Dreamer Easy

Ideally I'd like to finish a first draft of the novel by the end of the year, but with one thing and another I think there's little realistic chance of that. I shall continue to plug away at the bastard, but I mean to attend the Macquarie Ancient Languages Summer School for further punishment in January - Classical Greek or Classical Hebrew??? - and then make assaults on French, German, and Korean. The former two are crucial for seriously studying the ancient world, since so much of the scholarly literature is written in them (guess which colonial powers squabbled over Egypt and the Middle East), notably the two major books about the goddess Sekhmet. German and Korean will require actual classes - I'm going to try to translate the Français stuff I have with the help of a dictionary, some teach yourself books, and the scattered remains of my high school French.

This is something I've wanted to do for a long, long time. Korean is the "just for fun" language here, obviously; I'd love to be able to do fan translations of Kpop stuff, and stumble along in Korean in shops and cafes. Though of course, the more languages you learn, the easier it is to pick up new ones - although Korean has no known relatives, it shares characteristics with other languages, like subject markers and formal and informal modes (I'm looking at you, Japanese). Anyway, let's see what comes of these grand plans.

http://youtu.be/VIB7bMBFfaA?t=12m

At the twelve minute mark of this video - the link should take you there directly - you can see an example of English being used to straighten out a little communication difficulty (caused by a cheeky Chinese-speaking band member deliberately feeding a mistranslation to his Korean colleague :).

It's a goofy variety show taking place in, as best I can work out, four languages - Mandarin Chinese, the Changsha topolect (or dialect), Korean, and a small but recurring smattering of English - typical stuff, as is the raising of laughs by playing around with language. You'll see two sets of subtitles - the large, colourful Chinese characters are from the original show, and the English translation at the bottom has been added by a fan, bless them.

(I do believe Mandarin has absorbed the word "romantic" from English, rendering it as làngmàn. That's come a long way from Latin.)

I am champing at the bit to learn Korean*, but continue to stick to my resolution not to study it until I've finished the novel. In the meantime I continue to absorb an eccentric vocabulary. Onew from SHINee's adorable combination of randomness and clumsiness is jokingly referred to as "Onew Condition" - 상태, "Onew Sangtae". At the Sydney Aquarium yesterday, a display had been switched to Korean, so I had a crack at sounding out some of the the Hangul, and suddenly realised it was telling me the conservation status of the platypus - its 상태. Hee hee hee!


* Also German, French, and (properly) Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and Akkadian. Wouldn't mind a crack at Mandarin, Latin, and Classical Greek, and I'd like to at least be able to sound out Hebrew, Russian, and Japanese. The list's got way less insanely ambitious thanks to my meds.

Wikipedia: "Mirotic" is a newly coined term... that combines the Korean miro (미로), meaning "maze", and the English suffix "-tic".

Oh my gawd - it means "labyrinthine"! With cheeky echoes of the English "erotic", of course. A sexeh title for a sexeh song. (So sexeh, in fact, that it famously earned the ire of the South Korean censors.)



Fairly basic video. Plenty of of boys being tied up and tormented, though, if you like that sort of thing. (The band is DBSK, or TVXQ!, or Tohoshinki, depending on where you are and which language you're using. Apparently they could've instead been called "The Whale That Eats Legends" or "The Five Viscerae", so I think they lucked out there.)

ETA: "Labyrinthine" is a great word, and so is "mazy". Somewhere in a Tanith Lee novel she uses "styxy" instead of the more usual "Stygian", getting in connotations of "sexy" and perhaps "stinky" the same way "mirotic" hints at "erotic". Try this at home, kids.

Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English. Looks like objections to "Britishisms" are based on their higher status (and thus pretentiousness) and not their lower status, as with Americanisms.

In the absence of proper language study I continue to squee at puzzling small things out - for example, the relationship between the Korean jjang, "boss, best" and the Mandarin Dui Zhang "leader". (The Duizhang himself, Kris from Exo-M, reportedly talks in his sleep in three languages. How cool is that?!) Speaking of Exo-M, they were amongst several Kpop bands who recently performed in Jakarta. The press call was a tasty salad of languages, including Korean, English, and Bahasa - you can hear Kris speaking a little of the last two here, much to the delight of the crowd (and the commenters on YouTube :).

ETA much later: the slang 짱 jjang may come from 장, as in 사장 "boss", and 장 in turn comes from the Chinese 長 zhǎng "chief".

Moar stuff:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/light-is-fading-for-indigenous-languages-20120922-26dik.html
http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2010/04/14/the-big-bang-theory-sheldons-chinese
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/braille-app-frees-keyboard-slaves-20120222-1tmnz.html
http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html (The Jargon File)
http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter_old.html (Chinese Romanization Converter)

I have promised myself I won't try and learn any languages until the novel is finished. But in the meantime, there's the joy of mucking about with languages - a close cousin of the cryptic crossword, methinks, and cunning jokes, all about the A-Ha Moment, that jolt of pleasure in your brain when you suddenly make the connection. Viz:



This is the Japanese version of SHINee's song "Lucifer", subtitled, romanised, and translated into English by an angel of a fan. Many of the lyrics have just been rewritten to scan better in Japanese, but I was delighted to see the daffy poetry of "I feel like I've become a clown trapped in a glass castle" has survived.

Better still, the Japanese word for "clown" jumps right out from the romanisation: "piero". Bingo, I thought, Portuguese loanword, like the ones I came across when writing Room With No Doors all those years ago. I guessed wrong there: it's from the French Pierrot, of course.

Curiosity piqued, I went back to the Korean lyrics, and found the same word: 삐에로, "ppiero". Now I wonder if the Koreans got it straight from French, or via Japanese. :)

Time to get cracking on the Talons essay rewrites. Luckily my energy levels are much improved by the combination of clear skies and clean CPAP equipment. The main job is to cut about 1200 words, which I suspect is going to be easier than I think. Just lopped out a 200-word para (and six footnotes :).

In other news, I sing of arms and people who can do wordplay in a second language, specifically, the English bits in Korean pop songs. Though there is much amusing Engrish about (had I penned the immortal line "We got the flow it's break your naughty" I would not care to see it in letters two stories high) there are also little gems like "I'm that cool cat (Meow!) / Check me out."* (One of the joys of listening to pop in a forrin tongue is that you're not distracted by idiotic lyrics, but certain songs have some clever rhyme and repetition going on that even a 외국인 can pick out.)

ETA: Lopped out about 700 words with next to no effort. It's the other 500 that's going to be the real work! But lo, the flu jab I had today is making me woozy and weird, so I'm off to bed.


* Although, admittedly, about fifty people wrote this song - SHINee's "Get Down" - not all of 'em Korean.

대 실패
dae shilpae
epic fail

Thanks to howlingquietly, here's a tiny sound clip from Delta and the Bannermen 2, including Burton and Ray's exchange in Welsh. I'm now pretty sure she says, "O, mae'n wir, mae'n wir" - "Oh, it's true, it's true!" - but I still have no idea what he says!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FKJXG7O5

ETA: omg! Burton says: "Dangoswch imi!" - "Show me!" (Probably a better rendering of Ray's line, then, is "It's the truth!")