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August 2008 |
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Speaking in a foreign language can be intimidating, sometimes to the point where you lose sight of common sense because you're so wrapped up in the differences in speech. Case in point, my dad and I once made a trip to a McDonald's in Paris. I know, I know, what were we doing at a McDonald's when we were in Paris? Well, it's a valid point, but McDonald's is actually ridiculously popular in France (I mean, so popular that some of their locations are literally overflowing with people), especially among the younger generations. In any case, I had already ordered my chicken nuggets and my dad wanted a burger. The exchange at the cash register went as follows.
Do you have a language story that you'd like to share? Submit your experiences to us at livinglanguage@randomhouse.com. We'll pick our favorites and post them in this newsletter. 
More on reading foreign literature The Catcher in the Rye was the first complete book I read in English, and I remember getting through it not knowing what rye was. It’s funny, because rye is actually similar (and possibly related) to the Croatian raž. My English was then of the advanced-high-school-knowledge kind, so I think I also missed the whole metaphor associated with the book’s title, as well as the relevant paragraphs in the book. Still, I ended up loving the book, in whatever interpretation I might have assigned to it then. It must be all the universal between-the-lines stuff that has nothing to do with particular languages and everything to do with great literature...
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While in the midst of editing the culture notes for an upcoming Croatian language course, I started to notice the oddity of the word "Croats." I thought about it: why do we say "Croats," and not "Croatians?" Surely this goes against all the rules of naming nationalities. We have "Russians" (not "Russes"), "Romanians" (not "Romans"), "Albanians" (not "Albans"), "Austrians" (not "Austers")... so why "Croats," and not "Croatians?" And why "Poles," not "Polandese?" "Irish," not "Irelanders?" Also on the blog this month: 
The clever design of Korean HangeulThe languages of the world are written in a number of different ways. Languages like English, Arabic, and Russian use alphabets, where each letter represents a particular sound, at least when things are spelled phonetically. Languages like Chinese, Ancient Egyptian, and Classic Maya use a logogrammatical script, where a character is like a symbol that represents a word or morpheme, much like & means and and # means number. In between sounds and words you have syllables, and there are languages that write their words with syllabaries, like Japanese katakana and hiragana, both of which are known as kana. Korean, which is written in Hangeul, is a bit of a mixed bag. |
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