Some Things, Wot Make a Post

[akirlu]

One of our junior-most faculty came into the office this morning to tell me that she had been laughing out loud on the bus to work while reading my minutes of the previous month's faculty meeting. It's always gratifying when someone notices. Most especially when it's my very favoritest of they junior faculty, which is a very hard won laurel, given what a charming, amiable, pleasant, and interesting bunch we currently have among the juniors. It gives a person hope for the future, it does. And today I made someone laugh out loud. That is a thing.

Also today, I noticed a thing about my native language for the first time. So, is it weird, or just culturally revealing, that Swedish has two completely different words that translate into English as "worse"? Yeah, I know värre and sämre are used in somewhat different contexts, but really, how many ways do you really need to be able to say that things are worse, especially when you only have one way to say they're "better"? Upbeat folks, my people.

And speaking of upbeat, today I also gave my first oral presentation of the quarter in my Mandarin class. It was on educational inequality and child poverty among ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. Yeah, it's possible I got a little too ambitious in my choice of topic. But I can tell you what the child poverty rate for Filipino immigrants in Hong Kong is. In Mandarin. And With PowerPoint, because we were strongly encouraged to use slides. I don't do PowerPoint. *ptui* *hairball*. And because for me there is no such thing as the final draft of anything, just the most recent before the deadline, naturally I went off script winging it at a couple of points. That did not go entirely well. But it is over. And hey, given the near fluent, been-to-China young things in my class, I may well be Cao 老师's worst Third Year Mandarin student, but I still am a Third Year Mandarin student, so that's still something.

And I trotted down to the student union to get in on the last day of on-campus flu vaccinations for the season so I don't have to remember to go in to the doctor or queue up at the pharmacy or whatever. Must see if there's a way to self-report flu shots to my medical group's web page, though, so the flu shot reminder goes away. On the plus side, the line for getting a shot was short and quick. On the minus(?) side, the vaccination clinic had been popular enough that they had run out of Starbucks cards. I signed up on the list for them to e-mail me one. Not sure how that will work. And of course I hadn't been thinking about immunizations when I got dressed this morning, and had thoughtlessly put on a long-sleeved merino mock turtle. Suboptimal for accessing a shoulder for the jab, at least in a public ballroom with various folks of all genders and sexes wandering about. The nurse advised me to pull aside the collar as the better choice.

"But don't do it until I'm ready," she said. "We don't like to have people strangling themselves."

"Yeah, I said, "That would kind of defeat the purpose. Dead people don't catch flu."

"We should make that our new slogan."

But no new pictures taken today -- it was gray and sullen all day, and the weekend windstorm blew off many of the pretty leaves. Also, Chinese ate my brain. Luckily I took a metric buttload of pictures last week when there was sun. I'm still in pursuit of a really good photo of how wonderful the view from my office windows is in October, and have failed for another year, but here's a placeholder until I get it right.

Comments

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

So can you expand on the different usages of värre and sämre? (Never studied Swedish.)

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I am so impressed that you gave a speech with PowerPoint in Mandarin.

My one accomplishment in tonight's class was to go the entire hour and a half without saying, "um" or "uh" when speaking Swedish. Small goals, we haz them.

I've used sämre, but never värre.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Swedish is something I have only studied formally in very small doses -- a quarter here and there, decades apart -- so I can't always articulate underlying mechanisms even when I know them instinctively. So, in this case, Google is our friend. this entry at The Local has a good summary (though there's a bit of a wind-up getting there). Basically, värre is used when applied to things that are regarded as bad in themselves. The best they can be is bad, then worse, and finally worst. Diseases and disasters are the examples used. Conversely, sämre comes into play when the subject being modified is something that can be either good or bad, such as the weather.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess you've only talked about things that can be either good or bad, then, and not anything that's bad in itself. Which is probably a good thing, on the whole, which means it can only get sämre.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

My view is certainly a part of why I took my job. I like to say, I get it in lieu of money. Which is still a pretty good deal most of the year, since there are lots of people in my job who make the same money without the view. And at certain times of year, it is a fantastic deal, and totally worth every penny of a private sector income.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I didn't recognize värre as cognate with "worse" but when we get to the superlative värst the connection becomes obvious.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

You remind me of the time at work when the LPN administering the flu shot went into the ladies room with me because I was wearing a close fitted long sleeve top. I've been dilatory about getting it this year so it just went on the list of errands today.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's even trickier with färre for "fewer", because that is the closest the two get in modern languages. In Swedish the progression goes: få, färre, fåtaligast.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

That is gorgeous!

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I had no idea you spoke Swedish! I studied Norwegian at UCLA for about four years. My Norwegian is pretty good for talking about everyday subjects, though I'm quite out of practice. For me, it's amazing how I can listen to Swedish with great difficulty. When the conversation turns into Norwegian, I feel, "Aaaah, that's better" as it eases into focus.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Swedish is my native language, English my second. Funnily enough, I studied Swedish at UCLA just for the heck of it for a quarter or two while I was there. I find Norwegian pretty comprehensible with attention; it's Danish that is completely opaque to me. I don't come from far enough south, I guess.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thank you kindly. The real thing is even better, tho.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they're holding back on revealing the true, bleak Swedish outlook. Although, I don't know, four years of lessons, I think we know what we're in for. Our practice sentences are often hilariously depressing.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

If this picture is not "a really good picture" it will certainly do until a really good picture comes along.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Heh. Thank you kindly. From you, I take that as high praise.

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are absolutely right about Danish. The funny thing is that I actually had a conversation with an older Danish woman in the Copenhagen airport. True, I didn't understand half of what she said. But the conversation was basic enough that I could fill in the gaps with guesswork. I think we talked about our children or something like that.

I mentioned to my husband that I had made sort of a lengthy statement at the dinner table of the Swedish family that was hosting our son, (and whose son had stayed with us.) I felt like I had gotten blank stares from them when I was done. My husband pointed out that maybe I sounded to them like I was speaking hill billy language, in other words, extremely rustic and illiterate. I granted, maybe he was right!

When were you at UCLA? I was there from 1972 - 1976. I guess I'm dating myself here! My instructor was Mary Kay Norseng. By the final year, they combined all of our classes into one. That is Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, though I don't remember any Danes. At that point, it became just a little too opaque to me, too. Previously, however, I had been quite comfortable walking into class unaware of a test and acing it anyway.

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I should also mention that in my family of five, My husband and two of my sons nibotand emo_snal have all spent several years studying Swedish. nibotdid a year abroad (from Berkeley) studying at Lund. emo_snalspent a year in Kristinehamn staying with the family whose son had stayed a year with us. Our third son tried a year of Spanish and declared it too hard; from then on he concentrated on Canadian, eh?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I don't know if I knew that emo_snal had studied Swedish. He's among the people I don't quite remember how I started following on LJ, though I think it had in part to do with the photos. That's very cool. And I am particularly amused to learn he spent a year in Kristinehamn, since that's only about oh, 25 miles west of my hometown of Karlskoga. It's been years and years since I went out to Kristinehamn on a visit to Sweden, but my aunt's ex-inlaws have a summer cottage near there on the edge of Vänern, so I've visited it as a child.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I started UCLA in 1980, was there for two years, and then had a sea change in my life and dropped out to go be an art major at Long Beach State instead. That sort of petered out after a while too, but I kept taking art classes at the local city college and eventually went back to UCLA in 1990 to finish up a BA in philosophy. I had a lot of fellow feeling for the protagonist of Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand, whose main ambition was to remain an undergraduate for the rest of his life... I think my stint with Swedish would have been in 1991 or so and my instructors were a graduate student in the Scandinavian Languages department, and a visiting lecturer from Sweden, Dag somebody whose last name I disremember, but who was full of interesting linguistic and historical information about Swedish. Among other things, he explained pretty clearly why Swedish vowels are so very challenging for Americans -- almost all American English vowels are near-schwa vowels, produced in the middle of the mouth and requiring very little facial movement. By contrast, almost all Swedish vowels are produced at the extreme corners of the mouth -- high front, low front, high back, or low back of the mouth. You have to move your face a lot to produce the sounds correctly and that will feel uncomfortable and unnatural to an American speaker.