"For gays and people in love."

Last night after class, Mozhu (who, despite the Chinese name, is actually Russian) and I were sitting in Phở 777 discussing linguistics over the blare of shimmery disco. All at once, she looked up and we exchanged the are-you-hearing-what-I'm-hearing look?

Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen
They put some poison into his wine
Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine
He drank it all and said "I feel fine"

Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen
They didn't quit, they wanted his head
Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine
And so they shot him till he was dead.

It wasn't a dream, it was a Boney M song (which says nothing to me, but it may to you hip kids)--and thanks to the length of our visit and shortness of the tape, we got to hear it twice more. Remember, this is the place where I heard the trilingual "Feliz Navidad" at holiday time. AFAIK, their slogan isn't:

Come for the phở--stay for the music!

but sometimes I think it should be.

Don't know much geography

When the White Sox went to the White House yesterday, Coach Ozzie Guillen wasn't there. He wasn't willing to break off a vacation with his family. Besides, he was there already just two years ago. President Bush was very understanding and made some remark about how he could see why a "Caribbean guy" like Guillen wouldn't have wanted to brave DC's unseasonable weather.

A Chicago morning DJ mocked this last bit, saying "Caribbean guy? Isn't he from Venezuela?" Yes, which is ON THE CARIBBEAN, dumbass. Look at a friggin' map.[*] Also, if you paid any attention to baseball outside of the borders of the USA, you'd know that Los Leones de Caracas won the Caribbean Series which was held--where again?--oh, right, VENEZUELA. (All of forty miles from Guillen's hometown, in fact.)

That's the problem with getting a reputation for stupidity: People think you're saying dumb things even when you aren't.


[*] (Just for you nitpickers: Guillen was born in Ocumare del Tuy, which, while not being on the coastline, is only a few miles further inland than Maracay--still closer to the Caribbean than quite a few towns in Cuba or the Dominican Republic.)

An inventory of flaws

I can't remember who the author was--it was years ago now. In any case, his complaint--that he lacked the proper flaws--struck home with me. Perhaps it was because of one of the examples he used, the lament that "my otherwise perfect Italian will never be marred by a heavy Tuscan accent". (Needlesss to say, he didn't actually speak Italian--that was rather the point of the piece.)

I've been thinking about the accents I have in other languages--I mean in addition to my varying degrees of American accent, which is definitely an improper flaw. I learned to speak German in southwestern Germany and it shows (i.e. back /a/, /g/ for /ç/ in word-final -ig, gell as a tag question, etc.), as does the fact that the only Spanish-speaking country I've been to is Spain. In high school, I was taught Latin American Spanish, but today my overall accent is northern Peninsular (i.e. /s/ (apical) vs. /θ/, /j/ vs. /ʎ/, no aspiration or velarisation, etc.).

In some cases, such as Catalan, my pronunciation approximates the standard. In others, it's a mishmash: My first Welsh grammar mixed dialectal forms willy-nilly. I've unlearned most of the "lies" (to use the term one of my tutors did) in it, but a lot of the Southern bits (e.g. [i] for /Ɨ/, /e/ for <au>, e for "he/him", etc.) have held on, even though all my teachers since then speak Northern varieties.

I'm happy to have a Taiwanese accent on my Mandarin (though I'm doing my best not to confuse the retroflexs with the corresponding alveolars, as many Taiwanese do), but I kind of wish I'd learned a more interesting pronunciation of Korean than standard Seoul. (I wouldn't care for the merged vowels of my teacher's Kyengsang accent, but having the tonal distinctions would rock.) If only I'd taken that contract to teach abroad on Jeju!

My French, like most of my remaining languages, is so primitive that accent isn't even an issue, but I confess an affection for the beautifully old-fashioned pronunciation that Nuphy sometimes uses. Who wouldn't want to sound like a protagonist in a Cocteau film? (I mean, if you have to speak a language as brutally ugly as French, that is.)