Lichtrausch's Log: The Sinosphere and Indoeuropean

[iguanamon]

My heartfelt congratulations, Lichtraush!!! You have made a huge accomplishment through a lot of hard work and dedication. I've been following along the way. You've definitely earned this!

[lichtrausch]

Thanks for the kind words!

Congrats! What level did you reach?

Level 6 under the current test regime. HSK 3.0 was supposed to start in 2021, but it hasn't been implemented yet.

[lichtrausch]

Last week I went to an event featuring the Korean author Han Kang, who you might know from her novel 채식주의자 (The Vegetarian) which won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. She understands English well, but struggles to express herself in the language. That wasn't a problem though since the moderator was a perfect Korean/English bilingual who could interpret on the fly. As such, a lot of Korean ended up being spoken.

Han was here to publicize the English-language release of her 2011 novel 희랍어 시간 (Greek Lessons). She was inspired to write this novel after a conversation with a professor of Ancient Greek who sparked her interest in the language. In preparing to write the novel, she read through three grammars of Ancient Greek. An audience member asked her about what is lost in translation, and the answer was quite a bit. She mentioned that even the English title of her book loses some "layers" that the Korean title has. 희랍어 (huirabeo) is an older word for the Greek language. The standard word is 그리스어 (geuriseueo). And the primary meaning of 시간 (sigan) is "time". Greek Lessons seems right up my alley so I hope to get my hands on it soon.

Earlier this week I went to an event featuring the Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy, whose book The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History was just published. There was lots to ponder here. For example he commented on what exactly has driven Ukrainians to put up a united front against Russia. Ukraine is linguistically, religiously, and ethnically diverse, so none of these work to unify the entire country. Only the longing for independence and democracy unites every faction. He also remarked that one factor behind declining corruption is that lots of men driving around Ukraine these days are members of the military, so police officers don't ask for bribes anymore out of fear of being shot... I am deeply interested in the war and its place in history, but I will wait until the conflict ends and someone writes a single volume history of it.

I've been doing Polish for a few minutes everyday on Duolingo, and otherwise kind of bouncing around from language to language. I concentrated on Korean for a few days before the Han Kang event, and try to listen to Mandarin for at least half an hour a day.

[lichtrausch]

I haven't said anything about my reading in a while, so let me give a little update on that front. I recently read The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, about the rapid demise of Boston's large Jewish community in the 60s. Read this book if you want to understand urban America.

I also finished 瀬戸内の海賊 (The Pirate of the Seto Inland Sea), which was a bit too academic for my taste. You don't need to constantly interrupt the text to provide the source for every happening you tell us about. The author also liberally quoted from Classical Japanese sources, which was interesting, but another roadblock to getting swept away by the story. An example:

此において賊船一艘来り、本船と問答す、少焉賊矢を放ち、本船衆これを欺て鏃を双べ鉄炮を放つ、賊船疵を蒙る者多く、須史にして去る、同申の刻塩飽浦に着岸して一宿に投ず
Koko ni oite zoku-sen issō kitari, honsen to mondō su, shōen zoku ya o hanachi, honsenshū kore o azamuite yajiri o narabe teppō o hanatsu, zoku-sen kizu o kōmuru mono ōku, shuyu ni shite saru, dō sarunokoku Shiwaku Ura ni chakugan shite isshuku ni tōzu.

Rough translation: At this point, a pirate ship came and negotiated with the vessel. Soon after, the pirates shot arrows, and the vessel crew retaliated by firing its guns. The pirate ship took heavy losses, and immediately left. The vessel arrived at Shiwaku Bay at the hour of the monkey (around 4pm) and stayed for one night.


I'm currently reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton.

[lichtrausch]

A Clockwork Orange was a fun reading experience. The book is known for its teenager argot called Nadsat, which is a form of Russian-influenced English with some traces of Cockney rhyming slang. Having gained some basic familiarity with Russian over the past couple years, I thought that now would be a good time to have a go at the novel. Turns out that my very basic Russian was a big help, because without it I would either be stuck googling hundreds of words or else making a lot of guesses about what the characters are saying. Here's an excerpt:

Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts.

I also went through the dual language reader Neuf nouvelles nouvelles - Neue französische Erzählungen. Why? Just driven once again by the impulse to hurry up and finally get a foothold in the Romance languages. I've got one more French reader and then I'll try reading a short novel. To improve listening comprehension, I'm now on the second season of Dix pour cent, an excellent show.

I have also made more progress with 东方 (In the East). I read part three 风雪 (Wind and Snow) and part four 江声 (The Sound of the River). Two more parts to go.

[lichtrausch]

The Greeks was a fantastic read. The Greeks have had such a huge influence on the world that it almost felt like I was reading a history of humanity. I find the Byzantine period especially interesting, so at some point I'd like to read a history dedicated to that time. I started reading The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe by Martyn Rady and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

I also read part 5 of 东方, called 长城 (The Great Wall). One sentence caught my eye in particular:

"战斗这么激烈，同志们被压在坑道里，我倒在那儿'ㄅ,ㄆ,ㄇ,ㄈ,ㄉ,ㄊ,ㄋ,ㄌ'...."

Notice anything unusual? That's Bopomofo, used primarily in Taiwan, in a novel from mainland China. It means "The fighting is so fierce, my comrades are pinned down in the tunnel, and there I was reciting Bo, Po, Mo, Fo, De, Te, Ne, Le." I guess in this context it means "twiddling my thumbs" or something like that.

Otherwise, I finally bought wireless earphones and have started listening to audiobooks. Most days I listen either on the train or while taking a long walk. I've been listening to 一品天下 (Yipin Tianxia) by Gui Ren and 世界秩序 (World Order) by Henry Kissinger.

[lichtrausch]

It's been a while since the last update. Near the end of summer I went to a trilingual wedding. There was Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, due to the bride's family, groom's family, and non-Chinese attendees respectively. It was interesting to observe which language was chosen at which time. For example, the bride said her vows in Mandarin, and the groom in Cantonese. The priest switched back and forth. Speeches were held in the native language of the speaker. I had some conversations in Mandarin and listened attentively to the Cantonese, but I was only able to pick out a word here and there, as you might expect.

Other than that I came across a couple interviews of linguistic interest. One was an interview (in Mandarin) with Haruki Murakami's Simplified Chinese translator, Lin Shaohua, who has a huge readership by virtue of the huge mainland China market. His translations have been criticized for using high register, flowery language which isn't really there in the original.

The other one is with Chinese author Yu Hua via the booktuber 편집자K (Editor K). This one is fun because the questions are posed in Korean and the answers come back in Mandarin.

[bolaobo]

His translations have been criticized for using high register, flowery language which isn't really there in the original.

I've noticed this a lot with mainland authors. They love using that kind of flowery language even when it's not really called for.

[lichtrausch]

From The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady:

[...] One soldier at the beginning of the twentieth century wrote his diary in four different languages: German for regimental matters, Slovene when thinking about his girlfriend, Serbian for songs he recalled, and Hungarian for his sexual fantasies. Others changed what they said they were according to circumstance and financial advantage, or they were indifferent, often conversing in several languages or in a blended argot. Even among educated city folk, when writing in a hurry (as for instance on postcards) they might mix words or grammars, moving (as in Styria) from German to Slovene and back again.

How people identified was something impressed by neighbours, parents, friends, and the workplace. But government and the bureaucracy were also involved. In the Austrian Empire, the first steps were taken in 1849 to itemize the linguistic communities to which people might be said to belong. Nine were identified - German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Slovene, and Croatian (although Croatian might be written in both Latin and Cyrillic script to accommodate Serbs). These nine then became the official languages in which teaching might be conducted in schools and the empire’s laws published. But the nine languages bore little relation to the medley of languages and dialects that were actually in use. Most obviously, Slovak was not included, since it was thought close enough to Czech not to merit a category of its own. But Yiddish, Friulian, Dalmatic, Hutsul, Wind (or Windisch), Lemko, Pulsch, Armenian, Gypsy Romani, and Szlonzok were also left out.

The first Austrian censuses had been primarily interested in identifying who might be recruited to the army and how many horses they had. But from 1880, Austrian censuses also had a box in which the responsible head of the household had to write in the ‘language of daily use’ (Umgangssprache) on behalf of his family and servants. Again, it was the same nine languages, except that Czech was now hyphenated with Slovak and Moravian. The Hungarian census, which was held separately in 1881, was more accommodating, with categories for Romani speakers, Armenians, and mutes. Later Hungarian censuses directed the public to eight named categories, although allowing them to write in an affiliation from a subsidiary list. Officials conducting the census advised people who described what they spoke as Saxon, Swabian, Yiddish, Landler, or just ‘our language’ (unsere Sprache) to call it ‘German’.[...]

Outside the Habsburg lands, most censuses were unconcerned with nationality, simply presuming that the populations were German or that what they spoke was unimportant. (Only in 1905 were Frisian and Danish speakers separately identified in Schleswig-Holstein.) Prussia was different not only in the sheer scale of the information it gathered but also in categorizing the population by ‘mother tongue’ (Muttersprache). Starting with the censuses of 1858 and 1861, Prussian administrators included besides German a medley of other linguistic options - Czech, Moravian, Wendish, Polish, Kashubian, Masurian, Lithuanian, Frisian, and so on. But the raw results were then aggregated in the final count. All Slav speakers, including Wends, Kashubs, and Masurians, were joined together as Polish; Frisian, Dutch, and Yiddish speakers were classified as German; and in some aggregations, Lithuanians were made into Germans too, since demographers were convinced that they would soon become Germans anyway.

The purpose of the Prussian censuses was not to give a snapshot of the linguistic make-up of the kingdom. It was driven by policy and intended to show where non-Germans predominated and where the Germanization of the population through schooling, expulsion, and forcible resettlement should be intensified. But it yielded one of the most extraordinary visual representations of its kind: The Linguistic Map of the Prussian State based on the 1861 Census. The map shows Prussia as having at its core a solid body of beige-coloured German speakers but threatened on its eastern flank by an undifferentiated red block of Polish speakers.[...]

[lichtrausch]

At this year's Boston Book Festival I went to a discussion session that included translator Emily Wilson and author Ha Jin, who writes in his second language (English). Wilson did a dramatic reading from her new translation of The Odyssey, first in Ancient Greek and then in English. Very entertaining!

I recently completed an odyssey of my own, namely reading the epic Korean War novel 东方 (In the East) by Wei Wei. At 1084 pages it was one of the longest books I've read in any language. It was fundamentally a work of propaganda. The characters portrayed sympathetically are all bourgeois-loathing, proletariat-worshipping, Mao-quoting zealots. Americans and South Koreans commit war crimes left and right, Chinese and North Koreans are honorable freedom fighters. Ironic since the war began with the North Korean invasion of South Korea. I'm going to have to be more careful about books I choose from mainland China. This is the second novel of chest-thumping nationalism I've suffered through from there, and life is just too short.

Other reading updates: Blood Meridian was excellent but horrifically violent. The Middle Kingdoms did a solid job of giving some order to the bewildering number of polities and rulers in Central European history. Circe by Madeline Miller was well done but I think the genre of myth retellings is not for me. I started reading Die Entdeckung des Himmels (The Discovery of Heaven) by Harry Mulisch.

Another excerpt of linguistic interest from The Middle Kingdoms:

To understand the people better, scholars in uniform investigated their speech and isolated Belarusian, or as they called it, 'White Ruthene', as a distinct language. Having discovered the Belarusians, they founded in 1915 the first ever Belarusian-language schools, sponsored a Belarusian press, and set up a permanent exhibition in Vilnius of Belarusian folk culture. Belarusians today partly owe their sense of belonging to the German pioneers who told them who they were and gave them some of their earliest history lessons. But this was no altruistic endeavour on the occupiers' part. By advancing Belarusian nationhood, the German occupation regime sought to detach from Russia a population estimated at the time at one million people.