the mad professor bores your ass

Oh man, too much modeling, Almanacking and tsunami-report reading over the past few days has dulled my wits. I had to abort my attempt at updating last night after I stared at the would-be entry for too long, wondering if it sounded stupid. Tomorrow I'm going to Guangzhou, China for 2 days of shooting a catalog in a "garden"; this was the agency's note to me on my job details: "Weather is cold raining in GZ around 3'C ,pls wear enough jacket." Uh-oh!


I've been obsessing over the Chinese language for several days now, and trying to mentally compose my thoughts into a coherent and interesting Livejournal entry. The following behemoth is what came out when I sat down at my computer; whatever, I've decided to go ahead and post it rather than try to pare it down.

Learning bits and pieces of other languages is one way I've found to occupy my idle model mind (and also to annoy those around me). Not only am I immersed in a foreign language every time I set foot ouside any hovel I may occupy, but few of my playmates (colleagues?) are native English speakers, so I have access to free lessons in random phraseology in languages as diverse as Afrikaans and Czech. I'm completely incapable of useful communication in any tongue besides Spanish, but it's still entertaining to memorize little bits and pieces like this:

"She is in the shower" in Ukranian- for the mother of my young roommate, whose phone calls from Kiev when Lina was in the shower would otherwise end in both of us shouting incomprehensibly at each other.

"The horse's hooves are loud on the cobblestones." In Hungarian, this is a tongue-twister along the lines of "rubber baby buggy bumpers."

"I am horny for you" in German. In a scene right out of an emphatically unfunny sitcom, my wily German roommate actually convinced me to say this to a German client we met at a casting in Milan, claiming it meant "I am pleased to meet you" (totally reasonable if one knows "ich bin" and "auf dich" but not "geil"). Then we left the casting and Chevy Chase crashed our Yugo right into the Eiffel Tower! Ain't Europe wacky?

Anyway, the point is that I like to learn other languages, and it was with an optimistic heart that I bought a little Cantonese phrasebook before left for Hong Kong. To this day, though, I can't say a single damn word in Cantonese! Not even ONE thing. The only two things I thought I could say for a while ("What are you looking at" and "thank you") cannot be understood by the Chinese-speakers I say them to.

The spoken form of Cantonese, the dialect of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong and a few parts of China, is completely different from the more common dialect of Chinese (Mandarin, the language with the most native speakers in the world). The devilry of this tongue is in the vowel tones, of which there are seven in common use (Mandarin has four). It's really difficult for me to explain this aspect of the language because this kind of tonality doesn't exist in English. Tones are an obligatory and essential part of every syllable; they are classified by "highness" or "lowness," and by "risingness" or "fallingness." So, for example, consider the word "chi." A speaker may repeat this syllable with (for example) a "high rising tone", a "medium falling tone" or a "low level tone"- to a Chinese speaker, each intonation would sound completely different (and have different meanings), but to me, each repetition would sound like the exact same word, just a little more or less, uh, "singsongy."

There's no reliable way to write Cantonese words in English- the 26-letter alphabet would be pathetically inadequate to indicate which phonetic nuance to employ when pronouncing a word. And even if I could somehow read what my mouth and nose were supposed to be doing, I sometimes find myself anatomically incapable of reproducing the sound- even some consonants! Even worse, my would-be teachers occasionally try to demonstrate the difference between two sounds that, to me, are literally indistinguishable. Like, "No, not 'hao,' 'hao'!"

When thinking about this, I was reminded of conversations I had with my Japanese manager over the difference between the oft-reversed /r/ and /l/, and with my Hungarian friends over their confusion of /w/ and /v/ (incidentally, I consider this to be quite an intimate conversation- I would never barge up to someone I didn't know and trust and bellow, "Sooo, let's talk about how you say 'willage' instead of 'village'"). If my friends hadn't learned English until they were adults, they will forever have trouble distinguishing between phoneme pairs that don't exist in their native tongue. This is according to my mom, who's a speech/language pathologist. She wrote the following to me in an email:

The thing of it is, that infants are born being able to differentiate between all sounds: /r/ and /l/, /w/ and /v/, /click/ and /clack/. As an infant grows, unused neurons are "pruned", so to speak. So if an infant grows up hearing /r/ and /l/, then those neurons get strengthened. If an infant gets raised with only an /r/ sound in his language, then the differentiating neuron for /r/ and /l/ will be "pruned". Now, its hard for a Japanese speaker to differentiate between /r/ and /l/ because they are acoustically similar. In "SLP speak" they are called liquids: the frequencies and mouth/tongue positions are similar when they are produced. A Japanese speaker could differentiate between an /l/ and an Australian Aboriginal "click" easily because they are acoustically so different.

On a side note, there is a new "toy" being marketed for infants. It's a noisemaker to put in his crib that supposedly contains all the sounds of the 100 most common languages in the world. The way it works is that the baby's brain would become "normalized" hearing all the sounds and later if that baby wanted to learn German or whatever, he would already have the guttural sounds in his bank of neurons. Interesting idea-have no clue if its well researched or not.

Neural pruning is at its peak in the toddler years but continues on through teen years. Thats why a rich and varied babyhood is so important- it feeds a brain that is eager to make connections. The connections can always be made at a later date, but as you well know, it gets much harder and requires a lot more effort and you never really "get it" as readily as you would if you had "gotten it" when you were younger.

See, now you got me going. I'm probably going to give you way more info than you really need.

Isn't that fucking amazing? Thanks mom!

So I've concluded that even basic Cantonese essentials like "I am horny for you" will elude me forever. And pathological long-windedness will hound me forever:

The written form of Chinese (written Mandarin and Cantonese are identical) is wholly "ideographic": each written character stands for a particular word or idea rather than, like English, a sound or, like Korean, a syllable. In order to be literate in Chinese, a student must memorize thousands of characters! But with so many tantalizingly useful neologisms originating from the comments section of this Livejournal alone (areolage, anyone?), how does the Chinese written language keep current?!

Consider new technical terms: according to a book I looked at in the library, these are often cobbled together from existing Chinese words. The result is a word whose meaning is easier to guess than perhaps it would be in English (where the origin is more likely to be Greek or Latin). Check these character combinations (Lyvovin, An Introduction to the Languages of the World).
movie: "electric shadow"
airplane: "fly engine"
transformer: "change pressure implement"
generator: "emit electricity engine"

However, some new words, especially foreign words, are written "phonetically"; that is, as two or more combined ideographs whose consecutive pronunciations approximate the foreign word. My book gives this example:
"Malay": written in Chinese as a combination of two characters, "mai" and "lei," which translate to "horse" and "come"!

My apologies for a relatively dry entry. It's just hard to get worked up anymore what with Darryl ostensibly out of town for the past couple of days. Oh well! I will be interested to read comments, especially from Chinese speakers, when (if) I return from Guangzhou.