The Wayfaring Wordhack

On Sunday, while sitting above the waves, these (unedited) lines occurred to me:

She no longer had a heart; it lay deep beneath the ocean waves. She had not forgotten her heart, but she would no longer recognize it, now encrusted with white coral, its atria home to ribbonfish.

Then, on Monday, I had a cyst removed from my inner thigh, a cyst I always called my "egg" for the size and shape it had beneath my flesh. But when the surgeon cut it out and held it up to show me (yes, I asked to see it), "A heart!" I exclaimed to myself. "It looks just like a monkey heart."[2]

The one thing has nothing to do with the other, but it is odd how our minds work and give us ideas, images, or snippets that  resound with us across days or weeks in totally different contexts.

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[1] Yes, I know that is not a monkey in my icon; it's a maki (lemur) from Mayotte, but it is the closet thing I have. :P
[2] I actually don't know what a monkey heart looks like.
[3] Yes, I know there is no 3 above, but frigg, you are not getting a picture of the incision. Just because J shared his doesn't mean I have to. :P
[4] khiemtran the prostetic spit testicles will be another operation. :P

One day, not long ago, happily minding my business on the Internet, I saw a photo of blue trees for artist Konstantin Dimopoulos' "afforestation art action."




I didn't think much on it besides wondering how the trees were painted, how long it would last, etc., and then, not a week later, at a certain museum in the town I'm currently staying in,* I saw a painting with blue trees:


Never two without three, as they say in France, a few days later, while wandering down a small side street in search of Christmas cards, we came nose to needle with a blue Christmas tree. And I don't mean a blue spruce. I mean blue tree, like this:
In all its awful 7-foot blue-tinsel glory.  Forgive me if this kind of tree floats your holiday boat. I think it is almost as shudder-worthy as the unholy tree, personally.

This post brought to you by the color...

You only thought I was going to say the B-word.

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*We weren't supposed to be taking pics in the museum, but we didn't notice the sign forbidding it. J offered to erase the images from our card when museum staff brought it to our attention, but they didn't insist. I plan on sharing more about the museum and art there, but I'll do it in a locked post with photos visible only to friends.

 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... 

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.

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.