Language is musical

I watched a TED talk a few weeks ago where the guy claimed he was going to make me fall in love with classical music, or if not fall in love with it, at least learn to appreciate it, or if not learn to appreciate it, at least learn to love classic rock. Except for that last part. He failed completely in his objective. I already have a good relationship with classical music: I listen to it very rarely but I can appreciate it. Classic rock on the other hand...

Despite his failure, the lecturer made a very interesting point that I carefully catalogued and put to use today when showing someone why normal English sentences sounded stilted in their rendition. The point that Mr. Classical Music made was that when you start out with music, you don't know what to stress, other than the mistakes. So the beginner will stress every note or at least every beat in a measure. When the beginner gets a little better (given the odds, chances were that this story would be about the 99.9% who quit, but did I mention I have incredibly good luck? The fictional beginners in my stories stick with it!), he/she starts putting accents every other beat, and then just at the first beat of the measure, and then eventually, according to Mr. Classical Music, the former beginner and now accomplished musician puts only a single accent in every phrase, or perhaps even in the entire piece, and the music magically stops sounding like an exercise and starts to sound like the classical music that everyone knows and loves and listens to at rave parties.

Jia Yan (female), one of our mutual friends, asked me today to listen to her read a few English sentences and tell her what was wrong with her pronunciation because she found it inexplicably abhorrent. I listened. To my own thoughts of course, not to a word she was saying. And after she was done, I pronounced a diagnosis based on no data whatsoever. I felt like an accomplished psychiatrist. I told her that the English language is like music, and like music it...and then I gave her the spiel on accents. She thought it was brilliant. Just kidding, she didn't understand what the hell I was talking about. But I felt quite intellectual. If I knew anything about wine, I'm sure I would have poured us both a glass and then lectured her on the proper way to drink it. I'm more of a Coca-Cola guy, so instead I taught her how to clean a toilet with it.

You call this a language?

English can be obnoxiously ambiguous at times. My parents and my sister went to the beach yesterday. When I wondered why Mahlet (my sister's best friend) hadn't gone with them and why I haven't heard much about Mahlet recently at all, and how Mahlet was doing cause I miss her, my dad said:

"I think she just loves us more now"

As long as you don't think about that sentence, it makes perfect sense. But once you start, you realize that it could mean pretty much anything in the world. It could mean that my sister loves my parents more now than she did before, or that she finally loves them more than she loves Mahlet, or that she loves them more than Mahlet loves them, or even that Mahlet loves my parents more now, so she graciously lets them have alone time with my sister. There's 46 other interpretations that I won't go into.

After I recovered from that soft gooey bitch-slap of ambiguity, I wondered for the millionth time how Chinese people do it. How do they ever understand who the hell they're talking about? In spoken Chinese, the pronouns "he," "she" and "it" sound identical. Not because I'm a foreigner and my ears are too big to hear the difference, but because they're all one and the same phoneme. Same goes for the plurals, "they" has three written forms - masculine they, feminine they, and undead they, but they all sound the same. This last one is only shocking until you realize that English only has one "they" to begin with, but it can help you appreciate the magnitude of the disaster that is the case of singular pronouns. Instead of he, she and it, you just have the singular form of they. And the same goes for possessive pronouns.

What this means, is that if a Chinese person is telling you a story about a heterosexual couple and their dog, you're hearing:

They says they doesn't want to get married, but they insists that they does, they just doesn't want to get married to they because they is so poor, and of course they has an opinion on it too, barking every now and then to punctuate the conversation. So I don't know what they is going to do. Maybe they will divorce they and marry that other girl.

Ha! You should be so lucky, getting that freebie at the end. Usually it's like listening to some kind of demented software interview brainteaser.

Whine Whine Whine

I got a chance to use my newly acquired knowledge of knots today and failed utterly and completely. Yuan Yuan was trying to tie her short hair in a short stump of a pony tail with one of my knot-trial-dedicated shoelaces. I saw her struggling and volunteered my services. I'm thinking now that I should have used the Constrictor Knot, but for some reason it didn't pop into my head at the time. Instead my head swam with images of Fieggen's Shoelace Knot, figure 8 variants, fishermen, fond childhood memories of trying to convince my mother to let me pull out all her hair ("how about just one?" "No! All of them!"), and shibari. Would it be easier to tie her pony tail if I first bound her head and foot and hung her from the ceiling? I wasn't sure enough to suggest it. Plus, I haven't taken the course on unknotting yet so testing should be conducted using other people's girlfriends.

Based on what I've read and this latest experience, maybe it's time to learn the Icicle Hitch. If I'd tied a quality one of those around Yuan Yuan's pony tail, not only could I be sure it wouldn't come undone, but I could also have hung her head out the window and climbed down the remaining 6 inches of shoelace without worrying about whether the knot would hold.

The Icicle Hitch looks pretty complicated and I've already knut (the past tense of "to knot" in the vernacular of 2047) enough for one day today...so maybe tomorrow. Today's knot is the Double Figure Eight Loop:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

For some reason my brain struggled with this one for a while. My figure 8 kept looking like a pretzel. Then I tried passing the loop in from the other side in one of the steps and everything fell into place. Well...actually just the figure 8, I still have to sort out my visa. In the directions on animatedknots.com, they don't tell you from which side to pass the loop. Now that I know, it seems rather obvious, but when it wasn't obvious, it wasn't obvious at all.* I wonder if this is how my students feel when I teach them English. "Oh...so there's a verb in every sentence! You said every sentence, not EVERY sentence, be more explicit next time!" (It's probably more like EVeRy sentence, if you count the little phrases we use in dialogue, like "Yes way, Ted!" and "Excellent!")

I missed my chance to be stared at more than usual today, which would be MORE than usual if the "usual" was measured in America. Confused? I bit my cheek two days ago and now it hurts every time I move my mouth or Yuan Yuan slaps me playfully across the face with the front door. Well...I don't really like pain, so when I eat I put the food in my mouth with one hand while pinching my cheek and holding it stretched out with the other. It's not an ideal method as I have to pull pretty hard on the outer cheek to get the inner cheek to separate from my gums and teeth. It's also not very comfortable and I'm already dreading turning 90 years old, when my arms won't be long enough to hold my cheek out far enough. Good thing we have that fight to the death scheduled for when we're 80.

I scoured the seven w's for cheek-bite remedies, but the more I looked, the more pathetic I seemed to myself. When I saw this...

"I thought there was food stuck between my teeth but it was just a piece of my gum that must have gotten a bit knickered. Anyway I pulled on the gum and peeled it off and now it's red and half of my mouth is swollen and a bit painful. It will heal right?"

and

"How long does it take for a dog's wounds to heal?"

...I almost punched myself in the face for being such a wuss (luckily I chickened out). People out there in the real world had far worse problems. I decided to just rinse my mouth out with salt water and hope that the 3rd day's a charm. Now I just have to wait for them to turn the water back on...

Yuan Yuan's two liner of the day (first aired while we were watching Terminator):
Yuan Yuan: I'm sure I've seen this movie!
Mark: Really?
Yuan Yuan: Well maybe not this one.

Yuan Yuan's creative spelling of the day:
sombile
("symbolizes," duh)

* This reminds me of a conversation with Lucy that took place a week back. She said something to the order of "good food is REALLY good," and I told her that that made no sense. However, after some discussion, I decided that the universe would be much more entertaining if that made sense than if it didn't. So one explanation is that the first good is more or less objective. It refers to the quality of the preparation. The second is subjective. So if "good food is REALLY good" to you, it means that if the food is prepared decently well (fuzzy linguistics), you'll enjoy it disproportionately. I think in my case it would be "good food is just as good as excellent food," with the second good being negative...maybe.