The Wayfaring Wordhack

I was looking through photos today because a friend J and I dined with yesty asked me to gift him with a B&W photograph for his walls.  I haven't found something to share with him yet, but I did enjoy looking at some photos of Halong Bay from Vietnam.  I shared a few when we were actually traveling there, but not many because I was feeling morning sickness too acutely to want to spend time posting to LJ.  When I read your post, asakiyume, and the mention of your floating village in the comments, it made think of these pics again, so I thought I would put them up.

 Didn't count on having the net in the Hanoi Airport.

Just thought I would share:

Before takeoff, on the flight between Hoi An and Hanoi, Vietnam Airlines played a instrumental rendition of "I Surrender All," an old Christian hymn.  I wondered what they were trying to tell me, but we landed in Hanoi without incident.

In the Hanoi airport, in a restaurant of all places, we were seated across from a little imp of a man who decided to blow his nose...into the air! Completely ignoring the napkins on his table.  Let the snot fly, who cares, right?  Not.

Seriously, can you get any more disgusting?  Oh, he did deign to take up a napkin at the end of it to delicately pat at his face.

Oh, forgot the guy in the shuttle out to the plane who was sneezing all over everyone, not even bothering to put his hand in front of his mouth.  Just achoo, Here, have some germs and why not a bit of spittle in your hair... 

Hanoi is, hands down, the noisiest city I've ever been to. It also has the most daredevil motorists (mostly scooter drivers) of any country I've yet visited.

We have it on good authority that Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is twice as bad. Thank goodness we aren't going there. I've had about all the honkhonkHONKing I can take.

That's all I hear now. Horns, horns, and more horns.

Someone, please make it stop!

During my cooking class, the teacher took us out into her garden to show us some typical plants and herbs. She pointed at her pepper plant, thick with bright red chiles that looked like christmas lights, and said, "In English you call these 'bird's eye' chiles. Here in Thailand we call them 'mowshi'."

"Mowshi,' we all repeated faithfully, trying the form the sounds right.

She gave us a funny little look and said, "Yeah, mowshi because it looks like shi(t) of mouse."

D'oh.

Which is in Laos, not anywhere in China.

On the morning of the 17th, we crossed from Thailand in Laos. It was chaos at the border as everyone jostled to get their visas or recover their passports, but everyone was goodnatured about it; we were all in the same mess, and most of us were leaving on the same boat.

After the immigration formalities, we were herded like little children--or cattle, take your pick--into a cramped minivan where music was blaring because the driver was on the other side of the street, chatting, and apparently didn't want to miss a beat. We waited for almost ten minutes, and no one else came to get in the bus, so the driver finally deigned to take us to the slow boat dock.

He pulled up to a rickety, rundown restaurant overlooking the Mekong, where a Laotian in a white suit proceeded to tell us a truckload of lies. The list goes a little something like this:

( Mr Smarmy tries to take us for a ride )

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* What a crock! Don't tell me that in a town that sees 100+ tourists debarking everyday doesn't have adequate accommodation options, not when everyone with a lick of business sense has converted every spare room and chicken coop to that effect in hopes of getting their share of the tourist dollar/baht/kip...Oh, speaking of currencies, yet another lie Mr Smarmy told: Change your money here because no one will accept baht or dollars on the river.  Yeah. Right.

** Some souls did trust and had their bags rifled before they arrived. The one we talked to, thankfully, didn't have anything stolen, but someone did have their backpack go missing while they slept on the beach.

At a local food market, pretty pink eggs, but....



...um, it being mid-February, I think it is safe to bet that those aren't Easter eggs. What is that black stuff? Nothing I want to put in my mouth, that much I can tell you.

Also in Chiang Mai: 

After my cooking class, I accompanied Julien to a little roadside eatery for his supper ( I got to eat all my dishes and was stuffed to the gills). Out of the gloom of the poorly lit street lumbered an elephant, a man in farmer's togs on his back.  When the great, dark beastie meandered past, we saw that his rider had thoughtfully attached a flashing red "warning" light to his tail, complete with a CD in guise of a reflector.

Lesson learned from Ayutthaya, we spent the morning lounging around our hotel in Sukhothai, not braving the outdoors until mid-afteroon. After a late so-so lunch, we rented a scooter and zoomed the 14 km to the Sukhothai Historical Park. The sun was heading toward the horizon when we arrived, leaving the air cooler and the light softer.

We moseyed around the old city, enjoying the crumbling ruins and peaceful ponds.





What would be a Thai monument without a buddha?

.

And a lotus





After snapping reflection photos to our hearts’ content and full dark upon us, we climbed back on our scooter and prepared to leave the park. Music and strings of white lights drew us off the main road to a spectacle with dancers and musicians playing traditional instruments. We had a seat on the grass and enjoyed the free show.





The time for us to return the scooter was drawing nigh so we left before the show’s end and headed back, past many a tiny, private shrine decorated with light garlands, to Sukhothaiand the night market, where we ate some pretty scary things.



Ok, the ones in the photo there were too scary for us. I wouldn’t have touched those wiener things with a ten-foot pole, much less a six-inch wooden skewer. We did try hard-boiled quail eggs wrapped and fried in wonton noodles, though. Meh. Very bland.

Culinary disappointments aside, we did indeed have a most wonderful day.

Julien and I were strolling along the road and heard music, similar to what you would hear in the States to announce the arrival of an ice-cream truck.  Just up ahead of us on the sidewalk, a woman flagged the truck down.  

Up pulled, not an ice-cream truck, but a vegetable vendor!  Not kiddies, but adults swarmed the truck to buy their fresh veggies and herbs.



In Sancerre, one of the village bakers drove through the narrow winding streets in a little pickup, bed full of baskets brimming with baguettes, loaves, and rolls.   Are there any unusual mobile vendors where you live? 

First a disclaimer: I'm not sharing this to make fun of someone's level in English,* but because I think it could be helpful to the writers on my flist--that would be most of you. :P

So some thoughts on language...

Our hostess at the hotel was driving us to the bus station, and we were complimenting her on the hotel and how charming we found it, especially the bathroom.  She replied:

"Oh, thank you very much, but we need mechanic for repairs. It very hard find mechanic here."

When trying to make foreigners sound foreign in our fantasy books, we (er, I) often conjugate their verbs incorrectly, drop articles and prepositions (something I know was hard for me to master in French and is VERY hard, with phrasal verbs, for the French when they learn English), and so forth.  In the quote above, you'll note a verb is missing altogether, as is a preposition and article.

From the example above--even if you didn't know that I was in Thailand at the moment--you probably could have guessed that the speaker's native language is not English and that it could be, at the risk of sounding like an idjit by broadly lumping some pretty non-similar languages together, Asian. 

Why could that be a reasonable guess?  Because most of us have heard a real Asian accent before, and if not a real one, then a parodied one. Accents are easy to parody because the sounds and grammatical errors tend to be consistent. That's important for me, as a fantasy writer, to remember: for an accent to ring true, the same mistakes must be made *consistently.* And to know which mistakes would logically be made by my characters, I really need to know a little bit about how the foreigner's language works as well as the language that is "translated" into English on the page.

If, for example, prepositions don't exist in Derfan'qah but are in overabundance in Huri, it's a logical conclusion that their usage will cause all sorts of trouble when a Derfan'qahi princess tries to express herself to a Hurite prince. 

Ugh. Grammar.  Too much work. That's what some people think. (Not moi; I quite like it). But it doesn't have to be just about the grammar as our hostess so clearly showed me.  I do, on occasion, give my characters an apt "wrong" word like our hostess used, but not, I think, often enough. Not-quite-right words can add a lot of spice, and they are likely to be easier on your readers than pages and pages of grammatically incorrect dialogue.

Vocabulary can be a wonderful way to give someone an accent on the page, that and word order. You don't have to put apostrophes in place of your Gs and other dropped letters and resort to all sorts of wonky, phonetical spellings to get foreignness (or lack of education) across. Note that I did not resort to "imitating" our hostess's accent with "tank you vewy mush...it vewy har fi mechanic..." even though that's what it sounded like to my ears.

Our conversation with her continued, and we realized that she had misunderstood our compliments and was taking them as criticisms or suggestions.  We struggled to make her understand, and she replied:

"Thank you very much for your recommendations. We always try do better."

Yep, misunderstandings can also be good.  Not only do they provide conflict; they smack of veracity.  If you've never had a single misunderstanding while chatting with a non-native speaker of your language, then you are different and fortunate, indeed. 

Those are a few random thoughts I had on language.  Have any you want to share?
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* As a speaker of a second language, I know what it's like to make mistakes, and I wouldn't presume to mock anyone who speaks in a language not their own, neither for their accent or their syntax.

 A pigeon hitching a ride on the rear window of car, its claws curled around the rubber sealing. Why fly when you can ride?

The best part was how tickled our driver was to see the same sight.