Just wanted to let everyone know that I have an email from Angela and she is safely in Vietnam!
From her email:
Well the first word I’ve learned is “ba” which means three.
Everything else has an accent on it so I cant pronounce it. My
hotel/guesthouse is nicer then I thought it would be. I have my own
room and airconditioning. There are two rooms a floor I have the top
floor to myself (five floors total). The balacony is next door to me
so I pretty much have that to myself. No shoes in hotel. Not because
of tradition but because the owner doesn’t like to mop. I start
training today. This computer is hard to type on so please excuse
mistakes. I had breakfast today for a 1.20. Very hot and very humid.
Like in the south but on the hottest day in July after it has rained.
But really not that bad. More later. But everything is really good so far. Love Angela
By the way, Vietnamese is a tonal language, so I suspect Angela means tones, not accents. Tones are very different from accents on certain syllables, and they are much harder for Westerners to master.
I try not to go to a foreign country without speaking at least some of the native language(s). I consider it to be disrespectful, and so do natives usually (especially if you go to France and try to speak only English…heh). Although, I did go to Canada and I don’t speak a single word of Canadian.
Yes, Cranberry, Vietnamese is a tonal language and can be real tricky. Based on tone alone a word can have six different meanings. Based on tone and context (placement in a sentence) a simple three letter word can have up to 17 meanings. (according to our research in the language course I took.)
Vietnam and the surrounding area can be a very hot, sticky, and uncomfortable place. Read, watch, interact, and it can easily become a lovely interesting and unforgetable part of the world. I hope Angela can master enough of the language and addapt to the surroundings well enough to be able to then appreciate the many little things that made it a place I really liked a lot.
Rules of travel should include some simple linguistic ability (please, thankyou, excuse me, where can I . . .) and as much knowledge as practical about culture, history, religious practices, and legal system.
Mandarin Chinese runs (depending on which authority you choose) around 59 phonemes, with 4 expressed tones and 1 neutral tone.
Sounds confusing, but when you consider each word is just one syllable, and there are no words changed by gender or tense, that makes it easier.
But wait. There are gender and time modifiers that go before, in the middle, or at the end of the sentence depending on subject or context. Plus the jumble of “counting” words.
Um… Would someone please explain to me why I am studying Mandarin again? Of course I should be happy I’m not studying Cantonese or Vietnamese, with something like 7 and 9 tones respectively. But then a linguist told me that Russian is more difficult to learn than Vietnamese.
Russian is wicked hard, I’ve been studying it for 7 years now, and I wouldn’t dream of calling myself fluent. The big thing with Russian is cases, where a word has a different ending depending on whether it is the subject, direct object, object of a preposition, etc. There are six cases, and vestiges of a seventh in some contexts. The verbs are very little fun either, though once you get the hang of them, you can be quite precise with your meaning using them. Finnish though, has 16 cases. That would be nightmarish.
German, Russian, Latin, Greek, they all have case systems. Most Indo-European languages do or did (including English).
English used to have a case system, and part of it can still be seen sometimes in its pronouns: “I like him” We would not say “Me like he” because those pronouns still have case. English has all but lost its case system, as have the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, etc).
The fun (or horrible, depending your opinion) thing about having a case system is that you can fudge around with word order much more easily. It makes writing poetry much easier (in my opinion) than in a language like English where word order is pretty much set in stone (i.e., we couldn’t say “That dog on the floor water drank,” but in some languages that would be fine and completely understandable.)
One thing that might (or might not) make Russian difficult (besides case) is the fact that it is written with the Cryllic alphabet, whereas Vietnames uses a heavily modified version of the Latin alphabet. If you only read English, Spanish, or French, Vietnamese might look a lot less intimidating than Russian, but when it comes to grammar and vocabulary, Russian would be a million times easier because it falls within the Indo-European family of languages and has lots and lots of cognates and similar syntax, whereas Vietnamese is in a whole 'nother language family all together.
Which reminds me…last week I gave a workshop on poetry to a bunch of psychologists. It occurs to me that modern poetry is now just about impossible to define. If you settle on a definition of a poem, I can show you one that violates that definition.
William Carlos Williams is supposed to have said that a poem is “a machine, large or small, made of words.” That’s a good one, but I’ve now seen a poem that consisted mostly of punctuation marks. It was BS, but there it was in a fine journal anyway.
Drifting ever more off topic, but I think poetry is all but dead in modern America, for the reasons you outlined. There was a time when educated people quoted modern poets both to show erudition and to illustrate points. Now no-one does that with modern poetry, and very few do it with American poetry of any era. You just can’t quote William Carlos Williams and have anyone but a handful of fans know what you are talking about, and it is hard to illustrate anything of timeless significance with his stuff. At least guys like Dana Goia are trying to write good poetry, but he doesn’t succeed terribly often, and very, very few even know his name. When you list great poets, people think Tennyson, Whitman, Blake, etc. Nobody is going to say Angelou in the same breath and be taken seriously.
I have to say that I think you’re dead right about this. Increasingly, the poetry publishing business has been about poets publishing for each other. I don’t know how much of it is the increasing inaccessibility of modern poetry, or the declining attention span of readers, or what.
