Learning Korean 7A: an update

In a recent post, I talked about how difficult the sentences in my Korean textbook are getting. Today, I went over some of them with my teacher, and it was, as usual, humbling.

This was the sentence I discussed in the previous post:

"There are plenty of people who are well-acquainted with proofreading work, but there are never enough who can do document editing well as well."

And this was my Korean translation:

교정하기에 밝는 사람이 많지만 문서를 잘 편집할 수 있는 사람 전혀 충부 안 해요.

And here it is with my errors marked:

교정하기에 밝은 사람이 많지만 문서를 잘 편집할 수 있는 사람은 전혀 안 충분 안 해요. (But that last word would be better translated as 충분하지않아요 instead of the I-guess-it's-clunkier version with 안.)

The first error was in treating 밝다 (be well acquainted) as a verb, instead of an adjective. Then, I should have used the 은/는 topic marker on the second 사람 to mean something like "but these other people, in contrast." And then there was my handling of the negated form of 충분하다.

All in all, I translated that sentence... passably. Of course, it's just one sentence among millions. There's always more to say, more to practice, more to learn, more to improve. (Just ask Sisyphus.)

Ad Watch: why we take off and don't flap

Let's enjoy another Delta Airlines ad narrated by Donald Sutherland.

This one's called "Take Off: Why We Go," and I think they're trolling us now. 

In case you don't want to waste thirty seconds of your time watching an ad on purpose, here's what we got: on top of blurry footage of bands and blotches of color rushing by, Donald Sutherland steadfastly refuses to flap. It's almost heroic.

What’s happening here is not normal; it’s extraordinary.
Two hundred and nineTy-one people, three hundred and fifTy tons,
one hundred and eighTy-six miles per hour. 

(Blah blah blah. A bunch of heavy breathing about pioneers and covered wagons and the wonderfulness of people who sit on planes.) 

EighTy thousand people now, on the ground, in the air, engines on.
Because there is no stop in us, or you. Only go.

In case you're new here, those capital Ts are my way of representing what we (yes, all of us) call aspirated Ts. This is the sound you hear at the beginning of a word like Tuesday. It's very different from the sound we spell with a t, but which we (well, we Americans) pronounce in a word like water. That sound—the one in water—is a flap, and it's what we would expect to hear in the word eighty. But not in a Delta ad. No, sir and/or madam.

Because that would fail to... It would fail to, well... I don't know why they can't do that, but they can't. Like many others, they seem to believe that flapping sends the Wrong Signal. It indicates a lack of precision and maybe even a lack of being able to fly airplanes. It's all very strange.  

Addendum (9/28/15): I didn't include this in the partial transcript of the ad above, but there's another peculiar thing in here, beyond Donald Sutherland's infuriating refusal to flap. At the 0:20 mark:

You're not sure what's on the other side to that time after you land...

If you're anything like me, you're thinking, "Wha?!" On the other side... to something? Did the completely standard English phrase "the other side of something" change when we weren't looking? (But we're always looking!) I simply don't believe that anyone else anywhere has ever said something like, "The remote? Oh, it's on the other side to the couch." Why are advertisements so weird?

The Danger of Dictionaries Part II: The More Dangering

I've talked about the limitations and absurdity of dictionaries before, and I'm back with a new bunch of examples. These all come from a word-finding app called Spellix. When you find a word in the game, you are (sometimes) shown its definition. Now, I have no idea why the game does this. It's of no use as far as gameplay goes. The definitions have nothing to do with scoring, and as they show up after you enter words, all I can think is that the game designers wanted to throw in a little "educational" component.

Which... okay. Fine. The world can always use more "educational," um... components. But the definitions are so strange as to be doubly useless. (But they did provide an additional dimension of entertainment, so that's something.) Here, take a look and see what I mean.

Each of these is such a perfect bauble of superfluous gibberish that it's almost impressive. Why do these things exist? Why did the game designers spend the time (and—oh god—the money?) to produce these "definitions"? They are of no utility for anything. Where they aren't tautologous (SICKS as people who are sick and SING as, basically, to sing), they are almost sort of accurate, in a well-meaning but fevered way (see CAT and BEEPS). And then you come to OGRES, the definition of which—as they say—isn't even wrong. Everything about this is gloriously, breathtakingly unlike anything of any value. Even if ogre had something to do with numbers, who on earth would describe any number as the sum of 7 and 1? And GEN as an informal term for information? Wh—? I mean—? Why did—?

Learning Korean 8: More on KDS

In the same vein as Learning Korean 7, I give you this brief disquisition on Korean Discouragement Syndrome (popularly known as KDS). I have been slowly crawling into Chapter 5, and I'm finding more thorny constructions, this time involving gerunds and nominalized sentences. For instance:

금년 봄이 이렇게 추운 걸 믿을 수 없어.

Keumnyeon bomi iroke chu-un geol mideul su eopseo.

Literally, phrase-by-phrase, this is:

This year's spring—like this—being cold—believe can't. Or, "I can't believe this spring is so cold."

Trying to follow along in my textbook is a matter of deliberate concentration as I pick my way through the sentence. It's only nine words (and nowhere near as complex as sentences get in this chapter), but I might as well be deciphering cuneiform. The basic idea behind this and other sentences in the chapter is simple enough. But when I try to actually do these sentences, I run into a brick wall. And it's only through careful work that I can crack them. How different from truly understanding a language, where it's rarely a matter of anything more than hearing and understanding. The two—the input and the output—seem almost identical, we travel from one to the other so fast.

I can translate simple (written) sentences (simple subjects, objects, conjunctions, and verbs—and maybe a relative clause thrown in here and there), pretty quickly, often almost as fast as I can read them. But anything more complex is a real slog. Which is why I'm still suffering from KDS.

Learning Korean 7: Painstaking and Unnatural

I've been at this Korean business—with varying degrees of diligence—for two years now. (My first lesson was two years and one week ago today!) And trying to do some homework I was struck by how difficult and not-at-all-automatic some of this still is. How far removed it is from my experience with my native language. I guess that's part of what it means to have a native language—that it's original, central, essential. It's not that I never have to stop and think about what I want to say and the best way to say it in English. It's that I usually have to do that in Korean. For me, Korean is still mostly happening at the level of deliberate, analytical behavior, not reflexive, fluent response. So, translating this sentence in my textbook:

"There are plenty of people who are well-acquainted with proofreading work, but there are never enough who can do document editing well as well."

Here's the translation I came up with:

교정하기에 밝는 사람이 많지만 문서를 잘 편집할 수 있는 사람 전혀 충부 안 해요.

Apart from the fact that I had to look up a bunch of vocabulary, and that I wasn't sure how to handle that "as well," and that I'm not confident about how I translated "never," and that I don't know whether I translated the gerund "proofreading" properly—so, apart from the details—I had to approach this with such painstaking attention that it left me feeling exhausted and discouraged. And it makes it hard to understand how anyone can produce or understand a sentence like this easily and with the kind of... thoughtlessness native speakers can indulge in. I feel like I need a calculator just to get to the end of a sentence like this. It's like solving a math problem.

Learning Korean 6: Relative Clauses and Insults

"You big hair-having, ugly shirt-wearing, too loud gum-chewing son of a bitch."

This is exactly how Korean relative clauses work. By which I mean, this is the word order of relative clauses in Korean. So every time I form relative clauses, first I have to translate what I want to say into that kind of swaggering throw-down, which makes relative clauses in Korean a joy.

"The man who chews his food too loud and wears ugly shirts" becomes, basically, "the too-loud-food-chewing, ugly-shirt-wearing man," and that's just cool.

음식을 너무 고성으로 씹는 추한 셔츠를 입는 남자

Actually, that might not be quite right, but my point stands. And if anyone reads this one day and wants to make something of it, they're nothing but a too-much-Korean-knowing, bad-tennis-playing, wet-paint-sitting fool.

Throwing Your Pencil Across the Room

You know those learn-to-draw tutorials? The blogs, the books, the videos? I have the feeling people have tried for centuries to teach people to draw using these kinds of simple, step-by-step techniques. And I assume that for centuries people have been throwing their pencils across the room in disgust when they realize that it's just not that simple. You can break it down into the smallest steps, but eventually you'll reach the point where you'll need to be able to... draw.

The reason I bring all this up is because I've realized something similar goes on with learn-to-speak-a-foreign-language tutorials. They can teach you a bunch of vocabulary. They can teach you some grammar. They can teach you some useful constructions and colorful idioms. But eventually you reach the point where you need to be able to understand and create sentences of your own. And that's where it all breaks down. I mean, if all you want to be able to do is repeat a script of set phrases—a kind of simulacrum of a conversation—you should be fine. But if you want to do more than just repeat something (just like wanting to do more than draw a face by following a formula that starts with an oval, then a curving line across to indicate where the eyes should go), you will soon want to throw your linguistic pencil across the room.

Still, I'm a sucker for the well-meaning tutorials, the apps, the answers-to-all-your-prayers websites.

Word Watch: conserve

Yesterday (9/01/15), I was listening to NPR (infinite geyser of weird pronunciations!), and I heard a correspondent pronounce the word conserve as "conzerve." Repeatedly. It was in a story about the sage grouse and the Endangered Species Act, but that's probably not relevant. Because I'm filled with curiosity about Our World®, I started thinking about this. Was it just a tic, or can we say something more interesting about it?

Conserve is typically (as in, virtually always or maybe actually always) pronounced "conserve." On the surface, this word looks like it's composed of two morphemes (meaningful components): con + serve. After all, English is packed with words that start with con- (contain, conceal, control, confer, and on and on). Let's leave con- and conserve alone for a minute and look at other prefixes that appear to combine with other morphemes to make words in a similar way.

For instance, re-, pre-, and de-. Notice first that these prefixes can have easily understood, "transparent" meanings. re- (can) mean something like again or back, pre- (can) mean before, and de- (can) mean something like negate or rescind. Look what happens, though, when those prefixes are combined with certain one-syllable words starting with s:

re + side = reside
re + serve = reserve
re + sign = resign
re + sort = resort

pre + side = preside
pre + serve = preserve
(Why is there no presign or presort? Beats me.)

de + serve = deserve
de + sign = design
(Deside? Desort? Nope, I guess not.)

In each of these words, the verb that begins with an s-sound when the word stands alone begins with a z-sound when combined with these prefixes. Just like that strange "conzerve" above, right? Not so fast!

Reside, reserve, resign, and resort aren't always pronounced as "rezide," "rezerve," "rezign," and "rezort." When the prefix re- has its "transparent" meaning—that is, when the meaning of the whole word is an obvious, "mathematical" combination of the prefix and the verb—those verbs are pronounced with s-sounds, just like they are when the words stand alone as independent words.

That is, when reside means "to side something again" (or "to install siding again") it's pronounced "re+side" (with an s). When reserve means "to serve again" it's pronounced "re+serve" (with an s). When resign means "to sign again" it's pronounced "re+sign" (with an s). And when resort means "to sort again" it's pronounce "re+sort" (with an s). But in what sense does re- mean again in reside ("to live in")? Now that you mention it, in what sense does side mean side in that word? Where is the sense of signing in resign ("to step down from a position")? Where is the sense of serving in reserve ("to set aside")? They're not there. Those words only look like they're combinations of meaningful parts.

So! It's only when the prefix+verb combo has a meaning that can't be derived by looking at the meanings of its parts that the s-verbs are pronounced with z's. In other words, it's only where there's a distinction between a-word-made-by-combining-parts and a-word-that-only-looks-like-it's-a-combination-of-meaningful-parts that we can sometimes see those s-verbs pronounced with z's.

Let's return to "conzerve." It's clear to me that that word came about on the analogy of what happens to s-verbs when they're combined with prefixes like re-, pre-, and de-. But notice that con- (lacking as it does an easily understood, "transparent" meaning) doesn't lend itself to those tricky pairs (like pre+side vs preside, "to side something ahead of time" vs. "to supervise or lead proceedings"). There's no possible confusion between "conserve" and "conzerve," because con- doesn't really mean anything on its own. Notice also what kinds of things con- typically gets stuck onto. It often only appears to combine with verbs: contain, conceal, control, confer. Tain isn't an independent word. Nor are ceal, trol, and fer. Nor are many of the "words" con-'s cousin com- "attaches" to. Look at compel, compare, combine, compute. con-/com- just doesn't work the same way as re-, pre-, and de-.

And that's why "conzerve" is weird.

Update (9/11/15): I just heard (on NPR, naturally) "rezources." This appears to follow the story I tell above (except "resources" is a noun, so who knows?), where we expect to see a distinction between "resources" and "rezources." Even though the verb resource (meaning something other than "to source something again") would be pronounced "rezource," I still think the noun "rezource" is bizarre.

Lyrics Watch: "Proud Mary"

Breaking news! (Breaking news that's more than 40 years old.) Tina Turner doesn't understand her own signature song!

I'm talking about "Proud Mary," of course, written by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival and released in late 1968 or early '69.

Ike & Tina Turner first started performing the song in 1970, and their "nice and rough" version eventually came to define Tina Turner.

You know how it goes:

Left a good job in the city,
Workin' for the man every night and day.
But I never lost one minute of sleeping'
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been.

Only, that's not how Tina Turner usually sings it. She usually says something like, "But I never lost one minute of sleeping—I was worrying about the way things might have been." Which is not only the opposite of the intended meaning; it's also kind of meaningless. (If you don't lose any sleep, it means you're not troubled. You're not worrying. "I never lost sleep; I was worrying about something" is a contradiction.)

I've been thinking about this for a long, long time. How can she have sung this song so many times without singing it the right way? Is that the answer—that she has sung it so many times she's stopped paying attention? She can certainly be forgiven for adopting a less-than-fresh attitude to the number she must have performed a thousand times. (And we all know what she means. We don't really listen too closely, either.) But! Her strange wording goes back to the 70s. She's been singing the song like this from the beginning! (See 1:30.)

But then in this 1982 performance she does it right! (See 3:05.)

Beyoncé got it wrong in her rendition at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Tina Turner in 2005. Which I guess isn't surprising; she was emulating Tina Turner, after all. (See 1:25.)

Am I missing something? Does it actually make sense the way she (usually) sings it, and I just can't see it?