To protect against infection, washing hands is a critical gesture, and to do so properly, the washing should take as long as singing Happy Birthday twice.
I don’t like the Happy Birthday song at all.
That’s why I decided that every week I would choose one song among those I do like but have never looked up the lyrics, and would learn them by heart, to accompany my hand washing routine.
The first song is in Italian, chosen in honour of our Italian friends, although its name is French, abat-jour, from abbattre (to through down) and jour (daylight).
It is a song from the 1960s. In a film Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), it accompanies the famous sensual scene with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
Abat-jour che soffondi la luce blu
di lassù tu sospiri chissà perchè
Abat-jour mentre spandi la luce blu
anche tu cerchi forse chi non c’è più
In some versions of the song, the verb soffondi (you suffuse) is replaced by diffondi(you diffuse). The two verbs are related, but different: soffondere means to suffuse, to spread in a manner of light or fluid, and derives from Latinsuffundere, with the etymology of spreading upon (‘sub’ ). A more common diffondere, from diffundere, means to diffuse, to spread around, away (‘dis’).
Ferrantomania, or Ferrante fever. After several years wondering what was this fuss about, I have at last caught the Ferrantomania bug.
I picked the first volume on a business trip to Brussels last November. Going back to the train station, I entered a bookshop to get something to read on my way back, and was delighted to discover a foreign language section.
L’amica geniale was there, and I bought it thinking that at least I should give it a try. But I did not read it until this January, when I decided to brush up my Italian in anticipation of two trips to Italy.
My Ferrante fever symptoms were the same as described by millions of readers worldwide: you buy this Ferrante book because you have heard that you should definitely read it. You read a couple of pages, and when you finally put the book down, it is after midnight, the book is over, and you desperately want to read the other three titles of the “Neapolitan Novels”.
When I started the first volume, I was not aware that language plays such a crucial role in the story. Much has been written about the use of Neapolitan dialect in the book, about sociolinguistic mechanisms, and about some enigmatic language-related metaphors, such as ‘il suo italiano che assomigliava un poco a quello dell’Iliade’ (‘Italian that slightly resembled that of the Iliad’).
Not only languages, but Classical languages specifically, play such a crucial role in the story. Thanks to private Latin lessons, Lena is able to continue her education; then, Latin and Greek (and their teachers) become her favourites, and eventually she goes on to study them at university.
A passage in the first volume struck me.
Elena is struggling with her Latin, and when she tells Lila (who has stopped the school because her parents could not afford it), Lila recommends the change of approach:
“Leggiti prima la frase in latino, poi va’ a vedere dov’è il verbo. A seconda della persona del verbo capisci qual è il soggetto. Una volta che hai il soggetto ti cerchi i complementi: il complemento oggetto se il verbo è transitivo, o se no altri complementi. Prova così.”
Provai. Tradurre all’improvviso mi sembrò facile.
In language learning, we have moments when suddenly something clicks and we finally get it. I have experienced it myself multiple times, and now I am really looking forward to reading about Lena’s linguistic (and other) discoveries.
Last week, I went to the local library knowing that it held the entire trilogy, and indeed, volumes 1,3, and 4 were there. The volume 2, exactly the one I was eager to read, was on loan. I made a recall and am impatiently waiting for the book to become available.
These are not incantations, but words ‘eight’ and ‘nine’ in Estonian, a language I am learning.
While learning numbers, I had a huge difficulty remembering the words for ‘eight’ and ‘nine’: which was which?
Then it dawned on me that inside kaheksa hides kaks, ‘two’, in its form kahe, and inside üheksa hides üks, ‘one’, in its form ühe. Clearly, kaheksa (8), was constructed as ‘2 (kahe) out of 10′, and üheksa (9) as ‘1 (ühe) out of 10′.
But ‘ten’ in Estonian is kümme, where does this mysterious -ksa come from?
It took me some time and effort to find reliable sources of information, given that my Estonian is basic and I have only faded memories of Hungarian, another Finno-Ugric language on my list.
Estonian etymological dictionary gives etymology for kaheksa and üheksa, and proposes two explanations: -ksa derives from *detsa, a proto-Iranian (hence Indoeuropean) word for ten (compare word for ‘ten’ in other Indo-European languages). Alternatively, –ksa is interpreted as an old negation form.
Curiously, it is believed that seitse ‘seven’ might be a loanword from Baltic or Slavic languages, which are of the Indo-European family (compare Russian семь, Czech sedm, and Latvian septiņi), whereas numbers one to six are of of Finno-Ugric or Uralic origin.
This heterogeneity of construction and origins of the first ten numbers is sometimes interpreted to suggest a base-6 system among ancestors of Finno-Ugric people — apparently, a heated linguistic debate.
Continuing the fish theme from the last post, in some languages – English, French, Italian, and Spanish, to my knowledge – fish is attributed with short memory.
So, today’s list contains memory-related expressions in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian.
It looks like some expressions, such as ‘memory of a goldfish’, ‘memory like a sieve’, ‘memory like an elephant’, ‘in one ear and out the other’, ‘refresh the memory’, exist in multiple languages, whereas others, such as tener memoria de grillo (have a memory like a cricket ) or девичья память (memory of a young girl), unique to one language.
I was reading in Spanish novel where a protagonist left con un portazo, ‘slamming the door’. I was left wondering how do you slam the door in different languages.
In English, weclose the door. We can also shut the door, bang the door, and slam the door. We can even slam the door in somebody’s face, although this is not recommended.
In French, on ferme la porte. If one wants to slam it, on claque la porte, and if one is annoyed, bothered, or impolite, on claque la porte au nez. In his Chanson pour l’Auvergnat, Georges Brassens sings:
Tous les gens bien intentionnés
M’avaient fermé la porte au nez
In Spanish, to close the door is cerrar la puerta, but to slam it is dar un portazo. One canirse / marcharse con un portazoand one can also cerrar la puerta en la cara. A good rule of thumb was mentioned in a dictionary as an example: siempre es mejor irse cerrando puertas que dando portazos.
In Italian, you would normally chiudere la porta (close it), sometimes sbattere la porta(slam it), and rarely sbattere la porta in faccia. If you are really upset and it’s too much, you would sbattere la porta e dire: “Basta”, literally or figuratively.
In Russian, you can хлопнуть дверью or уйти, хлопнув дверью; on the other hand, they can закрыть дверь перед носом. A popular song goes:
Уходя – уходи! Если кто-то тебе не поверит.
Уходя – уходи! Затвори за собой плотно двери.
In German, there is plenty of options: die Tür schließen, die Tür zuschlagen, die Türe vor der Nase zuschlagen / jemandem die Tür vor der Nase zuschlagen; jemandem die Tür ins Gesicht schlagen / werfen. Note that if the English, Italian, and Spanish slam the door in somebody’s face, whereas the French and Russian focus on the nose, the Germans can do both, face and nose.
In Latvian, one says aizcirst durvis, aizcērt kādam durvis, aizcirst kādam durvis deguna priekšā, aizvērt durvis kāda deguna priekšā. (Nose again.)
In Czech, one can mlátit, prásknout, bouchnout dveřmi. One can simply zavřít dveře(shut the door) or emphatically zavřít dveře před nosem. (Also nose.)
In Modern Greek, one says κλείνω την πόρτα, and κλείνω την πόρτα κατάμουτρα. The word κατάμουτρα is curious: κατα is a preposition with many meanings, including ‘down’ and ‘upon’, whereas μουτρα is slang for face. My Modern Greek is not yet sufficiently good, and I could not find any equivalents of slamming, but the Greeks surely are able to do it?
Why 19 languages? 19 is the number of languages I have decided I wanted to learn in this life.
I had a language wish list for decades, but last week, on a flight from Madrid, I actually sat down, thought about it methodically, and came up with three groups.
Group alpha includes 7 languages: English, French, Italian, Latvian, and Russian, all of which I master at different levels of fluency, plus German and Spanish. For these languages I want to have excellent passive knowledge and pretty good active knowledge.
Group beta included 4 languages: Czech and Modern Greek, which I studied and used to be able to speak, plus Polish and Portuguese, which I don’t know at all. I would like to have good passive knowledge of these four, and be able to converse.
Group gamma included Estonian, Georgian, Hungarian, and Japanese, for which I know the bare basics, plus two additional languages I want to learn but have not quite decided which ones. Current favourites are Swedish and Catalan.
A special case is Ancient Greek and Latin, my field of specialisation at university, which I want to continue to read.
19 languages 