Italian linguistic adventures

I’m back in Europe to give a talk at a conference, and that continent is always an interesting experience, so it seemed like a good time to write a post to break up the monotony of nothingness for a year. Living in the US seems to provide fewer interesting interactions, maybe because I delude myself into thinking I know my way around the language and society.

This trip has been, and should continue to be, very exciting, but has presented both a linguistic and a kinetic puzzle to the extreme. The conference (AMLaP, in case you were wondering) took place in Riva del Garda, Italy – a resort town at the head of an enormous and gorgeous lake nestled at the foot of a collection of Alps. Needless to say, this is not necessarily the most convenient location to get to, especially from California. Dan and I left San Diego at 9am on Saturday morning, drove up to LA, spent the morning with his brother and future sister-in-law, drove to the LA Times parking garage to leave the car, walked to the train station, took a bus to the airport, flew to San Francisco, flew to Frankfurt, flew to Venice, and finally took an unbelievably slow water taxi (which was super cool for the first 20 minutes, being excited about getting around a city on roads made of water, but rapidly became much less novel after being on the same, slow boat for the next hour.) We finally made it to our Venice hotel at 9pm Monday night, 27 hours after we’d left San Diego.

We stayed in a very small, family-type establishment for two nights in Venice before heading off to Riva. (Getting there required a walk across most of Venice [dragging our suitcases], a train to Verona, another train to Rovereto, and then finally a bus to Riva del Garda.) The owner’s mastery of English was rather lacking, much like mine of Italian, so the entire check-in process consisted of repeating Dan’s name several times, and then smiling broadly and nodding profusely when they finally figured out who we were (which seemed to be triggered only when they recognized Dan’s middle name). Over the next couple of days, however, our main contact was Mario, who seemed to be the entirety of the housekeeping staff. Dan and my combined production abilities in Italian are limited to the essentials (“senza carne, pesche, fruiti di mare!”) and to music terms, none of which are so useful when talking about train tickets, (though very useful for coming up with possibilities for strange restaurant encounters: subito pesche! carne fermata!) But from knowing Spanish and French, I can understand a substantial amount of Italian – the problem is that when I try to say anything, it comes out as a garbled mass of Spanish words, French grammar, and English gratification phrases. Amazingly, however, my conversations of this sort with Mario were actually productive: he’d speak to me in Italian, I’d speak back in Generic Romance.

In Riva, we spent most of our days in the conference center, learning about language predictability and code-switching and other fun psycholinguistic topics. But every night, when we went into the little square next to the lake (stuffed in every conceivable corner with cafes, roving musicians of widely varying talent, and Indian-looking men selling neon blue light-up spinners), we saw this bright white church, lit up with floodlights, incredibly high up on the mountain, built flush with the face of the rock. It looked impossibly high up – at least 5-6 hours of nearly vertical climbing. When another conference goer told us that somehow, the round trip only took a much more reasonable 3 hours, we decided we had to do it.

So the morning we were leaving, we got up at 7:30 and started climbing up the Alp. It was steep, to be sure. The little chapel is 535m up, and the path wound back and forth over 3km in hairpin turns. It was definitely hard going – couple days later, we’ve still got sore back and calf muscles. But up on top, the view was absolutely spectacular. I am unfortunately not going to be a very good recounter here, since I don’t have my laptop and so can’t upload any pictures from the hike. But for now, suffice it to say that the chapel was minute, which was the source of it looking so far away; it was an optical illusion such that our brains assumed that the reason it looked so small was distance rather than true size. It commanded a view across the entire valley, looking straight down to the lake below, glittering from the sunlight. The plain, with Riva and various surrounding towns, stretched completely flat until it hit the mountains on either edge, except for one anomalous mini-mountain which popped up directly in the middle. In fact, this mini-mountain was still awfully steep, and the bus from Rovereto wound its way first up and then down its very narrow road.

We rather reluctantly climbed back down, partly because didn’t have any food with us, partly because we needed to begin another epic 11-hour stretch of travel to get to the Greek island Santorini, where we currently are. Our Greek language skills are exactly nonexistent, though years of math (or maybe college fraternities – guess which was more useful for us two!) has taught us the alphabet so we can mostly sound things out and then verify our out-sounding using the English description written immediately below. Of course, this doesn’t mean we can actually understand anything at all, but so far, that hasn’t been a problem because everyone speaks English. We’ll see….

Au revoir, Marseille

So that’s the end of my year in France.

I’m back in New Jersey now, home for two and a half weeks before I leave for California to start grad school in the cognitive science department at UC San Diego. Marseille was a good year – I learned a lot, about French and about research; I met some very cool people that I hope will skype me in the future (hint, hint); I experienced Flutag, and the World Series of both Pétanque and Beach Volleyball. I ate tons of amazingly delicious bread and cheese. I had wonderful visits from my parents, and Josh, and Cindy and Andrew, and Sara, Rosanne, and Omar, and Aaron.

Waiting for the boule to be thrown at the World Cup of Pétanque

Il tire la boule.

As a fitting wrap-up, a fun language fact. In English, we’ve got all these expressions of “French” something – most of which aren’t French anything in France:

• French toast = pain perdu (lost bread)
  Baguettes get stale and lose their incredibly delicious squishiness after at most an hour of sitting around. So what to do with yesterday’s rock-solid baguette, as its cheese-carrying powers are long-since lost to the world? Answer: fry it in egg and enjoy!

• French fries = pommes frites (fried potatoes)
  Rather self-explanatory. Apparently, the “French” in the English phrase refers to cooking something “in the French manner”, namely deep-frying. I’m thinking there should be more butter and garlic on fries, though, if we’re talking French style of cooking.
• French horn = cor (horn)
  An English horn is still called cor anglais, though it is neither English nor a horn. Wikipedia informs me the name is likely a corruption, either of anglé meaning angled or curved or engelisches, from old German, meaning “angelic” and not “English”.
• French kissing = rouler la pelle (roll the shovel)
  Every single French person to whom I mentioned this expression couldn’t stop laughing about it. So much for French romance…
• Pardon my French = ?
  Apparently the concept of excusing oneself before cursing doesn’t exist in France. Certainly the frequency with which people yell putain! supports this.
• Encore! = une autre (one more)
  Bizarrely enough, even though we stole this word from French, after a concert everyone chants “une-autre! une-autre!”. Also, I never saw anyone throwing gloves onto (or off from) the stage. Granted, I didn’t go to any operas.

So that’s that. I’d like to try to keep this blog going, maybe turning it into a forum for “interesting doings in the world of cognitive science and beyond”, which is what it was originally intended. Any suggestions of a format or topics to write about or anything at all are welcomed. With that, adieu, thanks for reading, come back soon, and remember, cogsci is pretty cool.

Les mots, les mots, les mots

— Le Shakespeare

I’ve recently started mixing up the French words gentil (nice) and joli (beautiful). This has led to hilarity all around.

For some reason, gentil and joli sound the same to me when sloshing around in my brain. Not phonetically – even with my English-deadened ears, I can tell the difference between the sound wave for /ʒα:nti:l/ and that for /ʒOli/ – but rather semantically. They both have this bland, happy association, and I can’t keep straight the subtleties of the particular qualities each word refers to. Basically both have the same entry in my mental lexicon, something along the lines of “positive but emotionally vapid word”. As a result, I keep using the wrong one.

The first few times I described someone as joli, the oversight was ignored. The next couple it was chuckled at and corrected. Hopefully there won’t be a third group of switches, as I’ll probably end up being propositioned by the roving bands of relatively sketchy Frenchmen who are constantly and completely timidly trying to get every girl in the city to have coffee with them. (Note to concerned parents: don’t be concerned. Sketchy they may be, but agressive, insistent, or at all imposing they are not.)

While on the subject of French words, I found a book of French idioms and their English counterparts at a bookstore the other day. Here are a sample of the best ones:

Tous les trente-six du mois
(Every 36th day of the month) =
Once in a blue moon.

Vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre
(To want the butter and the money of the butter) =
To want to have your cake and eat it too

Avoir d’autres chats a fouetter
(To have other cats to whip) =
To have better things to do

And this book was completely inexplicable.

-Julenisse is a Norwegian elf who lives in barns and on ice floes. He feasts on the fish he catches. Every year in December, with Hannukah Harry, he visits children and their families. For 10 thousand generations, more than 400,000 years, Hannukah Harry has protected the earth from cold, heat, and the weather. Come back soon, Hannukah Harry!
-The weather has gone crazy!
-Dad, why don’t you tell the story of Hannukah Harry?
-That’s a great idea!
-Hello my friends – is there a little cake left?
….

Synaptic Firing = Cognition

A friend of mine and I spent the evening after work creating the below masterful poetic tour de force. Of course it’s no term paper epic poem, but gimme a break – I can only produce those on rare and frenzied occasions, such as when I’m about to graduate college. For now, I’m simply trying to do my part by contributing ridiculous (cognitive) science poetry to the universe. In that vein, I’ve also resolved to write cogsci limericks while I walk to work and then tape them up on my door.

Please provide limerickal contributions, on any and all ridiculous/scientific/nerdy/surprising topics. Absurd rhymes a plus.

Please note this took us about 2 hours to write. We were choosing our words very carefully.

After we were suitibly pleased with ourselves, we went around and taped copies of the poem and (pilfered) picture to the grad students’ office doors. Tune in tomorrow for reports on thrilled reactions!

Un compte bancaire

Today, I managed to open a bank account.

This was round two of the bank saga – I’d gone two days ago and was told to come back with 4 additional documents to prove I had a job, an apartment, and electricity. (When I told the guy at the bank that I didn’t have an electric bill, he very excitedly exclaimed,  “Ooh! Vous êtes trés verte!” I wish. I just pay my landlord directly.)

We kicked off the rendez-vous with probably 20 pages of questions, in which I had to divulge every possible aspect of my life. I don’t remember Bank of America asking whether I had any children or the city of my birth, though I can’t say whether this level of detail was necessary because I’m a foreigner or it’s just that the French really like bureaucracy.

I was transferred to Madame Raffaele Marras, who is in charge of clientele particulars (or maybe particular clients?). (As my parting gesture last time, when the man gave me a business card, I asked if he was the name mentioned there. He looked hurt and informed me that no, Raffaele was a woman’s name. Whoops. Thanks, French, for having feminine names seem masculine to my vulgar and untrained American eyeballs.) Raffaele and I went through all the same questions – interestingly, I was still single, still had no children, and still was employed by CNRS.

Then came the questions of particulars. I’d asked the first man whether the account was free and he’d assured me that it was. However, I’d read their fee booklet and it clearly said there was a monthly fee of 1€50. When I was first transferred to her, I asked Raffaele, just to be sure, whether there was any charge for maintaining the account, and she solidly declared that as long as I didn’t want a bank card or online access or overdraft insurance, it was definitely free. Great!

But at the end of our interview, to quadruple-check, I asked one final time whether there was a charge for the account. At this point, she informed me it was completely free and had a 1€50 monthly charge. Wait. What?

Three different people in the bank told me there was no charge, and all of them, on further questioning, ceded the point that there was this 1€50 fee. For some reason, none of them viewed it as a charge for the account. Once Raffaele had finally owned up to the fee, she kept telling me it was for account maintenance purposes, which apparently are too banal to really count.

This was some real-life proof of linguistic differences that not even a perfect dictionary-based lexicon can remove. I was definitely using the right words – gratuit = free and frais = fee. There’s much more to learning a language than just learning all of its vocabulary. Knowing a word so that you can use it in speech doesn’t just mean you can write down a definition for it. There’s tons of extra information about the sense of a word that native speakers just know: what kinds of contexts the word can be used in, what prepositions it takes, fine shades of meaning differences between synonyms. Knowing all of this information makes the question of lexical storage substantially more complicated than just shoving a dictionary into neuronal connections. This additional information, that can hardly be articulated even by native speakers, needs to be connected to a word’s entry somehow.

I don’t know if the bank personnel’s not calling this a fee was a linguistic or a cultural phenomenon. It was probably a combination of the two: bank people don’t think of these charges as fees because they’re just maintenance charges and thus aren’t a “luxury” fee. As a result, they’ve built up the sense that a “frais” is something like a tax; something you pay in exchange for the right of passage or as a punishment.

This is tangentially related to the big question of whether the language you speak influences how you think. I doubt it did in this case – they just categorized various monetary charges differently than I did and thus the misundertanding stemmed from what amounted to a different understanding of the sense of a given word.