Language | Muninn

A Few New Phrases from Alabama

My father, an American born in Alabama, visits his relatives there once a year. Since I left the Boston area last week my major goal before leaving for Korea next month is to finish a translation project I’m working on, something I can do any quiet place. I decided to join my father on his trip this year, since a journey to the South is never without interesting discoveries.

I have been paying a little more attention to the vocabulary and rich expressions that are used around here. I don’t always have a pen handy, but I will try to keep a running list in this posting of those expressions I remember to write down when I hear them.

NOTE: I did not grow up in the United States, so it is possible that much of what strikes me as unusual is in fact quite common all over the country.

Expressions:

• “Smelling high on the bush” = Stage of childhood when boys begin expressing romantic interest in girls. [Note: Not sure if it is used in the reverse case]
• “I’ll cut your gubber off” [Note: Pronounced goober] = A threat made to misbehaving children.
• “Loose as a Goose” = To be very relaxed.
• “Fine as Frog Hair” = To be doing very well.
• “Slick as a spanked baby’s bottom”
• “[Busy|Nervous] as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs”
• “Get above your raisin’” = Trying to live above one’s social station.
• “Hanging on like hair on a biscuit” = To be doing OK, to be stubbornly hanging on (to life, health, etc.), as a hair does in the dough of a southern biscuit.

Vocabulary:

• Hen Fruit = Eggs

Updated: June 3, 2007

甘口カレーという問題 (Or, on the problem of the so-called “sweet” curry)

I love curry. I love curry from many countries and in many colors and consistencies. However, I am a firm believer in the basic principle that curry must be spicy. I know that the Oxford English Dictionary describes curry as:

curry, n.2 A preparation of meat, fish, fruit, or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric, and used as a relish or flavouring, esp. for dishes composed of or served with rice.

but seriously, I think it is time for us to take a stand and reserve the use of the word for the spicy curries that truly deserve the name. One of the first to go should be what the Japanese call 甘口カレー, or sweet curry. It is simply shocking that this can decorate the shelves of grocery stores in Japan along side “moderately spicy” and “very spicy” curry blocks. “Not very spicy at all,” this I can accept, but “sweet” curry does violence to the word it modifies. Curry has to be more manly, more aggressive, it has to have bite! If anything it has to mean something slightly closer to another, now obsolete, use of the word curry also listed in the Oxford English Dictionary:

curry, currie, n.3 The portions of an animal slain in the chase that were given to the hounds; the cutting up and disembowelling of the game; transf. any prey thrown to the hounds to be torn in pieces, or seized and torn in pieces by wild beasts: see QUARRY.

You see, at least that has much more punch than “a quantity of bruised spices”!

Today I was reading in the Harvard-Yenching library with Sayaka. She abandoned studying for a time and with her headphones on watched Youtube movie clips of Downtown, her favorite pair of Osaka comedians. The silence of the library was disturbed by the occasional muffled chuckle emerging from her side of the table. After we left the library I asked her what was so funny. The Downtown clip she showed me was brilliant: Matsumoto Hitoshi basically laid down the law on this ridiculous concept of 甘口カレー. For those of you who understand Japanese, you can view the clip here: 甘口カレー Downtown Clip.

Tragically, however, like so much other extremely rare and otherwise completely unobtainable video content now or until recently available on Youtube, I doubt the link above will last long.

Losing Your Language

Another book I looked through today was a fascinating memoir by a Osvald Harjo Moskva kjenner ingen tårer (Moscow knows no tears). Harjo was raised a Communist in northern Norway. Even before World War II his family often housed Russian intelligence officers and helped them transmit intelligence back to the Soviet Union.

During the war Harjo, who spoke both Norwegian and Finnish, worked with anti-German communist partisans in the north and continued to help Russian radio operatives and other spies get their intelligence back to the Soviets. Another captured partisan gave up Harjo and his father’s name to the Germans. He was arrested, tortured and interrogated for weeks by the Gestapo before finally escaping thanks to the help of a sympathetic Norwegian policeman. Harjo then fled to the East with partisans and eventually crossed into Soviet controlled territory.

This is where the tragedy of Harjo’s memoirs begin. He had the audacity to send Stalin a letter early in 1943 with some minor complaints about the conditions in the North, suggesting that there were perhaps some administrative problems he might want to look into. Very soon after Harjo was arrested and accused of being a German spy. Later charges were brought against him for leading the Germans to a Russian radio operative, which Harjo claims in his memoir was impossible since he had not worked with the operative he was supposed to have given up.

The rest of the book traces the more than a decade Harjo spent in Soviet camps until December, 1955. It seems as though pressure from the Norwegian government, including pleas from labor party prime minister Einar Gerhardsen during his visit to Moscow in 1955 were instrumental in his release. He tells of his final meeting with a Russian officer who asks him if he was “dissatisfied with his experience in the Soviet Union.” Harjo writes that he replied, “I have sat in prison camps for 13 years, convicted of crimes I did not commit.” The officer says that upon review of his papers, he realizes that the conviction was a mistake but that Harjo should never have admitted to the Gestapo (under torture) that he had spied for the Soviet Union and that he hoped that Harjo would only tell the truth about the Soviet Union upon his return to Norway.

The book was unique among the Norwegian war memoirs I looked through but was nowhere near as eloquent or powerful a work as some of the other memoirs of Soviet gulag experiences I have read. Clearly the horrors of the experience gave him deeply bitter feelings about the cause he dedicated his life for until he was imprisoned and this does come through clearly. Harjo notes in his final chapter how, in contrast to the active support he received from the anti-Communist labor party in power then (as now), the Norwegian Communist Party had no interest in helping him.

There was one short passage in the book that interested me more than anything else and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the books main themes. Harjo writes that one day in the “grey monotony of camp number 14″ he suddenly met with a surprise:

Jeg våknet og satte meg opp i køya. På gulvet framfor meg sto det en kortvokst, lubben kar. Han spurte på russisk hvem jeg var. “Jeg er nordmann,” svarte jeg. Da kom det på syngende Finnmarksdialekt: “Æ e’ også fra Norge, æ e’ fra Kiberg”. Det var Otto Larsen. Jeg hadde ikke sett en nordmann siden 1944. Vi snakket litt sammen på norsk, men vi hadde vanskeligheter med vårt eget språk, så vi gikk over til russisk…”

Harjo had woken up one day to find himself face to face with a new cellmate. The man asked him, in Russian, who he was.

Horjo answered, “I am a Norwegian.” Then he replied in a singing Finnmark dialect “I am also from Norway, I’m from Kiberg.” It was Otto Larsen. I had not seen a Norwegian since 1944. We spoke together a little in Norwegian, but we had difficulty with our own language and switched over into Russian.”

I have posted previously about my fascinating with code-switching, or switching between several languages in daily communication, not the least because I do it frequently myself. What is described in the above passage, the loss of full command and comfort in the use of one’s native language is another phenomenon I’m interested in. I first encountered it with my first girlfriend in college. I met her upon her return from several years of living with a German family in Germany, and for a number of weeks she had trouble putting her thoughts into normal English sentences, even though English was her native tongue. My mother, who is a native Norwegian speaker also sometimes switches into English when we speak Norwegian together either because she feels more comfortable with English or finds speaking Norwegian tiring.

Here we have another example of this phenomenon. Two Norwegians from northern Norway meet in a Russian prison camp and after briefly speaking to each other in their native tongue switch into Russian because of “difficulties” with their native tongue.

Today’s Code-Switch Spotting

Today at a rice porridge restaurant near my apartment Sayaka and I overheard some interesting code-switching going on at the table next to us. A woman was struggling to feed her three children, two of which were being less than cooperative. Sometimes she would speak full sentences in Chinese, but with an accent that at first made me think she was a non-native speaker. I later concluded she was just speaking a dialect close enough to standard Mandarin for us to understand but not of the variety I was most familiar with. She seemed to slur her words in an interesting way and pronounced some syllables differently.

As the meal progressed she began code-switching with her children. One child was significantly older than the others and the mother seemed to speak to her mostly in Korean. However, a number of things such as her pronunciation and the occasional and almost random use of honorifics when speaking to her children indicated that she was less than native in Korean. With her two younger children she freely mixed Chinese and Korean, sometimes speaking several sentences in a row in Korean, then switching to Chinese, especially when barking frustrated commands to her restless children (why didn’t the father join them for their Sunday lunch? She sure could have used the help with the kids). She also freely mixed both languages in the same sentence, such as when she tried to convince her youngest that the spoonful of smoking rice porridge headed for his mouth was not hot, “不热了，먹어요, 不热了，먹어!” The youngest child always responded in Chinese, but perhaps due to his young age struggled with some of the initial consonants, turning Chinese initial consonants like c-, zh-, ch-, q- into t-, d-, t-, t-, respectfully, in a most adorable manner.

One possible background story for this family is that the mother is married to a Korean husband, learning Korean after coming here and starting a family with her new husband. Their marriage would be one of the many “invisible” international marriages in a country which has a fast growing number of Korean males marrying foreigners, especially Chinese and Vietnamese women. As I have mentioned in early postings, given my own background, I feel an intense feeling of identification with these children, no matter what their own unique mix of languages and identities might be. I hope the kids I saw today will be able to keep their Chinese as they grow up in Korea and that the social and educational environment for my young fellow hybrids will allow them to develop to their full potential.

国粋 and 국수

I’m giving a presentation to my Korean class related to nationalism, and wanted to explain one translation of the word that is particularly strong and usually has a negative connotation: 국수주의(國粹主義). I want to explain the word by discussing its parts, especially the character 수(粹) which can be roughly translated as “essence.” For reference, I looked up the definition of the important compound 국수 in my Korean-Korean dictionary (동아 새국어사전 제4판). It has the following definition:

국수: 그 나라나 민족 고유의 정신상・물질상의 장점이나 아름다운 점.

To compare, I then looked up the same word in Japanese in the Japanese dictionary 広辞苑 which had the following definition:

国粋：その国家・国民に固有の、精神上・物質上の長所や美点

If you know Japanese and Korean you can see that these two definitions are, down to the order and specific wording, almost exactly same. It can be roughly translated as:

The spiritual and material virtues and strong points specific to a nation and its [people/race]

The only differences between the two definitions is that 1) the Japanese uses the word 国民 (nation; people; citizens) whereas in the same position, the Korean definition uses the word 민족(民族) which has a similar meaning but includes a kind of conception of race or ethnicity in it and as far as I know, cannot be used to merely refer to the citizens of a state. 2) The Korean uses 아름다운 점 for 美点 (good point; merit; virtue; beauty; excellence) when they could have used the same Chinese character compound 미점. However, the meaning is pretty much identical in either case.

While it is not surprising that a character compound like 国粋, which probably had either a Chinese predecessor (I haven’t bothered to look up its origin) or was a modern neologism from Japan is similarly defined in the dictionaries of the languages that adopted the compound. However, the similarity in word order and phrasing is really too close to be anything other than a direct copy. The question then is, who copied who? Or perhaps more likely, did the 広辞苑 and 새국어사전 take their definition from the same older source (the 諸橋 or something like it perhaps?)

닌자 거북

My summer language program is moving along here in Seoul. Although I’m in level 4 of 6, my Korean still sucks. This is especially true for my listening ability, which is so bad I’m almost about to give up hope on it and concentrate on reading. I still struggle to understand anyone in a daily conversation and I can’t answer an overwhelming majority of any questions on any of our listening exercises. Today’s “cute” homework was to make a list of what “image” I get in response to various animal pictures. I had to look up a few of them, including “turtle.”

My electronic English-Korean dictionary, which uses Si-sa Elite (시사 엘리트 영한사전), provided me with what I guess is the correct word, 거북, in its first numbered entry under “turtle.” Entry number 2 explained that turtle could mean turtle meat, such as that which is used in soup. Entry number 3 was “=turtleneck.” Entry number 4 was some kind of computer term.

I was amazed to find the following as the 5th and final entry for “turtle” in my dictionary:

5. (때때로 T-) 닌자 거북이[어린이 영화•만화 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle에 나오는 거북. 방사능에 의한 돌연변이로 태어남].

5. (Occasionally with a capital T) A Ninja Turtle (The turtles which appear in the children’s movie/comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. [They are] born with mutations due to radiation.)

Apparently TMNT has made enough of a cultural impact to get into the dictionary under the entry for the animal. I think they need to make the “Turtle” in TMNT plural though…

“Western looking” Americans

Sayaka is back “home” in Taiwan this week. She is supposed to be doing research and conducting interviews but she also seems to be enjoying all her favorite foods while she is home and meeting her friends.

In a recent posting she talked about the differences in average salaries for those tutoring in Japanese and English in Taiwan:

日本人学生が家庭教師として日本語を教える場合、時給にして大体３５０〜５００元くらい（１１００〜１６００円）が相場だ。一方アメリカ人の場合は６００〜１２００元。う〜ん、差別だ！！と言ってみたがマーケットの需要が全然違うので仕方がない。本当の差別は「西洋人の見かけ（Western-looking)のアメリカ人」と指定しているところがあること。初めて聞いた時「は〜い〜？」と訳が分からなかったが、つまりアジア系アメリカ人などがなぜか排除されてる。

She says that Japanese students tutoring in Japanese can apparently get around 350-500 yuan (TWD, NT$) or about 11-15 US dollars while Americans can make 600-1200 yuan per hour or about 19-38 US dollars. While it seems like discrimination she admits this is really just an issue of market demand. On the other hand, apparently there are places which specifically are recruiting “Western-looking Americans” to teach English, and thus aren’t accepting Asian-Americans who are equally native in the language. I wonder if this is kind of discriminatory recruiting is common, and whether it is also something that happens in Japan or Korea? I know that I don’t see many Asian-Americans as teachers on the English language school advertisements on Japanese trains and subways (the advertisements are heavily dominated by white males, followed by white females, and the occasional black male or female).

霍: Huò or Hwak? Sharpening knives in the story of Mulan

The most fun lessons so far this semester in my first year classical chinese class were reading the classic tale of the giant snake killing Li Ji（李寄, and her faithful sidekick, a snake-killing dog) and the original ballad of the female warrior Mulan（木蘭） (two versions here and here). Both brave and filial young daughters from Fujian and somewhere along the Yellow river in northern China, respectively. One is out to save her town from the evil miasma of the demonic snake, while the other is trying to save old pappy from conscription.

In one line of the latter story (小弟聞姊來，磨刀霍霍向豬羊) there is a nice little description of the sharpening of knives. In our glossary, 霍 has the following interesting note attached:

“[Onomatopoetic for sharpening of knife]. In ancient Chinese, this word would have ended in a glottal stop, producing something closer to “hwak” – much more appropriate than the modern Mandarin pronunciation.”

More on Mixing Languages

I have written here on numerous occasions about the mixing of languages. It is the most basic fact of communication between Sayaka and me, as it is between many of my friends. The newest pattern to make itself felt in my life is the fact that, increasingly, conversations with my Korean friends that I got to know during my time studying in Japan or China have become a mix of Japanese and Korean (with the most frequent pattern being them speaking in Korean, me starting an answer in Korean, giving up, and then either switching to Japanese or Chinese, depending on what secondary language we have in common, or at least throwing in words with J/C pronunciation whenever I need to).

I have also seen how fundamental language mixing of various kinds is to communication in many Chinese-American and Japanese-American households I have had occasion to interact with since I moved to the US (and in many cases there is also the interesting pattern in which a parent will speak to a child in one language, but their child will respond only or mostly in another). In fact, while I have no stats to back this up and would love to read more substantial research on this, I suspect that this mixing of various idioms in daily conversation, and not just the occasional word that might be absent or awkward to say, is and has been a basic fact of life for peoples in many communities around the world both in our times and perhaps more so in ages past.

In fact, I have often felt that in exchange for the clarity, efficiency, and stronger guarantees of accurate transmission, as well as the powerful creative forces of new national literatures that standardizing and legitimating certain idioms at the state level has we have lost an appreciation for the rich and highly varied possibilities that language allows for. I’m not lamenting some kind of pre-modern paradise of inter-lingual bliss, but I do think the way we view languages and some of the philosophies behind language learning need a good re-thinking. More on this some other time…

I have often wondered when and how this language mixing starts. My own case is too messed up to be representative. While reading in the coffee shop today I tuned into an interesting discussion between two fluent (and most likely native) Chinese speakers, one of whom had a heavy Beijing or northern accent. Since we are on campus and they were older students, I assume they were graduate students, and they may be two of the many students here who complete their undergraduate degrees in China and come here for graduate school.

They seemed to be in disagreement about a lot of things, and by the time I tuned in, the topic of the conversation had shifted, to my surprise, to the Chinese historian Simaqian. What I found interesting was the language mixing that this student, who may have only been in the United States a few years, was engaged in. I have seen this on countless of other occasions but today paid closer attention to how it worked in this case. If one can make any generalizations from the small sample of the conversation that I overheard, the mixing had these characteristics: 1) The English words in the conversation were not always chosen because the equivalents in Chinese are unusual or awkward. For example, she would say something like, “司马迁，这个life…” or “他的那个complexity…” 2) Words that bridge or transition; that connect sentences, were sometimes said in English. Thus, she might shift gears in the middle of a sentence by saying, “Well, 我知道…” 3) Sometimes I think the English words were used, as is possible in the cases mentioned in (1) above, in order to emphasize a particular point. Other times, I was left with the impression that they were used for the same reason that my mother (who is Norwegian) will throw in an English word in: because it was frequently used recently in English, the English word just happens to come to mind before the word comes to mind in one’s “mother” tongue. I would be interested in some of the more permanent and large scale examples of this: cases where, instead of specific words getting adopted and absorbed into languages (which is what most often comes to mind when we think of change in language), there is a more permanent free and flexible, if sometimes arbitrary borrowing from other “languages understood in common” among people in a community. Although I’m sure there a long list of places one could go to in order to explore this, Hong Kong pops to mind as one place where I suspect that this might happen on a large scale. Taiwan is another… In fact, perhaps we might find that any place where you have an official language at odds with the idiom of the majority would be a good place to look for these patterns…I wish I had paid more attention in that undergraduate socio-linguistics class!

Word of the day: onomastic

As always, my reading provides me lots of opportunities to learn new words. In a discussion of the French royal cosmographer Thevet’s fantastical lists of creatures, places, and monuments:

In this exercise in Rabelaisian nomenclature, Colossus generates Column by, it seems, the repetition of a common radical; Ypodrome proceeds from pyramid by inverting the first two letters; and the Obelisk consummates, with its terminal erection, the alignment of Colossi with Columns by borrowing from them a pivotal vowel o. The onomastic play that represented, along with a vogue for anagrams and for the equivocal, one of the bases of the poetic science of the Renaissance.” Frank Lestringant Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery U of C Press, 1994, 34.

Onomastic apparently means, “of or relating to the study of the history and origin of proper names.”