blog: of umlaut and circumflex

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
http://zabkat.com/blog/search-for-accent-letters.htm

[Tuxman]

All other languages I know of use accents to modify the sound of vowels

Latin doesn't. That said, English also does, vowels in certain combinations sound different than those vowels alone.

[Robert2]

Latin used apices to distinguish between long from short vowels. Have a look at Apex (diacritic)

[Kilmatead]

...and English helpfully did away with a lot of that by utilising diphthongs to get away from the many cluttering graphemes and ligatures that Latin over-complicated (or over-simplified, depending on your point of view). Due to English being a bottom-feeding magpie of all the romance languages (plus a few extra, especially Arabic), we have the extra fun of arbitrarily deciding to be "poncey" or not, affecting such pretentious spellings as only the naïve could find charming - and getting away with it, as (at the end of the day) none of it really matters (may the grammar-police be damned).

I had a Swedish girlfriend once who drilled their orthography into my head, though I could never quite get my jaw around the pronunciation of the letter 'å'. Ironically, she always said I only ever got it right when I was "taking the piss" out of imitating the chef from the Muppets. There's a lesson in that. Somewhere. I think. (The lesson is to live in Glasgow for a summer, and learn by listening to the locals that how things are spelt and how they are pronounced have absolutely nothing to do with each other - anything goes.)

[pj]

... I only ever got it right when I was "taking the piss" out of imitating the chef from the Muppets.

Does that mean you're a "everything I need to know I learned from the Muppets" kind of guy? Maybe Gonzo was right all along
--------------------------
PJ in (close to Muppets Central, Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World) FL

[Kilmatead]

Does that mean you're an "everything I need to know I learned from the Muppets" kind of guy?

As the cognoscenti have known throughout recorded human history, from the learned men of the Pharisees to the Grand Princes of Kiev in the 11th-century, one never jokes about The Muppets. The hoax that parents play on children parading around as Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy is but nothing compared to the reality of truth and brightness that can only exist under the holy gaze of Animal's lusty artistry as it lives on in our hearts.

Back when I was picking up snippets of Swedish (as one does), we started with the usual familiarities of games and relations. For example, playing chess one could say "Jag flyttar bonden" which is "I move the pawn" (or, technically, "the farmer/peasant"). Simple stuff, and a useful way of building vocabulary. The trouble with such languages is that foreigners almost always find pronunciation a major stumbling block at first - and there's always an insensitive soul around to tell you as much every chance he gets. That said, every now and then you can surprise them, and in this case the Muppets came to my rescue.

The 27th letter of the Swedish alphabet (as mentioned above) is 'å', pronounced (more or less) as two flowing syllables "ohh-uhh" (as a rough approximation). This is not to be confused with the sounds one often hears during Swedish pornography, though no doubt there is some ancestor to be found within the modulating phonology.

The Swedish equivalent of C'est la vie is "Sånt är livet", which is a fairly simple four/five-ish syllables when you mash it all together in "normal speech", though getting the intonation right is rather difficult. Anyway, one day I was walking through the city-centre with a group of Swedish friends who had long grown used my butchering of their language, when (just for the fun of it) I decided to articulate wildly in the most condescending way I knew: use their own stereotypes against them. So (with accompanying grandiose gesticulations for effect), I chose my moment in the conversation and just blurted out "Sånt är livet" with a parody of pronunciation just like the Swedish Chef himself was the most singy-songy idiot on the planet trying to entertain a bunch of 5-year-olds covered in half-eaten chocolate.

Strangely enough, all the Swedes stopped dead in their tracks and together exclaimed a congratulatory "That was perfect!" at me, my girlfriend beaming brightest of all, as only a woman can.

I was like - uh, wait - what did I do?

In trying to "take the piss" out of them by mimicking our worst impressions of cultural superficiality, I inadvertently learned the trick of fitting-in: be not afraid to completely humiliate yourself and risk all rudeness in the name of communication. It doesn't matter if you feel like a fool doing it, and you consider everyone around you fools for accepting it, but the only way to "forget yourself" in the pronunciation-game is to just have fun. Weird, but true. Once I had the initial "breakthrough" for the "feel of it" the rest is just vocabulary accumulation and grammatical necessity - doesn't matter if you're learning to swear in the roughest bars Paris has to offer (it's scary what they do with billiard balls), or just imitating some Liverpudlian "Scouse" off a stray telly advertisement - you can't go wrong if you just ask yourself: "How would Kermit approach this?"

A few months later the Swedish girl and myself parted ways, and my studies in the language were abandoned to fond history, but that one small event always stuck in my mind, and despite all the professors I had in university, all the books I read on the dark Road to Damascus, and all the Shakespearean verse I was forced to memorise as a child - the most important lesson I ever learned in human communication came courtesy of a wordless caricature puppet who's best known for throwing half-cooked pasta about the place. What better moral-of-the-story can there be?

I remember hearing some state-sponsored propaganda years ago about how Jim Henson had died (as if a man like that could ever die!) - what rubbish, I thought - no wonder we have no faith in the evening news anymore... do they think us all fools? Jim Henson is alive and well and still teaching old dogs new tricks.

Now, if only I can get the "yew" out of the μTorrent with Nikos' fuzzy selection, I'll be counting my chickens like the great blue Gonzo himself tonight.

[drac]

Kilmatead,

Love the story! One of your stories is always a great way to start my day.

[pj]

As the cognoscenti have known throughout recorded human history ... I'll be counting my chickens like the great furry Gonzo himself tonight.

The blarney stone is strong in you, my son.

-----------------------------
PJ in (having found a new path to enlightment: W.W.K.D. - What Would Kermit Do!) FL

[nikos]

if latin is like modern italian, you don't need accents because you simply read what you see. In english what you read is seldom what you see! The buiscuit goes to slovakians for putting accents even on consonants