[Multilingual Monday] Cheese and Cherokee
Carl and I had gone to a bookstore and I was -- surprise! -- perusing the language titles. I found a book on Mandarin Chinese, and at one point they discussed what a person taking a picture should say to the people he's taking a picture of. Whereas English speakers say "Cheese!", apparently 茄子, qiézi. "eggplant," is common, and I can see why such a word would become common, as the initial syllable has the same vowel as "cheese."
So I sat there and thought, "Man, I need to make a compilation of such phrases!!" Normally I get down in the dumps when Wikipedia beats me to the punch, but this time Omniglot beat me to it. Upon looking at the list, a few things come to mind:
I am a bit disappointed by "cheese" being either directly imported or, even worse, translated. Indonesian apparently uses Katakan keju!, which is literally "say cheese!", but at no point is anyone using /i/, which would make you show your teeth. Hebrew uses תגיד צ'יז, tagid chiz!, where "chiz" isn't a Hebrew word, and doesn't even use sounds native to Hebrew.
While some languages have some native word to make the subject show those pearly whites, several seem to lack this word, and you just get "smile!". I guess this is slightly better than just importing "cheese."
Our second topic: it's been often said, for people trying to get their non-Hebrew speaking children to learn and use the language: "If you want them to use Hebrew, give them Hebrew to use." This could be said of many languages on various stages of disuse -- using a language is fine, but people actually need things to read. Cherokee, which once had a rather vibrant history in the 1800s of newspapers, books, religious texts, etc., has seriously declined. Outside of a Wikipedia that has stalled at 300 articles (many of which are stubs) and an occasional Cherokee Phoenix article, there have been very few things written in the language -- a hard blow against efforts to do immersion teaching of the language to children.
FINALLY, an actual novel is being translated into the language -- sometime this year, Charlotte's Web will be in Tsalagi. Indeed, it's lighter fare, but again, I am seriously hard-pressed to think of ANY other novel -- literally -- that has ever been translated into the language. Only small anthologies of (VERY) short stories have been available before, like this collection of short Cherokee tales.
Speaking of lighter fare, apparently sometime in the '70s someone took comics like Blondie and translated them into Cherokee, More recently, a few people have taken taken stabs at translating pages of manga into Cherokee which ... I think is a fantastic idea, personally. But I'm biased ^_-
So I sat there and thought, "Man, I need to make a compilation of such phrases!!" Normally I get down in the dumps when Wikipedia beats me to the punch, but this time Omniglot beat me to it. Upon looking at the list, a few things come to mind:
Our second topic: it's been often said, for people trying to get their non-Hebrew speaking children to learn and use the language: "If you want them to use Hebrew, give them Hebrew to use." This could be said of many languages on various stages of disuse -- using a language is fine, but people actually need things to read. Cherokee, which once had a rather vibrant history in the 1800s of newspapers, books, religious texts, etc., has seriously declined. Outside of a Wikipedia that has stalled at 300 articles (many of which are stubs) and an occasional Cherokee Phoenix article, there have been very few things written in the language -- a hard blow against efforts to do immersion teaching of the language to children.
FINALLY, an actual novel is being translated into the language -- sometime this year, Charlotte's Web will be in Tsalagi. Indeed, it's lighter fare, but again, I am seriously hard-pressed to think of ANY other novel -- literally -- that has ever been translated into the language. Only small anthologies of (VERY) short stories have been available before, like this collection of short Cherokee tales.
Speaking of lighter fare, apparently sometime in the '70s someone took comics like Blondie and translated them into Cherokee, More recently, a few people have taken taken stabs at translating pages of manga into Cherokee which ... I think is a fantastic idea, personally. But I'm biased ^_-