One video on the Youtube channel Lisa and Josh shows another American couple walking the Caminho Português/Camino Portugués from Porto in Portugal to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I had seen their previous video, in which they walked part of the Camino Francés (I can’t remember where they started; possibly from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port) so I was familiar with the Spanish expression Buen camino! In the Portuguese video, their interactions with other walkers and the locals are sprinkled with Bom caminho!
A sign in one town lists the greeting/wish in eight languages:
BO CAMINO BUEN CAMINO BOM CAMINHO GOOD WAY GUTEN WEG BON CHEMIN BUON CAMMINO DOBREJ DROGI
Clearly, five of these are related (Galician, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, with French being the most different), two more are related (English and German), and one is very different (Polish, apparently).
Yesterday we were exploring a part of the city we don’t usually go to, and I spotted a building with a sign
Obviously it’s the Consulate-General of the Czech Republic in Sydney, if the Czech and European Union flags on the roof didn’t show that already. Most countries have their embassy in Canberra, a consulate-general in Sydney and/or Melbourne and maybe a consulate or representative in Brisbane, Adelaide or Perth.
Czech, a Slavic language, has borrowed general, consulate and republic from Latin just as English has (maybe via French). Wikipedia reports that Czech vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German. Sydney is just Sydney, like Praha is Prague (the French spelling).
The other major Slavic languages are similar: Generálny konzulát Slovenskej republiky v Sydney Konsulat Generalny Rzeczpospolita polska w Sydney Генеральное консульство Российской Республики в Сиднее – general’noye konsul’stvo rossiyskoy respubliki v Sidneye
This is complicated by the official and common names of names of countries. The Czech Republic has the lesser-used alternative Czechia, the Slovak Republic is more commonly called Slovakia, Poland is officially the Republic of Poland and the Russian Republic is actually the Russian Federation (Российская Федерация – Rossijskaja Federacija) (more Latin).
Among Germanic-speaking countries, we have the Federal Republic of Germany, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and a sprinkling of monarchies, which are obviously going to have different styles of names.
Also Indo-European is Greek, which translates as Γενικό Προξενείο της Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας στο Σίδνεϊ – Genikó Proxeneío tis Ellinikís Dimokratías sto Sídneï.
Non-Indo-Europeanly, Finnish translates as Suomen tasavallan pääkonsulaatti Sydneyssä and Hungarian as a Magyar Köztársaság sydney-i főkonzulátusa, so consulate has travelled to those languages as well.
I’ll leave to you to compare and contrast all of those, which, apart from the original Czech, are as translated by Google. The actual name of the actual consulates may be less or more different, and I’m not going to get started on non-European languages. I’m also not going to link to all those countries and languages.
A car rental company has a series of video advertisements showing two Australian employees brainstorming marketing ideas with their manager, who for no apparent reason is German. He approves their ideas by saying “Das ist good”, which text then appears on the screen with the company’s logo. A German would naturally say “Das ist gut”, but maybe the company or its advertising agency didn’t want anyone getting confused with English gut (/gʌt/), which is completely unrelated and irrelevant (not that any English speaker would ever say “That is gut” (except maybe when talking about vintage tennis racket strings or reproductions of historical musical instruments). (Compare and contrast good < > gut and bad < > schlecht.)
PS May 22: On later viewings of the same ad I realised he says “Das Ist good”.
Youtube randomly suggested a video of the complete piano music of Josef Bohuslav Foerster. The sets of pieces have titles like Dreaming, Roses of Remembrance and Evening Music, and the five individual pieces of the Dreaming set have the tempo directions Highly supported, Waltz time, Walking with a motorcycle, Graceful allegretto and Allegro.
Other pieces are Riding a motorcycle, Former motorcycle, Going but not too much, Allegro gracious, Impetuous allegro, Long and gloomy, Gracious cheerleader, Awesome and Joke.
I suspected an autotranslation somewhere, then spotted at the bottom of the long list of pieces ‘See original (Translated by Google)’. Aha …
Take some time to figure what the originals are or might be. Some are easier than others.
The Australian parents’ website Kidspot posted an article about a Reddit post about a ‘bizarre mistake’ on a sign on a display at a Big W store (the headline says ‘stores’, the story says ‘a store’).
A few days ago, the front page of Wikipedia included a recent Hong Kong movie titled Love Lies. I can think of at least four meanings: 1) noun modifier + head noun – the mistruths about love; 2a) head noun + verb – love is in a reclining position; 2b) head noun + verb – love tells mistruths; 3) imperative verb + object – cherish telling mistruths
This title might be 1, 2b or 3. The ambiguity is almost certainly deliberate. The Chinese title is 我談的那場戀愛, which Google translates as The love I had and Bing as The love I talked about.
I also found a Korean movie titled Love, Lies, which can only be two nouns. The Korean title 해어화 is obscure: Google translates it as seaweed, Bing as Hareization (whatever that means) and Papago as a sea bass (I know one meaning of 해 is sea), and my wife doesn’t recognise it at all. The hanja is 解語花, which Google transliterates as Jieyuhua, and Bing and Papago translate as interpretive flowers and translated flower. The trailer includes the word (at about 0:13) and subtitles it as flowers that understand. Even with that context, my wife still doesn’t recognise it.
After further research, 해어화 is not in the printed dictionary we have, or Wiktionary. Wiktionary does have 解語花, which it explains as “a flower that is able to speak; (figurative) beautiful, understanding woman”, and adds Korean 해어화 and Japanese 解語の花.
Maybe the word was always rare, or maybe it was previously more common and fell from use when that world passed away. In either case, why title a movie with it?
The young women in the movie are gisaeng, who provided a number of “entertainment” functions in the Goryeo and Joseon eras. I couldn’t help thinking about 기생충 gi-saeng-chung, the Korean word for parasite and the Korean title of the movie Parasite. The two words are unrelated.
One of the choirs I sing in is rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, which is all in Russian. Except it isn’t – it’s his All-night Vigil, which is all in Church Slavonic. But many people say and write “Vespers” and “Russian”. Among the Russian Orthodox Church’s services are Vespers (evening), Matins (early morning) and The First Hour (sunrise), and Rachmaninoff sets texts from all three. Church Slavonic is the traditional liturgical language of the Orthodox Churches, roughly equivalent to Latin for the Roman Catholic Church, but later, it clearly developed after Slavic-speaking people adopted Christianity.
Despite the liturgical texts, this is almost always sung in concerts, usually in churches but sometimes in concert halls. Wikipedia notes that a complete liturgical performance was given in 2022.
Various parts of tourist Korean can be found in the names of some of the 768 stations on the Seoul metro network. Most of these words are also useful in other contexts, and some have other meanings. In this post: 동 (dong, east), 서 (seo, west), 남 (nam, south), 북 (buk, north), 중 (jung, centre/middle).
Dong (동) is usually either east or neighbourhood/suburb. Tourists are most likely to encounter the former in Dongdaemun, Dongdaemun History & Culture Park, Dongguk University and Dongmyo (and further afield in Dongdaegu), and the latter in Myeongdong and Mokdong. In these examples, the east meaning comes first in the name, and the neighbourhood/suburb meaning last, but there are exceptions to both, more of which in a moment. The different meanings can be seen in the Chinese characters which appear alongside Japanese katakana in small type under the hangeul in large type and English in medium type on station walls and pillars. (I very rarely looked at the Chinese and Japanese, and tourists/temporary residents don’t have to. My Korean-born wife says she never did, and she speaks basic Chinese and learned Chinese characters at school.) The character for the east meaning is 東 and for the neighbourhood/suburb meaning is 洞.
Among the other stations, notable are Gangdong, Gangdong-gu Office and Seodongtan, in which the east meaning is second, and Namdong-gu Office, in which the neighbourhood/suburb meaning is followed by the local government area 구 (gu), approximately equivalent to a suburban city council in Australia. Gangdong is literally river-east, not east-river: compare the stylish Gangnam and the less famous and presumably less-stylish Gangseo and Gangbuk (which isn’t directly opposite Gangnam, but further north, near Bukhansan). Seodongtan is literally west east-tan (Dongtan is a station on the Suseo high-speed railway, SRT and GTX-A lines, none of which is counted as ‘metro’ ).
My research found that a third Chinese character lies behind two other stations’ names. Dongam and Dongjak share the character 銅, which apparently means copper, which I don’t know the significance of. Distinguishable in hangeul and Chinese characters but not in English is Dongnimmun or 독립문, which taken syllable-by-syllable would be dog-rib-mun, but undergoes two stages of assimilation.
Elsewhere, dong is also part of 동생 (dong-saeng, younger brother or sister). Apparently this literally means born together, so there’s a longer story there.
One of the choirs I sing in has just performed Rossini’s Stabat Mater. The words, a meditation on the sorrow of Saint Mary at the Crucifixion, are in Latin and date from the 13th century. They start:
Stabat mater dolorósa juxta Crucem lacrimósa, dum pendébat Fílius.
A close translation is:
The sorrowful mother was standing beside the Cross weeping, while the Son was hanging.
A poetic translation is:
At the Cross her station keeping, Stood the mournful Mother weeping, Close to Jesus to the last.
The edition we used shows the Latin text in full on the first preliminary page. On the second page is an English text titled Tribulation, which is not a translation or even loose paraphrase of the text, but a completely different text about personal repentance and forgiveness. It starts:
Lord most holy! Lord most mighty! Righteous ever are Thy judgments Hear and save us, for Thy mercies’ sake.
In my previous post, I wrote that “[The pronunciation of words like doon, dune and June] is all confused by etymology and spelling. These words come from different languages with different original and current spellings” and also about the obviously rare pronunciation of lute as /lju:t/.
Lute “probably” comes from Arabic العود, al-ʿoud, “the wood”, which also provides the Middle-Eastern oud. Wikipedia’s article gives the pronunciation /lju:t/ first, citing the Oxford English Dictionary, then /lu:t/ second. Wiktionary gives: (UK,Canada) /l(j)uːt/ (General American) /luːt/ (Wales, Canada) /lɪu̯t/
I asked my Facebook friends (which includes a number of highly musical and/or linguistic people) about this, and they said:
1) I have never heard it said LYOOT /ljut/ and if I were to hear it that way it would seem pretentious and affected to my ear (Aus) (another Australian agreed) 2) As 100% American English Professor we pronounce it “loot” (USA) 3) loot (Aus) 4) lyoot (if I am speaking carefully, otherwise loot) (NZ, long-term Aus resident). I asked “Did you hear ‘lyoot’ from other people, or told by someone?” He replied “I think it was a luthier on TV”. 5) ‘tiny guitar’ (Aus)
Quite coincidentally, Youtube showed me a video of a performance of Italian music on the “liuto”. I searched for ‘words for lute in different languages’ and Google found this page, which I can’t vouch for. Most spellings suggest a monophthong, but there are for example Dutch luit (/lœy̯t/) and Welsh liwt (see the Welsh pronunciation of the English word above). Japanese has リュートryūto and Korean 류트 ryuteu. Several languages have their own word, probably originally first applied to a traditional instrument and then to the Middle-Eastern/European one.
My recommendation, for what it’s worth: unless otherwise specified, say /lu:t/. I think that we can accept that it’s the standard pronunciation. Yes, that makes it sound like ‘loot’, but many words sound the same.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 