Sunday 3 December 2017

Chariot or Flying Carpet or Well-Trained Dragon or ...

Every morning I silence the alarm on my iPhone and fall out of bed. After making coffee and doing a quick scan of the latest emails, I shut the computer and begin the day's dictionary searches.

This is because, as mentioned at work, I am reading a Polish translation of The Magician's Nephew. On Sundays I turn to a new chapter, read the whole thing, and write down the words I don't understand. Then I divide the list into six mini-lists. Every subsequent day I tackle a mini-list and choose 5-10 words to memorise.

I am now on Chapter 6, "Uncle Andrew Begins to Have Troubles," which is my English translation of Mr. Polkowski's Polish translation of "The Beginning of Uncle Andrew's Troubles."

To repeat what I said at work, it is very interesting to read a childhood favourite as an adult and in another language. You see all kinds of things you didn't see before. I've already pondered Uncle Andrew's willingness to use children in scientific experiments; now I'm contemplating Uncle Andrew's ability to convince himself, through use of alcohol and dressing his best, that a beautiful witch is in love with him. C.S. Lewis said this was a very grown-up type of silliness. Why, yes.

But another thing I have noticed is how vividly Jadis (the beautiful witch) speaks, and how what she says in Polish sticks in my memory. This is a bit unfortunate, as Jadis does not say things that you can say in polite conversation at Polish weddings, e.g. "SŁUGO!" ("You minion!").

Jadis, the last survivor of a civil war she waged against her "przeklęta" ("accursed") sister, describes the river flowing with blood, and herself pouring out the blood of her soldiers like water ("Potwór," mutters Polly, which means "monster", so is also useless for weddings), and what she said to her sister before wiping out the joint (i.e. "Tak, zwycięstwo, tylko że nie twoje!")

In Chapter 5, Jadis was awe-inspiring, but now in Chapter 6, she is rather funny. I think this is partly because instead of speaking English in Uncle Andrew's cozy London row house, she is speaking Polish. And just as some Poles first arrive in the United Kingdom with antiquated ideas of what the United Kingdom is like, so does Jadis.

"Procure for me at once a chariot or a flying carpet or a well-trained dragon, or whatever is usual for royal and noble persons in your land," says the Queen of Charn to Uncle Andrew.

When I first I heard these exact words at my mother's knee, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Jadis would expect such transportation in Victorian London, which she knew not at all. But after reading Polish Jadis demand, "Postaraj się natychmiast o rydwan (chariot) lub latający dywan (flying carpet) albo o dobrze wytresowanego smoka (well-trained dragon)....," I giggled.

Possibly my adult giggles are unfair to Jadis as my GREAT DREAM is to ride over vast acres of Polish countryside in a horse-drawn sleigh until I am terribly cold and then am returned to the warmth of a long, low country house called a dwór where I am given delicious clear red soup to drink and crunchy krokiety to munch. So far this has NEVER HAPPENED--partly because I am never in Poland in the dead of winter, but also partly because my own Polish friends never seem to have horses. They are utterly mechanised and given a choice would probably purchase snowmobiles, which is not the same thing at all.

Where was I?

Right, Chapter 6. Well,  I must say that a chapter a week is very slow going, but it is much better for my brains than just plowing through a book without looking up all the unknown words, let alone memorising the most useful of them. I read both Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in Polish in that skimming fashion, and although this might not have been totally useless, it certainly did not improve my speaking skills. However,  working so hard on Chapters 1 through 5 of The Magician's Nephew has certainly increased my oral vocabulary. At any rate, I say "w każdym razie" instead of "at any rate", which I tended to say an awful lot.

While reading something about language acquisition this week, I started to think about using all the knowledge about learning languages I have acquired--after six years of messing around with Polish--to begin learning Urdu. After reading up on Urdu, however, I decided that 2018 would not be the year. One thing I had forgotten was how difficult the first year of learning a non-Romance language is , and I was reminded when I looked at the Urdu alphabet.

The Urdu alphabet has "up to 58 letters", which is a depressing thought, and Urdu is written from right to left, which is not so depressing as it is unnerving.  While reading about this, I was suddenly reminded of my first foray into Polish, which was pronouncing "Przepraszam" ("Pardon me").  Now I can say prze and przy and szcz and styczeń without a problem, but it took a lot of painful and embarrassing work.

Do I have time for Urdu? No, I do not. And when I mentioned this to Benedict Ambrose, he cried out in dismay against the whole idea. He thinks learning Urdu is entirely impractical and was not swayed by the news that those who master Urdu can easily understand Hindi, too. Of course, he also thought Polish was terribly impractical, and yet who was it who explained to his battered Polish roommate in the neurology ward that the police needed to keep his clothing for evidence? Me. So there.

11 comments:

  1. One of my favourite characters in The Magician's Nephew is the young parlourmaid. She is utterly delighted by the bizarre events in the Ketterley household that break up her normally very dull day of answering the door and doing housework, and her delight is somehow infectious.

    Clio

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  2. I believe I get to her this Sunday!

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  3. Have you tried Anki for vocabulary memorisation? It's freely downloadable, like a quantum Leitner. I think I have the same ponderous, old fashioned approach to language learning as you and can highly reccommend it.

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    1. I HAVE, but the trouble is that when you don't do it every day, the number of cards you have to go through are astronomical. And also the more cards you make, the more astronomical it gets. So for now I have returned to a modified Leitner box. "Fluent Forever" recommends no-English cards with pictures on one side and the Target Language on the other, but I have discovered that I remember words better than pictures and, in fact, that this is typical for older learners. It's The Young who should have flashcards with pictures.

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  4. Something I've always remembered about C.S. Lewis is that he was not, in his youth, enthusiastic about novels, not because he thought them trashy but because he disliked the way that a novel was said to have a 'happy ending' if a major male and female character got married, even if everyone else was left in the lurch. I don't think he imaged his parlourmaid with an eye to proving a point, but I do think he *did* prove a point in creating her: that while some people might be trembling with distress at the sound of the doorbell, others might be thinking 'Well, *who* can that be now?' with a certain frisson of excitement...

    Clio

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    1. He does make a point in "The Horse and His Boy" that two characters marry but not each other. Perhaps it's to make up for the two characters who DO marry each other. My mother once made a memorable remark about how none of the Friends of Narnia were married. However, I suspect the only characters old enough to have married by the outbreak of TLB were Digory and Polly. Of course, there is nothing in the Canon (if I remember correctly) that claims D & P never married.

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    2. Oh, I am wrong. Digory wasn't married, says CSL in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

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  5. Dear Dorothy,

    To make the thought of learning Urdu less daunting should you attempt it: though it is "upto" 58 characters and written from right to left, it really takes only about 3 months to get the script since it is perfectly phonetic. You clearly have an amazing head for languages and will certainly find it no trouble at all once you get over the first few days of weirdness. The trouble will be correlating the script to sounds without knowing what the words mean or how they sound. Its a beautiful language though, so maybe you want to slot it for sometime in the next 20 years. I'm teaching myself Spanish and French on the Natural Language and SRS system on this hope :)

    Happy reading, I really enjoy your posts on language acquisition.I hope you will write about it in a more formal sense, you are a talented teacher.
    Yours,
    A.

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    1. Thank you! 269,000 people in England/Wales reported knowing Urdu on the 2011 census, and I am inspired by its resemblance to Hindi, so I'd rather try it than Punjabi (spoken by 221, 000 people in England/Wales in 2011). Gujarati-speakers in England/Wales number 213,000. But really I should look up the Scottish census.

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    2. Aha! The most commonly spoken Asian language in Scotland in 2016 was Urdu by quite a margin over Punjabi. https://www.statista.com/statistics/331886/most-common-non-english-languages-spoken-in-scottish-schools/

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  6. If you get Urdu, Punjabi will not be hard, they share a large vocabulary derived from Persian. My grandfather (who is now 95) and grew up in the North West Frontier Provinces, now on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan, speaks Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Persian and Saraiki, so you see you get one, the others all soon follow :) There is a great poetic, literary and dramatic tradition in Urdu, as also a "pulp", short story and thriller genre, so you will have fun if you decide to take the plunge.

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