical comparison of 4 alphabets [thanks to my multilingual, Anglo-Russo-Greco-Swiss-French friend Katya, I can now add Russian to the comparison!]

I can't claim to know it all about WH, but I'm a huge fan of his documentaries especially. The first time you see a film of his, he can seem overbearing and orotund, but the more of his films you see, the more you grow to love his grandiose narration, distinctive voice, his "ecstatic truth" and the weirdness he seeks out in the obsessive characters he films. Also: his use of music in his films is exquisite. 

I just saw The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. As a fellow viewer said, most 3-D movies seem to be mostly about superficial effects, and who cares when we can see 3-D in our real life. Cave, however, was a perfect use for it!

(OK, he was pushing it a bit with the albino crocodile postscript and the be-scarfed archeologist-ex-juggler, but he is allowed to--he's Werner!)

If you don't know his work, here's where to start:

Little Dieter needs to fly. Also among the docs: Encounters at the End of the World, Lessons of Darkness, The White Diamond, My Best Fiend. His most "successful" doc may be Grizzly Man, but it's not his best, and seems exploitative in a way inconsistent with his usual exploration of obsession or "craziness".

Features: (these take more patience than the docs) Kaspar Hauser, Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo and Rescue Dawn, the fictionalized Little Dieter, which is surprisingly good.

I like how ليبيا  looks like a palindrome in Arabic, although it actually isn't. It's an easy word to read, even for beginners like me (many of the Arab country names are quite easy to read, since Arabic is phonetically spelled). Remember that you start from the right, and that (most) letters must connect to each other and are written as script:

L (lam) looks like a mirror-image L

I (ya) is two dots under the first "tooth" (the tiny vertical line)

B (ba) is the single dot under the middle tooth

I (ya, like an English Y, it can be a vowel or a consonant) two dots under the third tooth

A (alif) is the final vertical line

Some of you have been clamoring about depilation. As an ex-hairy person, I will tell you what I know. You can find all this info elsewhere online, but I’m going to make it short and simple for you, as I’ve tried (nearly) everything.

Short term

Shaving: like a good Greek girl (read middle-eastern/european) I did NOT grow up shaving, so I’m no expert. The few times I’ve had to it hurts my skin and makes it red. But it's fast and effective.

Creams dissolve hairs in a highly alkaline solution, smell really awful, and may irritate skin. I don’t like them.

Medium term (results last about a month)

Halawa (and now available in Arabic! حلوة) is what we grew up doing in Greece. A nice lady comes to your house and makes a sticky toffee-like concotion with sugar and lemon and a lot of kneeding on the cold marble kitchen counter (the latter an essential ingredient, apparently) and rips your hair out in minutes flat. Excellent—if an expert does it—and not too painful after the first time. You do it along with your mum, sis and GFs, and have cozy chats. I believe in the US the DIY version was sold by the Body Shop as “sugaring”.

Wax: like halawa, but with hot wax, so it may burn and be more painful. Some people swear by it.

Pre-waxed strips: Very common in Europe, I used to bring my own back to the US because they didn’t have them. A quicker, tidier DIY version of wax/halawa. Also somewhat less effective.

Springy circular coil device: Like a tightly wound slinky, this acts as a tweezing mechanism to pull the hair out from the root, just like with halawa and waxing. No muss, no fuss. I find it very slow and painful compared to wax/halawa but some girlfriends swear by it.

Long term

Laser works especially well if you have light skin and dark hair. You have to go for multiple treatments, and it’s not cheap, or painless, and some hormonally-activated hair seems completely unfazed by the zapping. Despite that, I can say that I never need to depilate my underarms or legs again. At most, every few months I use a wax strip and in 5 minutes the 5-10 small weak hairs left are gone.

Electrolysis is the only permanent way to remove hair. You have to go for multiple treatments, it’s pricey and somewhat more painful than laser. But, eventually, you get results.

Myths and extravagant claims

1. Shaving will make your hair grow back thicker.

FALSE! People, just think about this logically. When you shave, you’re cutting the hair off at the level of the skin. There are a few millimeters of hair left under the skin still attached to and growing from the root/follicle. How on earth will cutting hair either a) make individual hairs thicker b) create new hair follicles to grow more hair? What’s happening is that each hair is cut off with a blunt, flat top instead of a tapered one, and emerges from the skin looking and feeling more pronounced/scratchy. But it’s the exact same hair.

2. Laser is permanent.

FALSE! Read the fine print—all they can promise is a “permanent reduction” of hair. Electrolysis is the only way to permanently kill the follicle—and to get to that point you have to zap each hair multiple times.

3. Radio frequency zapping, painless and effective

If you wrote a book which included characters who speak another language, would you want to make sure the phrases you wrote were accurate?

How about if you were an editor or  publisher? Would you care about accurate translations?

I just finished reading a book in which nobody (except this reader) cared about such issues. It was so annoying that it stopped being funny. I’m trying to find the humor in it by sharing a sample.

I am quoting exactly what is said by the characters who are native French speakers, not what is said by the British protagonist who by his own admission barely knows any French. And I’m not going to bother to write [sic] every few words, but I assure you I’m carefully copying directly from the book, with ellipses indicating the—pedestrian but acceptable—English. At some points the author does use some pidgin French to indicate some Anglo-French exchange, and though even that is inelegantly used, it’s better than the auto-translate version of the “French.”

“ ‘Vous être aussi un sorcier’…she said….

‘Oh, no, ah…’ I began….

‘Oui, oui’  she said with quiet insistence. ‘Vous suivez-moi. Maintenant.”

‘Pourquoi?’ I asked awkwardly.

‘Nous besoin de vous,’ she said shortly. We need you.“Maintenant.’ Now.”

…..

“Vous elle aidez…Non. Vous elle aidez”

….

“The ‘opital is five heures far. Far”

“You calmez ‘er. Oui? Calmez.”

….

“Elle arrivé”

…

“Oui, oui. Vous avez fatigué”

…

“Vous aidez ma petite-fille” [in regard to a past-tense event]

another small paragraph:

“ ‘Daniel—Souvent il vous aidez?’ I said, butchering French grammar. The woman’s dark eyes seemed to become more guarded. I motioned back to the cabin ‘Comme ça?’ Like that? ‘Comme ça, et ne comme ça,’  she said, unhelpfully.”

 [At this point they attempt to go into a more Anglo-French suspend-your-disbelief exchange. Unfortunately however, the author does insist on some more insertions of  French at the end—remember, the French-speaking lady is addressing a guy, except when she’s talking about her fille, above:]

“ ‘Merci,’ she said quietly, ‘Elle est ma fille, vous aidez....Soyez le bienvenue.’ ”

[Next day, another scene. Impressively, there is even more French here, and it’s not quite so bad—there are some preposition and article issues—although  not quite idiomatic (I doubt native peasants would be using the literary passé simple in spoken speech)]:

“C’est ma troisième visite à le sorcier….Jules mourut l’année dernière…. Le sorcier, il est très compatissant. Le dernier fois, moi, je ne peut pas payer. Mais aujourd’hui, pour lui j’ai deux poules grosses.”

Hmmm…come to think of it, these characters are supposed to be Quebecois. Maybe my pretty good, but not really fluent, schoolgirl french has not prepared me for Canadians—maybe they’ve simplified things and don’t conjugate verbs in the colonies anymore? I’m kind of assuming, however, given the formulaic clichés used to convey “British” English and “British” characters in the same book, that the author just didn’t check with any actual person about how people in Canada, France or the UK actually speak. And she may not have even used google-translate, as I tried some of those phrases and they came out better….

Of course, I like to be right any language, and in general. I would feel dreadful embarassment if I was caught (in print and published by the Penguin Group) in a solecism, committing a language faux pas or gaffe, you might say, especially against those pedantic paragons of purity of language.

My advice is:

1. If you’re using French (or any other language) have your characters begin a simple exchange, like, “Bonjour” “Bonjour” and then continue in English using your writerly skills to convey the fact that now we’re suspending our disbelief and talking in French; it’s done in movies all the time. (and, I might add, getting more and more accurate. Stay tuned for a blog post on the funniest misuses of foreign language in film and TV)

2. Get a French-speaking friend to look it over.

3. Pay a native French speaker to look it over

4. DO NOT USE AN INTERNET TRANSLATOR.

Spell check seems to work well—the  accents in the above excerpts are remarkably accurate—but don’t confuse spell-check with grammar-check or auto-translators; it’s a path to disaster.

5. Next time, pick a language, like, say, Faroese, with well under 100,000 native speakers. Personally, as I said, I would care about the accuracy of whatever language I were using, but if you are using a language you don’t know in your book, maybe don’t use French next time, because there’s a lot more potential for looking like an unprofessional idiot (and even a parochial, uneducated Amurrican) when making mistakes in a language that well over 100 million speak natively, not to mention the half billion or so who speak (or read or learn) it as a third or fourth language.

6. None of the above points 1-5 are exclusive of the others.

Here’s an example of what the professionals do: one of my translating colleagues  in Athens took the time and effort to contact the Thai embassy and talk to a couple of people in order to transLITERATE the pronunciation of the name of a Thai film director as accurately as possible. This was for a paragraph comprising the biography of this director and for the poster for his film. And that’s just transLITERATION, of a name, so you can imagine what sort of research she does when transLATING a work of literature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/media/17adco.html?src=me&ref=business

Apropos of the article above, national(istic) pride notwithstanding, I must point out that Chobani (what the hell does that mean in Greek? I don't know!)*, Athenos (more atrociously declined Greek word roots with fun "ancient greek" font) Oikos (at least that's a real greek word, though, since it means "house", or, in modern Greek, more like "big name fashion designer" I wonder what it has to do with dairy) and other competitors [newsflash! Eros, always a popular Greek word, has jumped on the bandwagon of "greek" yogurt!] almost always have added thickeners. Not that there's anything wrong with gelatin or pectin per se, but you SHOULD NOT NEED THEM in real, strained-of-its-whey yogurt. Which is all "Greek" yogurt really is. (See my previous post).

UPDATE: Ironic that Chobani, most-popular-in-the-US "greek" yogurt brand, was founded by a Turkish immigrant! http://nyti.ms/wYUO3x Could this explain the naming issues?