Happy Friday! If you would be so kind, could you please send me some extra brain power and a few gallons of coffee? I could really use both right now…
Hurray for Friday’s Featured Language!
My guest today is Annie, who blogs over here in both German and English. Annie grew up and still lives in Germany. She says she started learning English in school in the 5th grade, and “also gained a lot of English by trying to figure out the meaning of some songs and by watching movies on DVD using the English language feature.” That sounds like a great language learning tip! (Another great tip would be to read a German blog if you’re learning German…hint-hint!)
Annie has selected a poem to share with us, to show us that “German isn’t a hard, uncomfy language one can’t bear to hear. Or speak.” She thinks German is a much more poetic language than we might realize! She adds that she really likes this poem, and notes that it is “a bit funny and a bit sad. Both, fun and sadness, are topics of which German sounds great when talking about.”
The poem is by Theodor Fontane, who is a famous and important writer in Germany, and this poem is sometimes learned in school; Annie says, “I still remember the poem in my German book, on a double page, which a lovely pear tree on it.”
{Note: the text of the poem is a little long, so I’ve posted it here as an image with English translation side-by-side. If you’d like to enlarge the text, just click on the image and a larger version will open in a new window.}
The source for this poem in German is here and its translation is available on this webpage that also includes a Hindi and an Afrikaans translation, if you’re interested 🙂 By the way, Annie says that we should compare the sounds of German with Dutch or Danish. “You’ll be surprised!”
Happy (?) Friday. I put that question mark in there because I’m at the point in the semester when weekends aren’t actually breaks from working, and all my days are starting to blur together…but anyway, it is Friday. And I should remember to always be thankful for Fridays!
My guest today is Xiaofei, a speaker of Mandarin Chinese. Xiaofei grew up in Beijing. She studied Spanish for several years as a young teenager, and began learning English in college at Beijing University, but says “I did not get to seriously learn English until after I came to the US in 1990.” She now lives in Falls Church, Virginia, where English is the dominant language, but Mandarin Chinese is still the primary language in her home.
She says we might be surprised to know that Chinese has no verb tenses! She also says she has “no idea how others would react to spoken Chinese,” and hopes that listeners can recognize the rhythm of the text she has selected. *For those of you who might not know this, Chinese is a tonal language, so what you will hear in this clip is both tone, which is part of the language, and rhythm, which is part of the poem.
Xiaofei’s sample is a famous poem by Li Po, one of the greatest poets in Chinese history, and “is about the beauty of being alone and the melancholic joy of solitude.”
English translation: Drinking Alone in the Moonlight
Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine No friends at hand, so poured wine I raised my cup to invite the moon Turned to my shadow, and we became three Now the moon had never learned about my drinking And my shadow had merely followed my form But I quickly made friends with the moon and my shadow To find pleasure in life, make the most of the spring
Wherever I sang, the moon swayed with me Whenever I danced, my shadow went wild Drinking, we shared our enjoyment together Drunk, then each went off on his own But forever agreed on dispassionate revels We promised to meet in the far Milky Way
[The translation is by Elling Eide in Victor Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 203.]
Mandarin Chinese is the world’s most widely spoken language, with 840 million speakers; for comparison, English only has about 330 million native speakers. Even so, I’ve never had the pleasure of listening to poetry in spoken Chinese! Thank you very much Xiaofei, for sharing with us!
Happy Friday everyone! I probably say that every Friday but…well, every Friday is happy, so it’s appropriate.
For Friday’s Featured Language, I am very happy to have Nozomi! Nozomi grew up in Japan, in Kanawaga Prefecture (near Tokyo), speaking Japanese. She started studying English in junior high and English was mandatory through high school, but she says the way the language was taught made it very difficult to actually learn, so she doesn’t think she really learned to speak English until she turned 18. Currently she lives in Michigan and speaks English with her husband and Japanese to her son.
Japanese has three script systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Both Hiragana and Katakana have 46 characters each, while the current system of Kanji includes about 50,000! Despite what I would think is a bewildering writing system, Nozomi says that we would be surprised that skim reading is easy in Japanese, as most content words are Kanjis and Kanjis are ideographic, “so even if you do not know how to read them, you can guess the meanings.” Only about 2,000 Kanjis are in everyday use, and Nozomi says that elementary students learn about 1,000 while the average Japanese adult has command of about 3,000. As if that weren’t already a cognitive feat, Nozomi notes that “many of the Kanjis have complicated forms and are pronounced in several different ways!”
On the other hand, Nozomi says Japanese grammar is very easy, and pronunciation is pretty straightforward. And she assures her students that they do not need to know all the Kanjis immediately; at first, students can read and write in Hiragana and Katakana scripts, which are phonetic systems, so much easier to pick up. She loves Japanese and loves teaching it! Her website is full of basic information on Japanese and some fun language practice. When I asked her if there was anything she wanted to say to my blog readers, she said “Let’s study Japanese! I will be there to help you out!”
The language sample Nozomi selected is a poem written by Misuzu Kaneko in 1928. Nozomi says, “Even though her poems were written long time ago, many of them still move our heart and make us think about life in general. This poem was used as a TV commercial after 3/11 last year, healing Japanese hearts who were suffering from the unexpected natural disaster. I think in this modern society where people are just busy about themselves, we need to think about others and be nice to each other. If we are nice to others, they would respond just like an echo.”
『こだまでしょうか』
「遊ぼう」っていうと
「遊ぼう」っていう。
「馬鹿」っていうと
「馬鹿」っていう。
「もう遊ばない」っていうと
「遊ばない」っていう。
そうして、あとで
さみしくなって、
「ごめんね」っていうと
「ごめんね」っていう。
こだまでしょうか、
いいえ、誰でも。
Transliteration:
<Kodama de shooka>
“Asobo”tte iuto “Asobo”tte iu
“Baka”tte iuto “Baka”tteiu
“Moo asobanai”tte iuto “Asobanai”tte iu
Soushite atode Samishiku natte
“Gomenne”tteiuto “Gomenne”tteiu
Kodama de shooka Iie, daredemo
English Translation: <Are they echoes?>
When I say, “Let’s play “ You say, “Let’s play”
When I say, “Stupid” You say, “Stupid”
When I say, “I don’t want to play with you anymore” You say, “I don’t want to play with you”
Then later I feel sad
Then I say, “I am Sorry” You say, “I’m sorry”
Are they echoes? No, true for anyone
In addition to this beautiful language sample, Nozomi wanted to share this video with us:
It is a thank you message from some of the victims of the March 11th, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Please make sure you have lots of tissues handy, and maybe don’t watch it at work – it is a tearjerker. (I’m kind of glad no one was around to see what a mess I was when I was watching it.) But it is so lovely, and touching, and even polyglossic!
Thank you so much Nozomi for sharing your language and your culture with us. Arigato!
Earlier this week, I had the honor of sitting in on a guest lecture by renowned Islamic calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya. Mr. Zakariya, who has spent years practicing and studying under Turkish masters, spoke about the different styles and the history of calligraphy in Islamic art. Already suffering from a profound weakness for the Arabic script, Mr. Zakariya’s slideshow of examples gave me goosebumps.
In the name of God, who soaks His entire creation with His mercy, who directs His mercy specifically: Truly, the promise of God is true, so do not be fooled by the life of the world, and do not let the deceiving devil fool you about God. Only God knows when the last day will happen, He sends the rain, and He knows what is in the wombs. No soul shall know what it will earn tomorrow, and no soul shall know in what land it will die. Truly, God is all-knowing, all-informed.
One thing I noticed about the lecture is that while it was scholarly and serious, it was also full of rapture and joy. Mr. Zakariya constantly referred to the “music” of certain calligraphic pieces. He said that a beautiful piece of calligraphy is to the Islamic tradition what the nude is in Western painting: its purity, its form, its “sinuosity” representing the height of art. He also described it as a very “intimate piece of art”; to really grasp the beauty of a calligraphic manuscript, one has to view it while holding it in the hand, off the shelf and out from the display glass, putting one’s face right up next to the text to see how the paper was burnished, how the border was constructed, how the ink flowed from the pen. He said that it is difficult to put into words what differentiates an excellent piece from a merely lovely one; there is an “indescribable extra,” he said, that “turns it into visual music.” Displaying a photograph of one exquisite example he had seen in person, he said “When you see a piece like this, you can’t get enough of it.” From my limited knowledge of Islam, particularly the mystical branches that come out of Turkey and Iran, I can see how this art reflects the religious experience: at once strict, empirical, scholarly, and dedicated, and also poetic, experimental, spiritual, and above all, ecstatic.
How does one describe the indescribable? How does one form an image of that which cannot be portrayed? That is what the hilye does…it embodies the Prophet’s moral, behavioral, and spiritual qualities as well as physical appearance.
Reading, or even simply viewing, a well-produced hilye can refresh the heart and mind. It gives us, so many generations later, a kind of intimacy with the Prophet, as though we had known him. To see him in this way is to allow him to show the way.
Of course, calligraphy is never just about pretty shapes. As Mr. Zakariya said to me when I got to meet him after the lecture, “this is all about language.” During his lecture, after displaying several slides of various permutations of the bismillah, the phrase that invokes the grace and mercy of God before every sura of the Quran, Mr. Zakariya noted that if you look at Islamic art or texts you’ve inevitably seen the bismillah hundreds of time. “But,” he noted, “it is perhaps the most potent phrase in all of Islamic literature.” Calligraphy, he says, has the ability to make a thing new; a particularly beautiful calligraphic rendering of the phrase causes the reader/viewer to stop and see the phrase with new eyes, and to reflect on its meaning once again. “If you put the hadith,” the sayings of the Prophet, “in a beautiful setting, it allows you to look at them in a different way,” he added later. At the same time, he marveled out loud at lines, movement, the perfect formation of a dot marking a consonant, the spacing of characters within and between words.
O cat, you left us and didn’t come back
And you were to me like a son,
So how can we get loose from the bonds of our love for you?
You were like a part of our household to us.
You would drive away harmful things and guard us
In the dark from snakes and crickets.
In Islamic calligraphy, language serves art, and vice versa. Language, art, and religion dance together to a verbal, textual, visual music.
Photos: “Do Not Be Fooled” & “Lament for a Dead Cat”, Kaz Tsuruta
“Hilye in Red”, Mohamed Zakariya
Happy International Women’s Day everyone!
In some countries it is traditional to give bouquets of flowers to the important women in your life on this day. Unfortunately this holiday is all but ignored here in the US, but I wanted to share this lovely language bouquet with you all. This is a sneak preview of a post I’m planning about an Islamic calligrapher I got to meet yesterday.
If Women … (Anonymous Arabic poem)
If women are as we describe them,
Then women are better beings than men.
The feminine gender of the sun is no defect,
Nor is the masculine gender of the moon something to boast of.
(Note: In Arabic, the word for sun is feminine and the word for moon is masculine.)
Thank you to Mohamed Zakariya for the photo and Sally Banks Zakariya for the translation.