let's talk about language

Tater or Tarter, you know what it is, people never call themselves what others call them, like the Germans call themselves Deustch, and the Mexicans call us Norteamericanos, and the French (who by the way invented tartar sauce, very interesting article about that on wiki) probably call both countries by another name of their own devising. It would probably be hard to figure out what the Tartars call themselves because they use the Cyrillic alphabet.

Here’s an interesting thing I read about in a book on languages. When we are first born we can pronounce all the phenomes, which are the various sounds, consonants I think, that make up spoken language. There are as many of these as there are ways to move your tongue and every language is made up of a subset of them, some of which are both in Russian and English, and some of which are only in one of the languages. I am assuming that Tartar is close to whatever the Russians call them, and the Tartars probably call themselves something different.

Anyway, according to that book, which now that I am explaining it, sounds a little fishy to me, but I’ll go on with it, all those strange sounds babies make are all the phenomes. But the babies are always listening to what goes on around them and trying to imitate it, so the phenomes they hear are reinforced, and the ones they never hear are extinguished.

When my friend was here we went to Millennium Park, where we were almost immediately accosted by some Chinese guy who could barely speak English wanting to know the name of this park. I thought this might be a problem because of the L’s. The Chinese don’t have the consonants for L or R in their languages, so they use some other consonant they have in their language for both L and R, and this is why when they say L we think they are saying R, and vice-versa.

But anyway it turned out later that he knew the name of Millennium Park, could be that he just wanted to know how it was pronounced, because English, alone among nations, unfortunately because it is becoming the world language, sometimes pronounces things the way they are spelled and sometimes pronounces them entirely different. Most likely he just wanted to practice his English, and seeing that we were seated on a bench and less likely to flee than somebody walking around, he pounced on us.

Which was fine by us, because it is interesting to talk to someone from another country, regular citizen to regular citizen, as opposed to official delegation to official delegation. We talked about odd things, tattoos and grocery stores, and trains. I am a bit of a train buff, and I love those bullet trains that everybody but America has, so I asked him about those and he gave their speed in kilometers, so I am only vaguely aware of how fast they go since we again are the only country in the world (I think there may be one other, probably some place like Albania) that refuses to use the metric system. I did explain to him that our trains are crappy, which was a word he didn’t know, but he had one of those app things on his super phone and when I told him how it was spelled, he was able to type it into his phone and get the Chinese translation. He smiled and laughed a little when he got the translation, so maybe I have added something to international understanding.

We were kind of wondering how he felt about his government, because we Americans all know that they have this terrible authoritarian government, and surely free from the the eavesdroppers of his own country he could speak freely, but instead he seemed to like his government.

Well that was something I wanted to get to when I originally when I started this Ukraine thread, about how governments of two countries can be at odds with each other, but the people of both countries are both pretty nice people, or as nice as people get anyway, and would get along just fine if they were neighbors, but at the same time they both hate each other’s government. Kind of a paradox.

Remember how I was saying politicians had all these different things about what to do about Syria and Iraq, but everybody agreed that one thing we shouldn’t do is put boots on the ground? And now without even a stutter, we have boots on the ground. I don’t think the Republicans have had time to come up with a response to this, but I am pretty sure that it will be that we should have more boots on the ground than Obama has put there.