A musing on language...

Several sources I've consulted insist that proper pronunciation in Chinese is of paramount importance, noting that the use of an incorrect tone can cause you to say something you didn't intend to say. One source illustrates this with an apparently well-worn example of saying "ma" using the various inflections found in Mandarin Chinese to express the sentence "Did mother scold the horse?" To the untrained ear, this sounds like "Ma ma ma ma."

While I am a firm believer in the acquisition of good pronunciation when speaking a foreign language, I refuse to believe that communications will break down completely if one should inadvertently use the wrong inflection for a word in Chinese, or any other language, for that matter. Language is too resilient for that; it has to be.

Consider the rather widespread tendency among native-born Russians to vocalize long "e" sounds (as in the words "sheet" and "beach") as short "i" sounds (as in the word "it" or "itch") when speaking American English. Most native-born Americans will have no trouble following a description of how difficult it may have been to lay a sheet on the sand at the beach on a windy day, and the few that actually notice the, um, unusual pronunciation will quickly dismiss it from their minds.

One might even extend this idea to the commission of some grammatical faults.

There is a common canard in circulation to the effect that, when John F. Kennedy said "Ich bin ein Berliner!" during a speech to a crowd in then-West Berlin, he was telling his listeners that he was a kind of pastry that went by the name of "Berliner" (the correct way to say "I am a Berliner" is, apparently, "Ich bin Berliner").

Technically, perhaps, yes. Taken out of context or interpreted by a "smart" computer, the utterance was incorrect. Just as in the sentence "Running down the street, the storefronts seemed to leer at the woman," some might wonder how storefronts can run down a street.

But if, indeed, the crowd understood JFK to have said he was a donut of some kind, how does one explain the resulting ovation, more suitable as a response to a clear expression of solidarity with the people of Berlin from an American President in the heyday of the Cold War? Just as it is clear that it is the woman that is running in my example of the storefronts, JFK clearly expressed the notion that he was a citizen of Berlin.

The prime reason errors of pronunciation occur ought to be fairly obvious: setting aside pathological reasons, you've got people trying to make sounds they've never made before and which, very likely, require the use of muscles that don't exist. As an example, in my travels, I've noticed that generally speaking, native-born Russians pick up French pronunciation fairly well but seem unable to learn to speak American English without an accent, the French typically have pronunciation problems with American English, while Americans rarely can pick up accentless Russian or French. There's a PhD thesis in there, somewhere.

Moreover, the prime reason grammatical errors persist for what I would imagine to be generations is that listeners/readers understand what's being expressed, grammar and usage be damned. Moreover, these listeners/readers often aren't even aware of any errors, as my first experience taking an editing test at Macmillan will attest. (This, by the way, is what stakes out the boundary between "writing" and "writing for publication.")

The Macmillan incident occurred at a time when I wanted to find a job in the publishing industry that might take advantage of my recent experience in the Soviet Union. At the time, Macmillan was publishing the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and needed some coolie labor to help finish the job. I left the Macmillan interview thinking I had aced the examination, only to find out during a return visit that I had tanked it, and badly at that.

And it wasn't that I didn't have the mental tools to distinguish good grammar from bad. Less than two weeks later, I took a similar editing exam at Plenum (which published translations of about 150 technical journals), acing it with ease because now, I was paying attention. (The fact that I have not ever been the same with regard to the written word, especially after having read Ted Bernstein's books, well... that's grist for other posts.)

Daylight, as they say, is burning. It's time to go out into the world.

Cheers...

Traumatization...

LJ friend mallorys_camera put up a thought-provoking post based loosely on my rant concerning the tempest over showing Faust to some first- through third-graders near Denver.

I cannot comment on the likelihood of being traumatized by a fat guy in tights and a bad moustache singing in some foreign language, but thinking back to my childhood, I do remember two specific exposures to the moving picture that, I suppose, could be classified as "traumatization."

The first instance that comes to mind was watching - or trying to watch - a telecast of a movie titled House on Haunted Hill. It scared the daylights out of me, so much so that I had nightmares for several days afterward. Was I traumatized? I suppose that depends on the definition, but to this day horror movies - even campy ones intended to be funny - rank dead last in my pantheon of movie preferences. (Strangely enough, I can watch movies such as Hannibal and not blink an eye; I think my reaction may have to do with the absence or presence of the supernatural as a plot point.)

The second instance had to do with the fact that my father used to watch a documentary series titled The Twentieth Century, narrated by Walter Cronkite, every Sunday afternoon. Most of the footage shown was of war, and more to the point, of the Second World War. I remember endless scenes of aircraft flying in the sky, of doors opening underneath the fuselage, of bombs falling, and of buildings exploding, fires burning, and bodies lying in the street.

Being a kid and inexpert in the fine art of aircraft identification, I saw no substantial difference between the Flying Fortresses flying over Europe on our black-and-white set and the propellered DC-10s making their approach to LaGuardia Airport, which was not far from our house in Queens. Every once in a while, changes in wind direction would cause some of these airplanes to fly directly over our apartment house (and to make matters worse, we lived on the top floor).

Inwardly, I was scared. I didn't understand the war or anything much beyond my pre-third-grade life of playing ball in the schoolyard, reading books about people like Kit Carson, and watching cartoons on television. Sometimes, I would sit by the window and watch the planes as they were about to fly over me, a few hundred feet directly overhead, apprehensively strain to see whether those doors underneath were open or not, and wondered: what do I do if they are? I never shared these concerns with my parents when I was a kid, though I may have mentioned it later in adult life (and if I did, it elicited no major comment).

Was that traumatization? The fact that I mention it probably means something, but again, I suppose it depends on your definition, and says nothing as to whether it is, or should be, the responsibility of the community, of the state, or of Someone Else™ to prevent it, or appear to.

Cheers...

eBaying at the moon, again...

I just posted my first item on eBay in... very nearly a year. (Hmmm. I could have sworn it was longer!)

It took me forever to do so. (Hmmm. I could have sworn it was longer!)

And I'm not sure I did a very good job of "optimizing" where it appears in their classification system.

We've been invited to dinner tonight, at another Mexican place (I have to admit, Ramone's was starting to get to me.)

I seem to have experienced a relapse with regard to a disease once characterized by a junior-high English teacher of mine as "parenthesitis" (the overuse of parenthetical remarks in one's writing).

(Ah, well!)

Cheers...