dead romans

Question: have you ever given any thought to where the names of our months come from?

I hope the answer is "no", because if you have considered this, you've probably concluded that the time you spent was sadly wasted. Or at least, that's my feeling about it. 

Hmmm ... perhaps I should throw in a disclaimer here. What I'm about to say definitely doesn't score highly on the 'most important issues facing our world today' scale. In fact it's been barred from that scale, and invited to participate instead in the slightly less prestigious 2012 "Why the Hell would anyone give this so much as a passing thought?" online poll, viewable at www.crackpot-blogger.com.

But y'know, I'm like that. I'll give a passing thought to almost anything – and then write a couple of thousand words about it!

Anyway ... what I wanted to say is that, for some reason, I find the long list of Roman gods and Emperors on our calendar a little dull and unsatisfying, when you compare them to what else is out there. 

Not a biggie, I know. I just think we could do better. 

Heck, even naming all the months after your relatives would be an improvement ... which, as it happens, is what the now-deceased former president of Turkmenistan did. He renamed the month of April Gorbansoltan after his mother, decreeing at the same time that this should also be the new word for "bread". Exactly why he wanted Turkmeni citizens to put his mum into a clay oven for a few hours, then slap her on a bench and fill her with the contents of a doner kebab, is one of the great mysteries the president took with him to his grave. An enigmatic bunch, these Central Asian leaders ...

But y'know, while that may have been silly, at least it was audacious and kinda original.

Our system does have an upside, though, in that it's shared among quite a number of languages. The calendar as we know it predominates both in Western Europe and in her former colonial territories, as far away as Papua New Guinea (and Australia of course). This means twelve less things to remember if you're learning, say, French (which has Janvier, Fevrier, Mars etc ...), German (Januar, Februar and so on ...), Norwegian (exactly the same as German), Romanian (Ianuarie, Februarie, Martie ...), or almost any other continental tongue. Even Turkish has echoes of the system, with Mart, Mayis and Ağustos all making appearances.

But in case you're thinking this is mainly a Germanic and Roman/Latin affair – with a bit of spillage into surrounding areas and occupied territories – let's indulge in a little tangent to consider the pleasantly weird Magyar (Hungarian) language for a moment.

Magyar is one of Europe's great linguistic oddities, and therefore well worth considering for its own sake. For a start, if you go looking for its closest relatives, you won't find them anywhere on da Continent. In fact, they're thousands of kms away in the autonomous Khanti-Mansy district of western Siberia. Pretty impressively obscure, no? And for a language nerd like me, this sort of isolation – coupled with Magyar's utter dissimilarity to every single one of its neighbours – makes it rather interesting.

So let's continue ... if only to humour me, your slightly creepy but eternally grateful virtual host.

Up for it? Ok, cool.

Magyar was originally written using runes, but now Roman letters are used, augmented by lots of comical squiggly hats. (They're more correctly known as 'diacritics', but I prefer my term.) It features some admirably weird syntax, which you can see in some of its question/answer structures. For example, if a doctor visits you at your house in Budapest, and after the consultation you want to find out if s/he's still there, you don't ask "Has the doctor gone?", or "Doctor went out?". Instead you ask "Away went the doctor?". And you don't answer "Yes"; you answer "Away."*

Let's consider that in dialogue form:

"Away went the doctor?"
"Away, away."

It's almost poetry, isn't it?

And this is pretty typical of how Magyar sounds to the foreigner.

Anyone who's tried to learn it also knows about the highly agglutinative structure** of Magyar, which allows for the construction of wonderfully outlandish words like megszentségteleníthetetlensígeskedései (meaning sth like "people doing things which make it nearly impossible for something to be desecrated"). But that's just one tiny aspect of a rich lexicon, which contains two words for "red", a single word for "the monotonous nature of the learning process", four levels of politeness with different verb choices for each level (something normally associated with Far Eastern languages), a fossilised smorgasbord of old Turkic loan words connected with horseriding, and an endless selection of kinship terms like Ősnagyapa, which translates rather brilliantly as "great great great great great great great great great great grandfather".

And yet, amongst all of this lavish lexical content, there's no verb "to have". You literally can't say "I have a toy squid" in Magyar. To grasp the oddness of that, monitor one hour of pub conversation between yourself and some friends, and then delete all the parts of that conversation which would've been impossible if the word "have" wasn't available to English-speakers. You'll probably find that what you're left with is quite fragmentary ... just little shards of disjointed chat, with an uncomfortable lack of intelligibility or resolution.    

So yeah ... the point (insofar as I have one) is that while staying within the bounds of Europe, Magyar is one of the most 'foreign' languages you can run into. Pretty much everything about it is organised differently to what we've come to expect of European languages. Which leads me to the question: what are their months called? Surely they've got some weird and wonderful system, haven't they?

Errrrr ... well, no. They have január, február, március, április and so on, like everyone else.

To me, this is a tiny bit disappointing.

If you delve back into history a bit, you find that Magyar used to have some wild names for months, like "Boldog Asszony hava" ("Month of the Bountiful Queen", a reference to a prominent goddess in Hungarian pagan myths, who women used to pray to during childbirth). But they ditched all of that some time ago, in favour of the same old Dead Gods and Emperors that we all know. Good news for the aspiring Euro-polyglot, of course, but a shame for anyone who enjoys the 'surprise factor' of learning a foreign language.

Luckily, though, there are some European cultures that have gone their own way in labelling their calendars. And thank the (non-Roman) gods that they have! I mean, there are simply loads of things to name your months after, if you can be bothered to show some imagination.

A case in point is Finnish (which has so many cool features that I just can't stop using it as an example). The Finns call March maaliskuu, roughly translated as "earthy month". It got its name because, during maaliskuu, you get the first glimpses of earth as it begins to emerge from underneath the winter snows. Similarly, February is helmikuu, meaning "month of pearls", because the little ice droplets that form on trees in February are reminiscent of tiny pearls.

Great, isn't it?

October, on the other hand, is rather less romantically known as lokakuu, "the month of mud". Oh well ... can't win them all.

Over in the Slavic world, meanwhile, I stumbled onto a great example a few years ago. Soon after I first came to Ukraine, I was surprised to discover that the Ukrainian names for months bore no relation at all to the Russian ones, and that it used an entirely different system.

Why the surprise? Well, because the two languages are intimately related. Lots of 'basic terms' are almost the same, which makes those particular Ukrainian words easy to learn if you already know the Russian ones.

By way of example, here are the numbers one to six:

Russian       Ukrainian
a-din               o-den
dva                  dva
tri                     tre
ch'-tә-ri           cho-te-ri
pyet'                 pet'
shest'                shist'

... see what I mean?**** 

I expected that a comparative list of months would look like this as well – i.e. almost the same, with a few odd vowel substitutions. And since Russian is a member of the Dead Gods and Emperors Club (with Janvar, Fevral, Mart etc.), I was therefore ready to meet another variation on the same old theme ... until I encountered the Ukrainian word for December, which is "Hruden" (груден).

That just threw me completely.

Not only was I surprised by its dissimilarity to Russian декябрь (Dekyabr, "December"), but its resemblance to another Russian term was ... erm, how can I put this? Striking? Yeah, that's probably the word I'm looking for.

See, Ukrainian груден looks an awful lot like an adverbial or plural form of the Russian word грудь (pronounced "grud"), which means "breast". Could that really be a month name? I mean, could the Ukrainian calendar really end with "a month of breasts"? And if so, exactly how would that be celebrated?

Unfortunately, it wasn't so. If you look up "Ukrainian month names" on the internet, you'll find something entirely non-breast-related. Груден is in fact listed as "the month of frozen clods" – a reference to the fact that the earth beneath your feet is all frozen in December.

And I had such high hopes for my "month of breasts" :-( 

Oh well ...

Anyway, I've since found out three things that are relevant to this train of thought. First, other Ukrainian months are also named after natural phenomena (so now, for example, we're in Berezn*****, "the month of birch trees", and this will soon give way to Kviten, "the month of flowering").

Secondly, Ukrainian shares this system with a number of other Slavic languages such as Czech and Serbo-Croat (though in Croat, March is Ožujak, "the lying month" – I'd love to know where that came from!).

In fact the only reason I didn't realise this sooner is because the first Slavic language I had contact with was Russian, which turns out to be the oddball of the family in many respects. When you go south and west of Russia, you find that its linguistic cousins are more adventurous with their calendars. In fact, there's even a month in Czech (Zari = September) which has been etymologically traced to the time of year when male deer most want to ...

*ahem*

(trying to find a polite way to express it)

... let's say when they want to, er, "get intimate with the lady-folk".

Don't know 'bout you, but for me, naming a month "The deer would really like to have copious amounts of sex now" is way, way, WAY more interesting than "Month of Julius, The Misshapen Despotic Tyrant Who Currently Collects Our Taxes".  

Apologies to any Romanophiles who may be reading.
(You know who you are!)

Oh, and I almost forgot the third thing. Apparently, I'm far from being the first person in Ukraine to notice the hruden = russian tits thing. And by "far", I mean "centuries distant". I'm told there have been silly jokes about it here since time immemorial. 

So there you go.

Of course, as soon as you head outside the Eurosphere, the whole calendar-naming thing opens up even more. On one end of the scale, you've got languages like Korean and Mongolian, whose month names literally mean "First Month", "Second Month" and so on (though Mongolians also have individual names for years, and the year which began on Feb 19 1996 is called "Fire Mouse". I do love that one! Seems to me there's a post-modern super hero there, just crying out to be created.)

Then there are lots of names that relate fairly directly to seasonal processes and food sources, like Chinese "Meiyue" (plum ripens) and "Layue" (preserved meat month – some time around December).

On yet another ridiculous tangent, what I find most entertaining about "Layue" is that the "yue" part seems to mean "month". If that's right, and if you assume the other part of the word has the same meaning outside of this context (which of course you often can't), it means that "la" is "preserved meat" in Chinese. I really hope that's true! It just tickles me to think of Chinese people raising an eyebrow the first time they hear a Western pop song in which the singer suddenly starts going "Preserved meat-preserved meat-preserved meat-preserved meat" at the end.

Sorry. Bad brain.

Finally, there are the month names which seem totally obscure to the Westerner. They're probably my favourites.

A nice example comes from Sesotho (the majority language of Lesotho in Southern Africa). They have some really cool month names, all of which are perfectly explicable in the context of the culture. They're related to nature and food supply, like a lot of the Slavic ones ... and yet at first glance, through a foreigner's eyes, they're just utterly weird. For example, in Lesotho February is known as Hlakola, which means "wipe it off". (Wtf?). April, meanwhile, is called Mmesa, meaning the "the roaster", and Motsheanong (May) is a contraction of a phrase that translates as "one who laughs at birds".

You have to love that, for sheer out-of-the-blueness.

Still, as I said, all of these can be explained. The laughing at birds thing is a reference to sorghum grain (something like millet), which is an important part of the Sotho people's diet. The grain becomes so hard and stony in May that birds, try as they might, can't eat it. So in the people's imagination, their sorghum plants are sitting out there in the fields for a whole month going "HAAA-haaa ... can't get me now, you dumbass birds!"

Hlakola (Feb) is also sorghum-related, because that's the time when sorghum plants produce a kind of sticky covering that needs to be wiped off if you want them to grow to their full potential. And the "roaster" thing for April ... well, if I say "sorghum", you can probably guess.

Lastly, going back to Chinese, perhaps one of the most fabulous month names I've come across is "Liangyue", which falls some time around October. It literally translates as "good month", and that's it. Nothing fancy – just good. And why? Well, to tell you the truth I haven't the faintest idea.

I suspect there are more than a few wizened historians kicking around who could enlighten us about the origins of "Liangyue", and no doubt it would be quite interesting to hear. And yet, personally I'd rather remain ignorant on this one ... it's much more fun just to try and guess! I mean, imagine you're a high-ranking member of a Chinese imperial dynasty, way back in antiquity. At some point, you have such an utterly fabulous time in October that you decide to promote the idea of calling it "good month" from that point onwards. The obvious question then becomes: what did you do for a whole month that was so damn good?

Whatever the truth may be, it probably isn't as entertaining (or possibly as debauched) as what's going through your mind right now. So I say let's leave that one up to the imagination :-)

Speaking of imagination, though, the original point of this rather silly entry was my being not-so-impressed with the 'Dead Gods and Emperors' system. It falls far short of what we could have on our calendar if we really put our minds to it. And for this reason, I'm handing it over to you. Your task: come up with new month names, and post them here along with brief explanations of each.

Actually I'm inclined to make this something like a competition ... so to fill my end of the bargain, let me offer some prizes. The person who comes up with the best month names will get a fabulous sample of genuine Ukrainian currency (generally unavailable in the outside world), featuring the faces of people who have made a real difference, often in subtle defiance of a nearby superpower.

You'll also get some genuine Ukrainian konfetki, which taste exactly like the chocolates your nan used to offer you out of weirdly-sculpted green glass bowls when you were a kid. Believe me, they're worth competing for!

So, how's about it then? Care to venture a more interesting calendrical system than the one we've got now? Go on ... I'm sure
you can! 

Meanwhile, take care and live well )))

Anthony.


* I got this from the following website, which contains an interesting article called "Hungarian: A Strange Cake on The Menu":  http://www.filolog.com/languageStrangeCake.html

** Agglutination means sticking affixes on a word to modify or add to its meaning. We do it in English, of course, as in 'lick -- licking -- lickable'. But highly agglutinative languages do it more. To increase the complexity of a message, instead of adding more words you add more affixes, creating sort of 'mega-words'. For example, in English we can take a word like "bring" and use it to build the phrase "I bring them", by adding a subject and an object. In Euskara***, which has loads more agglutination, you'd start with "kar" (the root of the verb "to bring"), add "da" at the front (to show present tense), then put "tza" (plural object) after the root, and finish off with "-t" (subject - in this case standing in for "I"). So you'd end up with one word, "dakartzat", containing a whole phrase within it. That's agglutination for ya. Pretty intense, isn't it?

*** The language of the Basque peoples in southern France and Northern Spain. It's another one of those oddities ... no-one is quite sure where it came from. There was a wonderful theory that it was related to the language of the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido. That would've made the ancient languages of northern Spain and northern Japan close cousins, with no other related languages in the huge geographical area lying between them. How intriguing that would have been! Unfortunately, the theory has been more or less disproven. Shame.

**** These transliterations aren't 100% accurate, but they're as good as I can make them, given the huge differences between Slavic and English vowel sounds.

***** One source I looked at claimed that the Czech "brezen" (March) – for which the most obvious translation is "birch trees" – is actually a reference to getting pregnant. So I guess there are a lot of Sagittarians and Capricorns in the Czech Republic ;-)

bribery vs the 'rule of law'

Ok, let's take a break from alphabets for a while. I want to tell you about a few things that have happened recently, starting with my brief run-in with a member of Odessa's notorious miltsia.

First, a bit of context. When western commentators turn their eyes to the former USSR (especially to the Central Asian republics) they often talk about the bribery and the 'culture of corruption'. Both of these things are undeniable problems, but it really irritates me when westerners complain about them – particularly the bribery part. They usually have little or no idea of what they're talking about, but even when they do, I still get annoyed. I hope these examples will help explain why.

A couple of months ago I visited my friend Scott in Odessa, on Ukraine's southern Black Sea Coast. It was a very entertaining weekend, at the end of which I had to get on a train for the overnight journey to Lviv, up in the country's northwest.

I arrived at the station in Odessa with a bit of spare time and a pre-bought ticket. I had no idea of whether or not I'd be allowed to smoke on-board the train (regulations change all the time in Ukraine), so I lit up on the station steps and began savouring what I thought may well be my last cigarette for the evening.

As I was doing this, a militsia man came through the main doors and saw me. He pointed to an expertly concealed 'No Smoking' sign, then motioned for me to come inside the station with him. At that moment my heart sank; I could see a potential nightmare unfolding, with me standing in a 'militsia post' (the equivalent of a railway police station), trying to justify myself while my train pulled out of the platform.

As we marched through the grand main hall, the officer started ranting about how I'd need to go to court. Then he changed his tune, telling me instead that I'd have to pay a 300 Euro on-the-spot fine.

When we came to the post, and Mr Militsia told his chief what had happened. The chief winced as if to say "Oh dear ... you've landed yourself in a lot of trouble, sonny boy". They both sensed that I was a foreigner, and they checked my passport to find out what flavour I was, also waving it under a scanner that was probably connected to nothing in particular. Then they chatted a bit more about the seriousness of my situation, while I fretted about inflated fines and missed trains.

At that point, my militsia guy decided to move to the next stage of the process, saying words to this effect: "Look, this is a serious matter, but if you come behind the station with me now, you can give me 100 hryvnia (about $12) and I can make the problem disappear".

So now let me ask you: what would you have done in my situation? Would you have risked going behind the station into a darkened area, with a guy who carries a baton and who knows you're not from 'round here? Or would you have refused, risking a missed train and a larger fine? 

Before you answer, consider three things: first, in former Soviet countries, being a foreigner equates in many people's minds to being vastly wealthy compared to the locals, whether it's actually true or not (and it quite often isn't). This can of course make you, the traveller, a bit of a target for scams etc.. Second, Odessa's militsia used to have a fierce reputation as one of the worst in any part of the former USSR, and at least an echo of that reputation still remains. 

Lastly, bear in mind that the salaries received by most militsia put them firmly below the poverty line, which of course is the reason why so many of them ask for bribes in the first place. It is, in fact, more or less expected that they'll ask, given the pitifully small pay-packets they take home in return for doing a rather dangerous job.

So now, taking all that into account ... what would you have done? 

Let me tell you what I did: conscious of the risk involved, I nonetheless went with him behind the station. There inevitably followed a very tense moment of standing in the dark with an armed man, and with no-one else around to see what he might do next. And then, an exchange of money. 

The next thing that happened isn't new for me, but every time I experience it, I find myself a little stunned. Our serious business concluded, all trace of authoritarian severity disappeared from the militsia guy's face, and he became my friend.

A second-and-a-half later, having examined my ticket then grabbed hold of my wheelie bag, my new protector was racing towards my platform, making noises of concern about me missing the train. Actually we had almost ten minutes to go, so I tried to explain that I needed to stop and buy some food for the journey. He refused to allow it, worried that I might not have time to find my carriage before the train set off. I was too surprised to take charge of the situation, so I just followed him meekly.

We parted with a friendly "Goodbye and good luck!" – rather a different farewell to what these western commentators who write about 'bribe culture' would lead you to expect.

Something similar happened to me once in Lviv, when I was walking home after a big night and was stopped by four policemen in a car. They made quite a show of checking my passport with grave expressions on their faces. In order to be allowed to go, they told me, I'd need to hand over some cash. (They said the money was "for coffee", but we all understood the implication.) I willingly paid the small sum they asked for, surprised and thankful that they hadn't asked for more. And just like my militsia guy in Odessa, they immediately became concerned for my welfare, debating amongst themselves which would be the safest route for me to take to my flat. It was friendly smiles and fatherly advice all around.

I must admit, I find this behaviour utterly fascinating. There's nothing like it in English-speaking cultures. I never come away feeling annoyed – rather it's a mixture of relief that things didn't get more serious, and a sense of "Wow, that was just SO weird!"

So that's my militsia story. The next thing I want to tell you about may seem totally unconnected and irrelevant, but if you'll bear with me, I'll explain in a sec.

I study online at an Australian uni called the University of New England (UNE). I receive most of my course materials via the uni's website, and submit nearly all my work electronically. At the end of every semester, UNE pays someone (usually the British Council) to set up an exam room for me in whatever city I happen to be in at the time. It's a great system ... and I didn't realise how rare it was, and hence how lucky I am to have chosen this particular uni, until recently.

Some time ago I decided that I wanted to study Russian in an academic context, which unfortunately isn't offered at UNE. I looked around for other options and discovered that Macquarie University in Sydney does offer it, so I applied to study with them. I started the extraordinarily long and complex application process in June 2011, having read on the internet that the deadline was in September.

When September rolled around, I was just about ready to submit everything, but the university said "No. Since you're an overseas external student, you should wait until December". I queried this, because I'd read on their website that applying any later would mean that I had to pay an extra fee. But the helpful souls at Macquarie assured me that the late fee wouldn't apply to me.

Later in the process, the question of payment came up. I was initially told that I couldn't apply for government assistance because I was living abroad, and I would have to pay in advance for my studies. The fee was absurdly high, but I saw no other option, and I really wanted to study Russian. So I agreed.

More time passed, and I submitted the application on December 1st as instructed. Macquarie then suddenly informed me that, if I could get the right forms, I could receive government assistance after all. This would mean that the government would pay my fees now, and I would pay the government back later in instalments. It was the opposite of what Macquarie had told me much earlier, but still, it was amazing news!

Or at least, it was until I understood the timing.

See, after letting me believe for almost half a year that I was going to pay in advance, Macquarie had explained the government assistance option too late. The forms I needed couldn't be filled in online, because they're the old ones that make an automatic carbon copy of everything you write. They had to be posted from Australia. No-one at the uni could (or would) tell me where I could get them, and in any case, there wasn't time to post them to Kazakhstan and back.

Suddenly, I was asked to pay $3,000 in course fees right now. I objected, because I felt it was the uni's inefficiency that had put me in this situation. And then, super hero masks, capes and externally visible underpants in place, Macquarie University's student services swooped magnificently down from the heavens to 'save' me from my desperate circumstances.

Remember the late fee I mentioned above ... the one which the uni had advised not to worry about? Well, now they said that I should give them the fee (somewhere between $150 and $200), and that if I paid them this money, they would make the larger $3,000 problem disappear.

I have no idea how they can do that – I mean rules are rules and laws are laws, right? Well, apparently not. Or rather, when there are so many rules and laws in a society, it seems that they can often be made to cancel each other out. Or to guarantee that someone along the line gets money from you that they don't deserve.

In any case, it was clear: if I gave Macquarie $150, I would delay the bigger $3,000 payment until much later. In actual fact, though, this was a deception. The possibility of delaying payment had been present all along, and the only amount of money in question was the $150.

In short, I'd been scammed.

In the end, I didn't pay them the money, because I found out about something else they hadn't told me. I mentioned above that my university can set up examination centres for their students living abroad. Macquarie uni, despite offering 'online external' units with a special code ("X"), doesn't do this. And do you know how I found that out? I asked.

Had I not asked, Macquarie would have happily taken my $150 and committed me to a $3,000 debt to the Australian government. No-one at the uni was going to refuse my money, regardless of the fact that I was clearly not in a position to pass a Macquarie exam and thereby successfully complete a Macquarie course. No-one.

At this point I would dearly like to write the much, much worse things that are going through my head right now, but I'll content myself (at least for the time being) with this.

BASTARDS! SNEAKY, DISHONEST, BUREAUCRATIC BASTARDS!!!

I hate them and I wish them ill.

Ok, so now let me try and explain why these two experiences are inhabiting the same page of my blog.

To do this, I want to look at the 'anatomy' of bribes. Keep in mind that I'm not an expert in this area, 'cause I really haven't paid such a vast number of bribes in my time. So maybe my perception of how they work is accurate, or maybe not. Also, I'm only talknng about private individuals who are bribed, not businesses or their owners. With that in mind ... let's go!


THE ANATOMY OF A BRIBE

Step 1: Identify (or create) a problem.

This usually relates to a transgression of rules. A classic example is the militsia who used to patrol Red Square in Moscow. I never saw this happen, but they would apparently stop foreigners and do a 'passport check'. The check would reveal some kind of visa problem (usually one of the militsia men's own making), and the tourist would suddenly find him or herself accused of being in Russia illegally – something guaranteed to frighten pretty much any Westerner.


Step 2: Explain the consequences.

The problem identified or created must have tangible consequences, and it is now up to the bribe-taker to explain these. In the Red Square case, it could be something quite extreme, like prison or deportation or whatever. In many cases, though, it's an extremely large fine or fee. It must be large enough to set off alarm bells in the victim's head, because they know they're unable to pay on the spot, and therefore they begin to fear the harsher fate which awaits them.


Step 3: Let your target stew in his/her own fear for a while.

A bribe won't work, it seems, if the solution to the problem is offered too quickly. The victim needs time to think over the horrible consequences of being 'caught', and all the inconveniences (or worse) that are going to result. This will, presumably, increase the effectiveness of step four, as the victim's thoughts become more gloomy and/or desperate.


Step 4: Offer yourself as a saviour.

Once your victim has had some time to consider all the catastrophic implications of what has just occurred, it's time to offer the hand of mercy. You simply point out that a small fee, paid directly and in cash, will make it worth your while to help them avoid the larger, much more serious problem. By this time, the person you're dealing with is only too happy to pay, knowing that it's a much better deal than the alternative. So money changes hands, and the victim is duly 'saved'.

And that's it*.

Before I go any further, I want to say that there are many kinds of bribes, and I'm sure that not all of them fit this model. Still, it does seem to be a common pattern.

Let's now examine this pattern with reference to the Odessa militsia and Macquarie University.

Step 1: The Problem

Militsia says        "Smoking here is illegal"
Macquarie says:  "Oh dear, you've applied to study externally?"
                                    (sounding surprised, though they've had this
                                     information for three months)
                                    "Hmmm ... that's a big problem."

Step 2: The Terrible Consequences

Militsia says         "You're going to court" / "You need to pay a fine"
Macquarie says:  "We need $3,000 from you right now."

Step 3: The stew

Militsia says          "Wait here while I speak to my chief."
Macquarie says:    Nothing. (Doesn't answer emails for a week, to
                                     prolong the agony.)

Step 4: Enter Your Saviour

Militsia says         "Come out the back with me, bring some cash, and 
                                       I'll make the problem go away."
Macquarie says:  "Hand us the $150 fee which we previously said was
                                      unnecessary, and we'll make the problem go
                                      away".

See any similarities here?

Skeptics may say "Oh come on, Anthony, this really isn't the same thing at all". True, there are some differences ... the biggest one being where your bribe money goes. In the Odessa case, it goes into the pocket of a hugely underpaid worker, who probably spends it on a good bottle of vodka to share with his buddies, or (if he's a nice guy) buys a little present for his wife/girlfriend/mistress which he otherwise couldn't afford.

In the Macquarie case, meanwhile, your money goes into the bank account of a self-perpetuating bureacracy. None of the employees of said bureacracy get richer from this – only the organisation itself. So if you believe that it's ok to extort money for the benefit of an organisation, but not for the benefit of an individual, then you'll favour the Macquarie approach. If, on the other hand, you'd prefer your money to go to a real person than to a vast bureacracy, you might feel more comfortable and less offended going behind the railway station than dealing with academic apparatchiks who scam you on behalf of their employer.

A second difference is that bribery usually works. As I said, the moment your militsia guy gets his little payoff, he not only stops hassling you but actually tries to help you. Compare that to Macquarie, who were prepared to take my money and still screw me assways by enrolling me in expensive subjects which I had no hope of passing, because I was prohibited from taking an exam.

Lastly, there's the 'lawfulness' issue. The Australian government's treatment of international students who study in Australia is a fitting example of this. Every time a student changes any detail of their plans in Australia – for example, moving from one kind of English course to another, when they realise that they need more specific language skills to help them achieve the aims of their über-expensive stay abroad – the government slugs them with a previously unmentioned fee. And it's a big one.***

If you define "extortion" as "taking advantage of a person's relatively weak position in order to extract money from that person", then this is extortion, pure and simple. The thing is, though, unlike the 'under the table' stuff that goes on in the former USSR, this particular kind of exploitation has the backing of law. Buried deep in the pages of Australia's vast legislative corpus, there are plenty of obscure regulations that allow the authorities to suddenly demand an extra $2,000 of struggling students, or else kick them out of the country with a nasty stamp in their passport.

In light of all this, my question is as follows: does the fact that something is done in accordance with regulations automatically make it fairier or more morally upright? 

In my particular case, the question looks like this: Macquarie can suck money out of me behind a facade of legality, whereas my Ukrainian militsia man has to do it behind a railway station. Conclusion: Ukrainian institutions are 'corrupt', whereas Australian institutions are 'open and fair'. But is it really as simple as that, or is there something more insidious in the 'lawful' way of doing things?

I'd argue that, when you're suddenly and forcibly demanding that people hand over their money, the fact that you can wave a piece of paper at them and say "Sorry, but it's the law!" doesn't make it any less of a bastard act. In fact, I'd suggest that maybe governments in countries like Australia might consider being a little more honest about their objectives in future, and calling new pieces of legislation things like "The 2011 Bastard Act".

Just one opinion ... that's all :-)

Having said all of this, though, I do want to point out that there are certain kinds of bribery in the former USSR which I think are shocking, and worse than what I've described above. Anything that compromises people's safety would be an obvious example ... which is why I still find it appalling that you can buy a driver's license in Russia, Ukraine, KZ and so on.

More subtly, many university students in these countries (especially Ukraine) report that their lecturers set prices for giving certain grades. The reason for this is clear: namely that, apart from police and doctors, academics are among the most horribly underpaid people in the country.

(A brief aside: at my school in KZ, we had a receptionst who was a fully qualified doctor, but she earned more money answering phones than she would've done performing surgery, so she decided not to pursue a medical career. Even now, that astonishes me.)

Grade-buying is kind of an open secret, and it tarnishes everyone who attends the universities where it takes place, because obviously having a degree from one of these universities doesn't actually prove that you successfully passed any subjects. So this, I think, is quite a different case to my little run-ins with militsia guys, who just want to make a little extra for themselves or their families at the (minimal) expense of a silly foreigner.

One more thing: as most of you know, Yuliya and I recently had our first child, the handsome young Timur Antonovich Cook. I mention this because, when you go to a Ukrainian hospital to give birth, your visit is peppered with payoffs. Yuliya actually prepared a pile of money in different currencies and denominations before the visit, so that she could slip appropriate amounts to the main doctor, the midwife, the ward nurse, and all kinds of other people who played minor roles during her stay. Plus, any medication required during the procedure had to be hastily bought from the on-site pharmacy and paid for over the counter. You can even pay someone to carry your newborn baby to a waiting taxi at the end of it all!

This may seem bizarre to some readers – as indeed, it did to me – but the result is this: you top up the salaries of medical professionals who sorely need it, you get the Gold Standard service, and you end up paying far less than you would in a Western country. Medical care is so cheap here that no-one has medical insurance ... unless they're, y'know, the president or something.

(Quick example: I had root canal therapy in KZ last year, the quality of work was equivalent to what you'd receive in Australia, and it cost me about $100. And Yuliya thought that was expensive!)

Imagine that: a world in which your insurance company has no role whatsoever. It's a beautiful thought, isn't it?

But what, if anything, can we take away from all of this? Well, the first thing would be "Real friends don't enrol at universities who try to extort friends". I'm therefore asking the Australians who read this: unless you have no other option at all, please don't ever give Macquarie University a single cent of your money.

More broadly, I hope I've adequately explained to you why I get so cranky when I hear condemnation of bribery and corruption, whether it comes from here or from the West. It's not that there aren't problems with this system – there are lots, believe me! In some republics, corruption is a real albatros for the small business community, and bribery is so rife that it noticeably advantages the already-rich, while locking everyone else out of whatever opportunities exist for advancement. So the message is definitely not "Yay bribery!" .

On the other hand, since I'm not a small business, I see things mostly at the level of private individuals and their interaction with 'the state'. At this level, I don't like the oft-heard implication that these societies are somehow less moral than the ones where people are constantly extorted by organs of government and other organisations who have the blessing of law or regulation on their side. To my way of thinking, the less civil society is arguably the one in which your money disappears into the cogs of faceless bureacratic machines, not the one where it disappears into the pockets of regular working people with regular working-people's concerns. Do you see what I'm saying? Am I making any sense here?

Oh, and btw, one minor follow-up point: when you're dealing with 'legal' institutions, the sums are usually much greater. Last week I saw an official at a registry office here being 'bribed' with a box of chocolates. Try that trick at the Australian Tax Office and see how far you get!

So that's my two cents' worth.

Now ... off you go with your counter-arguments ...

:-)



* Btw, you may note a similarity here to marketing, which very often relies on identifying a problem, informing consumers about it, then telling those consumers that there's a product, a service or a political ideology that will solve the problem. If you did notice that, then all I can say is: we're clearly on the same wavelength, sib**


** I just invented the word "sib", because we already have "bro" for brother and "sis" for sister, so to me it seems logical that we should have a similar form for sibling :-)


*** Just wanted to point out that while most international students are reasonably well-off, they're certainly not all millionaires. Not every chinese student who lands in Sydney is an 'Asian Princess' with a gold credit card, and in many cases her family has staked years of hard-earned savings on her education abroad. The government fees she's hit with can equate to a few months' worth of her father's salary, or even more.

scriptacular #2

peter the potty-mouthed and those unruly abkhazians

I want to share a silly memory with you.

It was some time around the Millennium, and I was sitting in my living room in Summer Hill (a suburb of Sydney), watching a documentary. I don't remember the exact subject now – something related to WWII or Communism, I guess. But I clearly remember the presenter talking about the comings and goings of a certain Mr Jo Stalin.

Footage was shown of a steam locomotive which had the word "Stalin" written on the front in large Cyrillic letters. Apparently this was the Communist leader's state-of-the-art private train, cleverly decorated with his name so that when it passed by, assassins would know that the moment had come to detonate their explosives.

Most vividly, though, I remember thinking to myself that the Cyrillic letters looked just awesomely cool, and right then and there, I decided that I would learn how to read them.

A while later I bought a beginner's Russian book, and some time after that I attended an eight-lesson evening course. This was well before I knew that I was going to live in Russia or any other country where this knowledge might actually be useful. I had no reason at all to learn the language, except that I was curious – especially about the alphabet.

You don't learn much in eight lessons, of course, but afterwards I had at least a tenuous toe-hold. I'd mastered greetings and thanks, learned the names of some everyday objects, been acquainted with genders and cases (don't get me started about those!), memorised a few key phrases like "Do you know where ----- is?" and so on. Most importantly, though, I'd reached the stage where I could just about read and write Russian Cyrillic ... a fact which made me extremely happy )))

A bunch of years later, I still struggle to hold a conversation in Russian – it's a fearsomely difficult language to learn, and I haven't exactly had oceans of spare time in which to study it over the past few years. Plus, I'll admit that laziness has been a factor. However, regardless of all that, my love affair with Cyrillic script continues undiminished. Every time I write my shopping list or add an entry to my vocabulary notebook, I get a special kind of pleasure from forming these characters with my own hand. I'm not sure why exactly; it's just fun.

Maddeningly complicated though the Russian language may be, Cyrillic script itself is quite easy to learn if you already know Roman letters. Some of the characters are easily recognisable, and even with those that aren't, there's at least a kind of familiarity to their form and proportion, and in how they position themselves relative to a line. So in comparison to, say, the serpentine loops of Thai or the inscrutible calligraphic shapes of Arabic, they're not that challenging.

This wasn't always so, and for a lot of the modern-day similarities between Roman and Cyrillic writing, we have one man to thank: the six-foot-eight, hard-drinking, filthy joke-loving, wildly blaspheming and perpetually sleep-deprived Tsar Peter The Great. When not pulling his son across the floor by the hair, forcing guests to join him in week-long vodka marathons, or scouring Europe for people with interesting deformities who might be persuaded to join his court (Siamese Twins were his favourite), Peter somehow found time to embark on a massive program of modernisation in Russia. As part of this program, he decided that the medieval Cyrillic writing system should be dragged into the modern era. 

More about the irresistibly weird and wanton Peter in a sec; first let's have a look at two of the wild'n'funky alphabets that modern Cyrillic replaced. Why? Well, partly to get an idea of what you might be up against if you were forced to learn one of them ... but mostly just because they're pretty ;-)

You can see old versions of Cyrillic in relatively recent documents, but to get the full effect it's best to look at the language known as Old Church Slavonic (O.C.S.). It's the medieval ancestor of a bunch of Slavic languages like Russian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian and so on.

This alphabet is definitely learnable, but it presents a few challenges that modern Cyrillic doesn't. When used in written discourse it was full of weird ligatures (linking or fusing together two characters, often with unrecognisable results), the vertical balance is quite unusual in places, and taken all together, it looks a lot more like a medieval script than a modern one. Which it, y'know, is.

Incidentally, most people who use Cyrillic script in their everyday lives will tell you that the original alphabet was devised by two Bulgarian monks, the revered Saint Cyril and his brother Methodius. In fact, some of the available evidence tends to undermine this view. According to some scholarly sources, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-script-inventing brothers actually developed a far more alien-looking set of characters called Glagolitic, basing their ideas on the Greek alphabet.

A century or so later, it's thought that Cyril's followers used Glagolitic as their base for developing the old Cyrillic script above, and it took hold in most areas where Slavic languages were spoken (though it seems that Glagolitic survived for much longer in what is now Croatia).

So yeah ... that's the potted history, and it's all fairly linear and logical – except, of course, for the bit where some proud mum and dad in Bulgaria exclaimed "Let's name the boy Methodius!". Hard to imagine the thought process which led to that; might as well have called him Techniquolas or MacSidekick, really.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, the big break from these arcane-looking alphabets came in the 18th Century with Peter. This is quite appropriate really, given that he was in many ways the prototypical Russian ruler: a volatile mixture of grand visions for his nation, strange personal obsessions (he's probably the only European monarch to have practised dentistry as a hobby, and almost certainly the only one to have filled a sack with teeth he'd extracted and stashed it under his bed), and most of all, belligerent disrespect for any authority apart from his own.

Peter was especially fond of mocking the church, bolstering the belief of some Russian peasants that he was in fact the Antichrist. In one rambunctious episode, he organised a profane re-enactment of Jesus' return to Jerusalem by strapping a few intoxicated friends to donkeys and camels, riding to an inn, acting out a parody of the biblical scene, and then drinking for several days. Pleased with the results, he then publicly declared his rabble "The Most Drunken Synod" and wrote rules for its future meetings*.

Personally I've always admired a man who can start up a new religious organisation while on a bender and get himself declared the Antichrist.

More to the point of this entry, though, Peter insisted that the basic architecture of Cyrillic letters should be 'westernised'. By that, he didn't mean that he wanted to replace them with Roman letters – rather, he wanted the Cyrillic letters to be adapted somewhat, to make them more uniform in their dimensions and in the way they behave on a page. So nowadays, if you want to learn, say, Russian, nearly all of the 33 characters you need to know look kinda familiar in their basic architecture. Even better, some of them are 'freebies', in that they're exactly the same as Roman letters.

 

As an example, one of the first Russian words I ever learned was мак, which means "poppy". Seems an odd place in the lexicon to start your learning, until someone points out that every letter in мак is written and pronounced the same way in English as in Russian. So if you can remember this tiny word, you're already 10% literate. Next you can add the mildly amusing сок (pronounced like "sock" and meaning "juice"). You'll notice here that o retains its Latin sound**, and с sounds like it does in English "cent". And so on it goes.

Before long, you're ready to start taking on longer words like ресторан. To make sense of this, you just need to know that there are a few letters which appear in both Roman and Cyrillic scripts, but which correspond to a different sound in each. In this word, you've got two of them:

Cyrillic р = Roman "r"

Cyrillic н = Roman "n"

With this in mind, you should be able to work out that ресторан translates as "a place where you pay lots of money for the privilege of not having to wash up after you eat".

Ultimately, though, I think the fun part is not the presence of familiar characters in Cyrillic, but the presence of unfamiliar ones. There are about twenty of these in Russian, which is not a lot really. I've already enthused in a previous entry about my personal favourite "ж", which I once heard described as "the pleasure symbol", because it sounds like the "s" in pleasure. But there are plenty of others I like too.

Having said that, some of these characters definitely cause their share of "Aaarghh!!!" moments for the learner. For example, щ is pronounced something like "shch" (as in the word borshch), but the balance between the "sh" and the "ch" has to be exactly right, and you need to bare your teeth a little to make it work. Almost every time I consciously practise щ, I find a new way of getting it wrong.

Then there's ь (called the "soft sign"), which is quite an odd fish in that it has no sound of its own; rather, it tells you to make the previous sound softer by doing a little backwards movement with your tongue, rather fetchingly known as a 'retroflex'. This can take quite a while to get the hang of ... but when you do master it, you'll be pretty damn pleased with yourself :-)

The closely related б (sounds like /b/) and в (sounds like /v/) can be confusing too, but the one that really screws people up is the humble т. It sounds the same as in English, but when it's stylised, italicised or handwritten, it becomes т. This leads to an unholy triumvirate of confusion, whereby:

Cyrillic т = Roman "t"
Cyrillic м = Roman "m", but 
Cyrillic т = Roman "t"

You see what I mean. After years of living in Russian-speaking countries, I still sometimes find myself staring at words that contain м or т or both, to make sure that I'm reading them correctly. You can imagine the potential for confusion if we had the same thing in English ... you could be browsing in a sports shop, when suddenly a sign catches your eye and you think "Hey, does that say baseball mits, or did the rules of baseball get a lot more interesting since last time I checked?"

*ahem*

Sorry ... sometimes you just have to give in to the smutty humour impulse.

Last characters I want to mention – because they're also among my favourites – are the ones which look super-Cyrillic, like ы and ъ. I really like these, because somehow for me they create a little visual link to some of the more arcane-looking characters you see in Orthodox churches, on old monuments, and other places where old-fashioned script is used.

Of all the sounds in Russian, ы is possibly the most difficult for foreigners to pronounce. It's another area where I still struggle, especially when I have to spell words out loud. For this reason, I often call it "the sixty-one" rather than naming it. 

To get an idea of how to pronounce the sixty-one, start by saying the word "elephant" a few times. Notice how, because of stress, the second "e" is quite different from the first. For want of a better description, the initial "e" receives all of the 'flavour', leaving the second one as little more than a featureless grunt separating some adjacent consonants.

This kind of flavourless vowel appears in all heavily stressed languages, especially English, and it has no standard spelling. (If you think about words like "manipulative", for example, you may notice that the only fully pronounced vowels are the /I/ sounds. The other three vowels are all little grunts, two spelled "a" and one spelled "u".)

In fact, the flavourless vowel sound has a special name in phonetics: it's called a schwa, and bizarre though this may seem, it's actually the most common sound in the whole English language.

Isn't that weird?

Oops, sidetracked again ... back to Russian.

So you've got the unstressed "e" sound from elephant (written /ə/ in phonetic transcription, as though it's stuck on its back like a cockroach tipped upside down). The next bit is a /j/, like the first sound in the word "yes" .

To put them together, try saying ə-yes, ə-yes. Remember the /ə/ should be a schwa – a vowel with no flavour.

When you've done that a few times, stop saying the "-es" part of ə-yes. Just get to the y, and stop.

In phonetic transcription, the sound you're saying now is /əj/. It's not exactly like Russian ы, but it's reasonably close. So well done ... you've come a long way towards pronouncing the most difficult sound in Russian!

Now you're ready to use some of this knowledge. Here are the Russian words for "frog" and "fish":

frog:     жаба 
fish:      рыба

Just to recap:
ж = a 'zh' sound;   б = a 'b' sound;   р = an 'r' sound.

To make it a bit more authentic, you can roll the "р" very briefly, as Russians generally do. This makes рыба a lot more bouncy and exciting: think of Spanish "ariba", stress it on the "ры", and start with an exuberant little flourish. Once you've mastered this, put the two words together and shout them from your balcony a few times.

What you've got here is the ideal tool to derail almost any boring conversation. When discourse becomes dull and you find yourself entrapped, just shout жаба-рыба!!! in a triumphant voice. You'll instantly get the focus back on yourself, allowing you to control what happens next. If someone asks a question like "What the Hell was that?", just say "frogfish" in a completely matter-of-fact tone, as if it were the most natural conversational link in the world. Whatever the previous topic was, it will now be completely forgotten. You're free to continue with "So anyway, ...", and begin talking about what you want to talk about. It's a guaranteed method.

The thing is, though, I've been talking about Russian and other Slavic languages so far, and of course these are the languages associated with Cyrillic in most people's minds. In actual fact, though, the large majority of languages written in Cyrillic characters are not Slavic at all.

You have to remember that the USSR covered about 25% of the Earth's landmass in its day, and before that you had the Tsarist Russian Empire, which was also rather staggeringly huge. Both of those entities reached into some of the most remote and unfamiliar territories in the world – places populated by literally hundreds of ethnic groups, many of which you and I have never heard of. Mainly as a result of this, many of the peoples who use Cyrillic script are in possession of some excitingly weird and exotic languages.

To start with, you've got the far north of Russia and neighbouring Finland, where you can find a variety of obscure 'arctic' tongues that have been around for ... well, a very long time. An example is Kildin Sami, formerly called Lappish. It's one of a few languages spoken on the Kola Peninsula, a wild frozen region separating the Barents Sea from Finnish Karelia. The number of Kildin Sami native speakers is tiny – something like 600 – but this almost-unknown language has managed to contribute at least one word to English: тундра (tundra). And so far, it seems to be hanging in there, in a world which has lost about half of its minor languages in the last century.

Heading much further south, you get your wacky Caucasian tongues, which appear to disobey just about every rule of phonetics that applies in the rest of the world. Among these is Abkhaz, which may have as many as 300,000 speakers (though no-one is really sure). It's quite an oddity due to its exceptionally large range of consonants, which seems to make it a poor fit for just about any alphabet.

Abkhaz has adopted and then thrown off various writing systems in the last 150 years or so. The problem seems to be that every time someone tries to introduce a new Abkhaz alphabet, it turns out that there are more distinct consonant sounds requiring their own separate characters than was previously thought. At one point, for example, Abkhazians felt it necessary to replace a 37-character Cyrillic script with another one containing 55 characters. Under the influence of linguistic anthropologists from abroad, this in turn was replaced by an even more extensive Roman script, with an incredible seventy-five characters. That's forty-nine Roman letters that we don't have in English – basically two whole extra alphabets!

I'd love to have been there when the orthographers*** were putting together this outlandishly supersized Roman script for Abkhaz. There surely must have been a point in time when they started thinking "Oh come on, you can't possibly have any more consonants! You're just making them up now!"

(And the Abkhazians giggled conspiratorially amongst themselves, as bespectacled British scholars scratched their heads and adjusted their reading glasses in consternation. "Adjir, come and check this out! These Britishers are as gullible as a Georgian farm boy. We just told them that we have four different kinds of 'f ' sound ... and they believed us!")****

Saddest of all, the linguists' 75-character behemoth lasted for about three years and was then replaced – which, incidentally, made it only slightly less long-lived than the system that came before it.

After an experiment with the wonderfully squiggly Georgian alphabet, Abkhazians again reverted to a modification of Cyrillic. They're still using it, as far as I'm aware ... but who knows? Maybe one day they'll throw it out, and torture some more orthographers in the quest for a 100-character script. That would be quite an achievement :-)

As you head down into Central Asia, you start to come across the Turkic languages, one of which I do actually know something about: namely Kazakh. Mind you, when I say "know", I'm only referring to that weirdly abstract (and from a certain point of view, utterly useless) linguist's knowledge of a language. This kind of familiarity doesn't mean that you can actually speak the language; all it means is that you can describe, and perhaps appreciate it. In some ways, it's rather hollow.

All self-pity aside, though, you might expect that Kazakh and its sister languages would have some wonderfully peculiar features ... and yeah, they do. One of my favourites is something known as 'vowel harmony' – a system whereby vowels organise into groups, then hang out exclusively with fellow group members while generally shunning the company of other vowels. In practical terms, this might mean that you can never have an /a/ and a /u:/ in the same word, because they belong to separate groups.

Why would a language do this? Well, the members of each group are usually similar in some way, like all being produced in one part of the mouth, or all requiring a rounding of the lips. Herding them together therefore means that the sounds in a single word 'harmonise' with each other like notes in a musical chord. Some may argue that harmony achieved through separation is basically phonetic apartheid, but fans of vowel harmony (which also occurs in a couple of European tongues, Finnish being the most well-known) write about it in positively inspired and poetic terms. 

Worrying analogies or not, if vowel harmony can produce words like "балалар" (balalar), then I'm for it. This is my favourite Kazakh word, as several of you have heard me say in the past. It means "children", and it's just perfect for the job. Let me demonstrate:

"So what did you get up to on Sunday?"

"Oh, nothing much. The wife went to visit her mum in hospital, so my job was to stay at home with three noisy kids and try to keep their balalar under control".

Great, isn't it? I think we should import it into English.
 
Kazakh also makes distinctions between aspirated and unaspirated consonants. To understand this, try making a /t/ sound a few times, and notice where your tongue goes. It starts out in contact with a ridge of bone just above your front teeth, and when you release it, a little puff of air escapes your lips. The puff of air is the 'aspiration'. If you try, though, you'll find it's possible to perform all the other moves involved in producing a /t/ without letting any air out. This is unaspirated /t/, considered to be a completely distinct sound in quite a few languages.

The effect of this really depends on your personal taste. For example, "no" in Kazakh is жоқ (zhok), but with an unaspirated қ which makes the word stop suddenly, as though you've slammed on the brakes mid-speech. It either sounds crisp and cheery or abrupt and impolite, depending on who's speaking and on how much affinity you feel towards the sound of Kazakh in general. Personally, I rather like it.

Because of this and various other features, Cyrillic script has to be adapted somewhat to fit the Kazakh sound inventory. Some standard Russian characters aren't used (or are reserved for foreign loan words, just as English-speakers only use the é in café for imported words), some are adapted to represent Kazakh (rather than Russian) sounds, and an extra nine characters have been added.

To my eyes, these extras make Kazakh writing seem pleasantly 'fancy'. When I see it, I often feel like I'm reading something a bit special, like a friendly greeting card or a decorative sign. Here are two Kazkakh phrases, "Magan diriger kerek" (I need a doctor) and "Bul qansa turadi" (How much is it?). See what you think:

Маған дәрігер керек
Бұл қанша тұрады

I think it's mostly the ұ that does it, though I also like the tail on the қ. 

Ok ... I'm about to finish up this entry, having covered just a tiny fraction of all the languages written in Cyrillic. The subject, as you can see, is pretty huge. And I guess by now you've all concluded that I'm either

a) really quite obsessed by this whole Cyrillic thing,
b) just a complete nut, or
c) both.

Whichever option you chose, you're probably right.

I hope that I've communicated here some of the joy I experience when familiarising myself with another writing system, and also shown that doing so can occasionally provide little windows onto parts of the world that we don't know so much about. Failing that, I hope you at least enjoyed the 'drunken Tsar chronicles'. There are plenty more out there if you're interested.

I'll conclude this series of rambles with one more entry, probably some time next month. In the meatime ...

C НОВЫМ ГОДОМ!!
(s novym godom = happy new year!!)


 
* I didn't actually know much about Peter before I wrote this. Got some of my info from About.com, some from the 'In Your Pocket' guide to St Petersburg (named after guess-who), and the rest was just bits and pieces gleaned from reading around on the net and talking to a few people.

** Actually this is a bit misleading, because Russian is a 'stress language' like English, and an unstressed "o" has a different sound. But still, knowing the sound of a stressed "o" at least gets you on the path.

*** Orthographers are people who study writing systems and, if they're very lucky, occasionally have a chance to invent them.

**** Actually the linguist who devised the Roman script was half-Russian, half-Georgian ... but why let the truth spoil a cheesy joke, eh?

scriptacular #1

a rambling meditation on hangul, yin/yang & cosmic death

This is one of those times when I feel inclined to begin with a disclaimer. I'm about to ramble on the topic of 'beautiful scripts', with extremely lengthy tangents about taoism, entropy, phonology and the End of The World. I want to preface this by saying that I definitely don't consider myself an expert on any of these subjects. I just have the urge to go blah about a bunch of cool stuff I've learned, purely for the pleasure of it.

The original idea was just to tell you about hangul (Korean writing), but the more I wrote, the more my thoughts wandered in a dozen other directions. Hope that at least a few of you will be entertained by it.

So, hangul. It had to be top of my list of cool scripts, because it has consistently blown not only my mind, but also the minds of linguists and scholars. Frankly, I'd be quite surprised to learn of another writing system that makes me go "That's awesome!" as much as this one does.

The first thing you need to know about hangul is that, before it was devised, Korea was basically an illiterate country. There had been an indigenous language there for centuries, but it was written using the nightmarishly complex Chinese alphabet.

This was a problem.

Chinese writing has some odd characteristics, one of which is that it doesn't aim to match one character to one sound. Instead the focus is on matching symbols to sets of related concepts. So the symbol for "moon" might also appear in the word for "Monday", though the two words may not sound alike. (I actually don't know whether they sound alike or not; it's just a convenient example.)

The fabulously confusing flipside of this is that a completely unrelated symbol – or indeed lots of completely unrelated symbols – can represent the same sound in different environments. One instance of, say, the sound "wa" won't be conceptually related to another instance, so the two "wa"s will be written differently.

If you're confused at this point, believe me I can empathise! I had to learn a bunch of these symbols when I studied Japanese (which also uses them, much to my annoyance), and it was a huge distraction from actually learning how to use the language. But anyway, what I said above very roughly explains why there are so incredibly many Chinese characters. It's also why, if you jumped into a time machine and set it for "Korean Peninsula, mid-15th Century", then rounded up the entire literate population there, you'd find yourself hanging out with a few members of the nobility (all male) and pretty much no-one else.

A ruler called King Sejong stepped in around that time and did something that proved to be a massive turning point for his people. He basically said "Look, this is just insane! We've gotta have an alphabet that people can f!#$%ing read!"

(Note: historical accounts suggest that Sejong may have used slightly more restrained and statesmanlike terms in his original speech than in this dramatised recreation.)

Assembling a team of scholars, Sejong tasked them with developing a simple alphabet that represented all the sounds in the Korean language. "It'll be f!#$%ing brilliant!", he predicted (again slightly paraphrased). And I probably don't need to tell you the result: a revolution in literacy, dragging Korean culture and industry into the modern age. It was a masterstroke, for which the South Koreans now honour their former leader by putting his face on their money and by celebrating the 'birthday' of his alphabet every November.

So yeah ... rock on, Sejong.

But the thing I like most about hangul is that, when these eminent scholars put their brains together and started trying to suck a new writing system out of the combined grey mass, the result was more than just a logical and functional sytem. It was, if you ask me (and many others), a thing of true elegance and beauty.

The creators of Hangul were all more or less down with the tenets of Confucianism and Taoism, and at some point, they had the bright idea of threading the Taoist yin-yang concept into their brand new sexy alphabet. In fact they used it as the main tool to map the contrast between different vowel sounds.

I personally think this is just about the coolest thing ever in the history of alphabets. Why? Well, because yin/yang is an awesome idea. In its simplest form, it basically goes like this: if you want insight into the nature of the world we live in (and beyond it), you should think about the 'interplay of opposites'. Taoists see it in just about everything, from the movements of the heavens to the contrast between sounds in a language.

Granted, you may be thinking that this 'opposites attract' view of the universe sounds about as deep as a Paula Abdul song (ie. horribly, depressingly twee and simplistic). And taking it at a surface, New-Age-bumper-sticker level, I kind of agree with you. At a deeper level, though, I actually think it's a fairly profound observation. To get a feel for how it all works, you can try ploughing through the impenetrable words of mystics ... or, if you prefer, you can do a Fritjof Capra* and look at the physical world instead. Depending on my mood, I generally opt for the second one.

Let me give you one example of why.

First of all, any half-decent analysis of the universe will note that one of its main characteristics is huge contrasts in temperature. Stars are unbelievably hot; space is pretty damn cold. Magma is frikkin' boiling (which makes it responsible for a lot of terrestrial landscapes); ice is freezing (which accounts for quite a few of the others).

Again, we may seem to be in "So freakin' what?" territory here, but in fact we're on the doorstep of "Ooooh, how bizarre!" (or at least I think so). It turns out that not only are these temperature differences an essential property of a cosmos with differentiation (i.e. with actual stuff in it), but that they're also among the main driving forces of creation. They allow solar systems and planetary features to form, which in turn allows life to develop. In other words, take away the hot-cold contrast and you wouldn't have anything in the universe.

The formation of stars, which happened very early in cosmic history, is a case in point. If there had been no such thing as 'hot' or 'cold', you could never have ended up with hot stars hanging in a cold void. And the implications of that are just stupefyingly huge, because stars are the sole source of most chemical elements, making them the number one prerequisite for pretty much any other thing you can think of. (Go on, try it out: No stars, no cheese! No stars, no Marquis de Sade! No stars, no irritating small dogs! No stars, no harmonicas! See, it's all good fun.)

So yeah ... this pair of opposites is clearly quite important.

It's even more important when you consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which underlies a lot of modern physics. In another of those "pretty damn obvious now that someone has pointed it out" moments, this law says that all things which are hotter than their surrounds release heat into those surrounds, and all things colder than their surrounds release cold. Over time, this means that temperature differences get smaller throughout the universe, as everything and everyone slides towards uniformity. This is the process of 'entropy' – a word which is now so famous** that it barely merits an inquisitive eyebrow-raise. But wait: there's a revelation in the fine print.

See, the astonishing prediction of this Second Law thingy is that the levelling out of temperatures can destroy objects. No, hold on a sec ... that's not quite right. I should've said that it will destroy objects. All objects, to be precise. As they lose their unique thermal signatures (their temperature), they'll just kind of merge with what's around them and become part of an indistinct mush. It's called "heat death", and it spells the end of the universe. I mean the real end – not some arbitrary date when Mayan calendar manufacturers ran out of paper and went "Bugger, what are we going to do with all the pictures of kittens we haven't used yet?", before deciding it would be funny just to print what they had and see whether movie producers and credulous folk would use it to try and scare the crap out of each other in centuries to come.

Short version: this is it, people. We're all gonna die.

Thankfully, though, it won't happen for a while. To see heat death with your own eyes, you'll need to hang around for another few billion years – and then, of course, you won't see it, because you'll be all mushy and formless as well, and hence rather lacking in the eye department.

(No heat, no eyes ... fun! ).

Oh well, never mind; you probably wouldn't enjoy it.

Once again, I realise that I've gone way, way off the point here. I just love all this wacky science stuff. I think my original intention was to say that, if you let the whole yin-yang / union of opposites thing roll around in your brain for a while, it begins to seem not so silly after all. And I've only mentioned only one pair of opposites. Imagine extrapolating this to try and calculate the importance of all the opposing qualities contained in the universe, and you get an idea of how yinnish and yangular (yinful and yangly? yintastic and yangalicious?) our existence really is.

But what exactly does all this have to do with writing systems?  

Well, heading back in vaguely the right direction: contrasts between opposing positions of the 'vocal apparatus' (your mouth, lips, throat and so on) are hugely important in forming the basic sounds of human languages. Vowels are essentially 'open' sounds, because when you produce one, you just let air come out of your mouth, without blocking or restricting it. Consonants are different (in fact they're the opposite), because they're 'closed' to various degrees. You form them by pushing air out of your lungs but then blocking it on the way out, either forcing it up through your nose or letting it go again after a fraction of a second. That's essentially what a consonant is: a puff of air trying to get out of you while you're saying "No!".

At a finer level of detail, vowels are described as being "high" or "low" and "front" or "back", because we make them by shaping our mouths differently to direct the airflow up, down, backward and forward, resulting in slightly different tones. And it's not an 'either/or' situation; some languages have huge vowel inventories, made possible by subtle degrees of balance between extreme opposite positions in the mouth.

Consonants, meanwhile, are partly distinguished by the degree of closure required to produce them. A 'stop' requires complete closure (try making an /m/ sound and you'll see what I mean), whereas a 'glide' (like the English /r/ sound) is almost open, and a 'fricative' requires partial but not complete closure to produce friction. (Try the /v/ sound and notice what's going on between your teeth and your bottom lip. This gives /v/ its slightly risqué-sounding technical name: the 'labio-dental fricative'.)

To sum up all that awful jargon: it's largely by choosing between opposite extremes of 'open' and 'closed', 'high' and 'low' etc. that we're able to make any sounds more distinctive and sophisticated than the one our dentist wants to hear before he starts invading our mouths with terrifying pieces of equipment.

The scholars who put the hangul system together knew all of this linguistic stuff of course. Being Taoists, they would've seen it as confirmation that language reflects other cosmic and natural processes governed by the yin and the yang. Hence their decision to represent a spiritual concept in a writing system.

So about these characters, then: all the vowels in hangul are based around three essential strokes. A horizontal line represents the Earth, the essence of yin. A dot much higher up represents the Sun in the sky, the essence of yang. (This usually becomes a short diagonal line, like a serif connected to the vertical, when the character is drawn using a brush.) Then there's the third stroke, a vertical line representing an upright human form, mediating between these two cosmic forces.

All of this was meant to reflect the idea that human language mirrors nature at a fundamental level, which at the time seemed to make it the perfect tool for gaining a better understanding of what the Hell is going on out there. (Btw, mathematicians now make a similar claim about their arcana of symbols, saying that they describe a 'language of nature'. You could see this, I think, as the modern equivalent of what the Korean scholars were getting at.)

And here's where the technical side of things starts to get a bit clever. If the vowel is iotated***, this is shown by throwing in a second vertical or horizontal stroke, parallel to the first. In this way, the written forms of the letters actually function as a guide to how they're pronounced: when you see the extra stroke, you know that you need to produce the /j/ sound which always begins an iotated vowel.

The consonants of hangul take this idea much further. Their shapes tell you which bits of your vocal apparatus you should use to stop the airflow when you form the sound. They also show how you should release the air, which is one of the main things that distinguishes different classes of consonants. For example, the symbol for /m/ shows two pursed lips, while the symbol for /p/ shows the same but with two squiggly lines repesenting the explosive nature of the release. If you make these two sounds, you'll notice that your mouth starts off in basically the same position, but with the /p/ sound, you let out a little 'plosion' of air.

What you're doing here – and what you do every time you make an /m/ or a /p/ in your own language – is clearly illustrated in Korean characters. Isn't that cool?

Btw, one of the reasons I love this is because it helps to achieve the main goal of hangul. Sejong's position was pretty clear: he wanted to take reading and writing – and hence education – out of the hands of affluent nobles, and put it into the hands of the 'common man'. And if you've got an alphabet that visually reminds you of how to read it, that goes a long way towards achieving this mission. In a sense, you might even argue that this was one of the great socialist projects of history. But to combine such a pragmatic socialist idea with the airy, abstract spiritual concepts of Taoism is just ... well, it's just weird and admirable and (if you ask me) pretty inspired.

One last thing before I finally stop ranting about hangul. In the last entry I mentioned the distinction between an alphabet and a syllabary. In an alphabet, one character is supposed to represent one sound (though if you consider English words like "thought", which contains only three sounds but seven letters, you'll see that it doesn't always work out quite so neatly). In a syllabary, one character represents one syllable. 

The Japanese hiragana system is a classic example of a syllabary. If you look at the word on the right, you'll immediately notice that it has one character per syllable. This is true of all Japanese words written with indigenous characters (though there's an anomaly with the character for /n/, which doesn't quite fit the western definition of what a 'syllable' actually is). In a nutshell, this is how syllabaries work.

There are loads of these in the world, as well as loads of alphabets of course. But there aren't many writing systems which can claim to be both at the same time. In fact, I suspect hangul may be the only one.

An individual hangul symbol is called a jamo, which means "letter mother". In other words, these symbols aren't meant to be letters in themselves; rather they're the means of creating letters. It's done like this:

Obviously there's one syllable here, made up of three jamo all fused together into a single über-character. You start by reading the jamo at the top left, which is the consonant sound /h/ . Then you read the vowel /a/ on the right. Finally you go to the bottom and read the concluding consonant /n/. All Korean letters look like this, with the relative size of each jamo adjusted to work as harmoniously as possible with its neighbours. (The final consonant is often vertically squished – an /n/ in top-left position would have a much longer upright stroke.)

All fine and good, but there's a problem. The syllable 'han' has all its possible slots filled – there's an onset (a consonant at the beginning), a nucleus (i.e. a vowel) and a coda (a consonant which rounds off the syllable). But what if one of these things is missing? If you look at the word "angel", you can see that the first syllable has no consonant at the start; in phonological terms, it lacks an onset. How do you stop that from wrecking your beautiful system?

Well, if you're one of Sejong's dream team, you've got a devilishly simple answer for this up your sleeve: just throw a circle into the top left position, to indicate 'empty slot'. Solved :-)

In final position, btw, a circle will have a different sound: you read it like the "-ng" in "sing", because that's the shape you form inside your mouth when you want to make an "-ng" sound at the end of a syllable. But if it's in first position, you get characters like the one on the right. It reads

top left consonant: --
vowel (right): a
final consonant: n

And that's how you get an alphabet and a syllabary rolled into one. Pretty clever, no?

To finish off, let me give you one more jamo: the vowel "yeo", which you can see here on the left. With this in your arsenal, you should now have enough information to be able to say "Hi" in Korean, using your newly-acquired reading skills.

Remember that:

- consonants in top left position are tall and thin
- consonants in final position are short and fat, as though
   someone has sat on them
- a circle in top left position is silent, whereas in final position
   it sounds like "-ng".

  

So .. how did you go?

I'm going to shut up now, but I'll continue this series of entries soon with some cool squiggly wiggly scripts and a little ramble (or possibly a very long one) about Cyrillic. After that, I'm planning to tell you about the eerie similarities between Macquarie University (in Sydney) and the militsia in Odessa. 

In the meantime ... Merry Western Christmas, and Praise be to Magic Woody Allen Komodo Dragon Zombie Jesus!****

Bye )))

* Capra was the guy who wrote the super-bestselling book 'The Tao of Physics', which meditates in detail on connections between the tenets of eastern spirituality and the theories of modern science.

** Just wanted to say that entropy is number #1 on the list of things regrettably made famous by annoying Americans, and thereby unfairly stripped of credibility. No #2 is Kabbalah. It's a shame, because in fact they're both quite serious, cool and profound. As it happens, Kabbalah actually represents my personal road into this kind of cosmic speculation, because it shares the Taoist pre-occupation with the 'union of opposites', and I discovered it at quite an early age. Such a pity that it became associated later on with Madonna, Queen of Tosspots :-( 

*** Iotated vowels are basically vowels preceded by a /j/ sound. (/j/ is the phonetic symbol for the first sound in the word "yes", usually written with a "y" in English but also present in words like "Europe".) Lots of languages have them, and they're very handy because they can double your stock of vowels by creating pairs of related but distinct sounds. Ukrainian, for example, has ten vowels, of which eight are 'pairs': a/ja, e/je, i/ji and u/ju. (You'll notice that in each pair, one sound has the /j/ and the other doesn't.) To English speakers, these iotated sounds are heard as a consonant followed by a vowel, rather than as a single sound, because we use a different system (short vs. long) to flesh out our vowel inventory. But speakers of languages with iotation hear the /j/ as part of one continuous sound, so they get a 'bonus vowel' in this way. There ... weren't you just dying to know that?

**** This is from a Tim Minchin song that made me laugh a lot when I heard it.   

love your alphabet ... where'd you get it?

Hello!

I've been thinking a lot about alphabets lately. Why? Well, to be honest I kind of always do – it's a word nerd thing. But my degree of interest has definitely risen above its usual baseline level this year. Not 100% sure what prompted this, but I think it started when I took a beginner's course in Japanese.

As I'm sure many of you know, Japanese is a very alphabetically intense language. It has two 46-character syllabaries*, used in conjunction with several thousand imported Chinese characters, and elements of both systems frequently appear side-by-side in the same words. So in the first half of 2011, I spent quite a lot of time practising and memorising endless combinations of strokes and flourishes.

The other reason, I guess, is that I've spent pretty much the whole year in what I not-very-imaginatively call 'Cyrillic World' – i.e. that part of the world in which varieties of the Cyrillic alphabet are used to represent the sounds of local languages.

There are quite a few versions of Cyrillic, because the languages it's used for differ in their sound inventories, so of course characters have to be invented or adapted to accommodate this. And recently, I was a little surprised to realise that I've actually developed distinct preferences for some Cyrillic alphabets over others.

This struck me as being quite odd. I mean, why should I prefer one set of abstract symbols to another? Why should anyone?

This thought set me off on a daisy chain of other aimless musings, some of which (being a part-time sadist) I'm going to share with you now.

See, I figure that if someone asks you "What are your favourite kinds of music?", there's an obvious and reasonable basis for their question. Music is clearly something that we engage with on an emotional level. (In fact, earlier this year I heard the following words in a Ted** talk: "Mathematics is the language of science, and music is the language of human emotions". Don't know how the rest of you feel, but personally I think that sums it up rather nicely.) So having a preference for certain kinds of music simply implies that some forms of emotional expression 'speak to you' more than others ... which makes perfect sense, given that we're all different and ya-ya-ya, the usual palaver.

But what about this question: "What's your favourite boys' name?"

I think that, in answering a question about name preferences, there are a number of considerations which different people draw on to varying extents. You might answer partly based on positive associations you have with people you know who go by certain names. Or you may be attracted to the meaning of the name. That's all perfectly fine and rational. But then there are somewhat more abstract considerations, like the sound of the name. And I know that spelling is a factor too, if you're one of those people who like names with, say, the letter "x" in them. (Personally I like almost any name with "ж" in it, which roughly equates to "zh" in Roman letters. Both the sound and the look appeal to me.) So here we're moving away from something that has an obvious connection to human emotions, and towards something that's a bit less readily explicable.

How about this one: "What's your favourite English word?" Do you have one? If so, why? Is it really possible to react emotionally with a mere word?

Of course, I'm sure that a comfortable majority of the people who visit me here at The Manor would answer with an emphatic "yes!". And so would I – no hesitation at all.

Recently at a teachers' meeting, a colleague asked me to come up to the board and write one of my favourite English words, as a lead-in to a rather nifty language game he was presenting. So many contenders flashed through my mind that I found it difficult to isolate one. Those few seconds were like a nostalgic little head trip, during which I recalled the pleasure I've derived from using or hearing dozens of different words. And playing them off against each other was extremely difficult, because the pleasures associated with each are so distinct.

(In case you're wondering, I ended up going with palaver, which I semi-deliberately used above. But then I instantly regretted it, and wished I'd chosen purr or weirdarse or paraphernalia or any of a hundred others instead.)

So yeah ... I'm definitely with the 'favourite words' people.

At the same time, this weirds me out a little, because I really have no idea why I should care about words at all. They're just conventions, used for practical purposes like referring to objects, explaining what we want, saying where things are in relation to one another and so on. Take away all those referent objects and wishes and whatnot, and the words we use to describe them have absolutely no business being in the universe at all. And when we try to use words for more profound things, like communicating our emotional states to other people, they often fail us – sometimes because of our limited ability to use them well, but other times because of limitations inherent in the actual words themselves.

Perhaps more damningly, if you exclude the relatively rare phenomenon of onomatopoeia, the form of all the words we use is utterly without significance. I mean, the sounds "c-a-t" have no more relation to a cuddly four-legged animal that can purr and be house-trained than the sounds "n-e-k-o" (which is "cat" in Japanese) or "k-o-sh-k-a" (a female cat in Russian). It's only because humans implicitly agree on the meanings of these little sound streams that they can signify anything at all; take away our willingness to make millions of these semantic contracts with each other, and a neko could signify "the person who carried me around in her uterus for nine months" to you, and "a small sausage-shaped object which I found in my garden last week" to your neighbour. Far more likely, though, it would mean precisely nothing to either of you.

So yeah, you get the idea ... words are essentially hollow, empty vessels, free of inherent content. And explaining why we feel more affection for some of these vessels than others generally involves just looking at, say, an adjective, and remarking that we really like the cut of its jib ... which strikes me as pretty lame.

Ok, time to move a bit closer to my actual point. If all of this applies to words – the weapon of choice for everyone from Chaucer to Chekov, from Obama to Murakami – then it surely applies even more to alphabets. A bunch of strokes on a page, used for the fairly mechanical task of composing words, which we've already established are meaningless: how can anyone possibly feel for these things?

And yet, I do.

As a consequence of all these musings, I'm now wondering this: am I alone here, or are there other people who also experience some kind of reaction to written characters? I don't know the answer. I hope it's a yes, though, because I'm about to ramble on this topic in much greater detail.

In fact, bearing in mind everything I've said above, I've decided to present you with a little collection of writing systems which, for one reason or another, I love or admire.

*several seconds of nonplussed silence*

I knew you'd be pleased )))

It's gonna be in at least two parts, because it's a subject that's oddly close to my heart, and I have a lot to say about it. Before I do, though, would anyone else care to

a) say what your favourite alphabet(s) are, and why; or
b) hazard a guess as to which ones I'm gonna throw onto my list of favourites?

I'd really like to hear from you about this, especially on the first point. So if you've been dying to get some dirty confession like "I just adore Hebrew script!" off your chest, now's your chance. Neither myself or anyone else here will judge you, I promise.

Waiting ...

 
* A syllabary is a system of writing in which every character represents one syllable. This is in contrast to the idea of an 'alphabet', in which each character represents one sound – at least in theory. (Anyone who has studied English, with its dog's breakfast of a spelling system, knows that this theory doesn't hold up very well in the real world!)  

** "Ted" = ted.com, a website which I mentioned in a recent entry. I won't plug it again; just wanted to clear up the reference.