For the language nuts out there, a fascinating post on the linguistic origins of an Arabic word for cardamom, kakula. This is from bint battuta, who is based in Bahrain and has recently started blogging again. I'm so glad!
In the waiting room, reading. Listening, sort of, to the French news on the television. I had arrived ten minutes early, the first patient, but it was now twenty minutes past nine. The Iranian dental assistant had come in just before the hour, clicking her usual high heels on the floor, and then the surgeon himself, greeting me warmly and taking the book out of my hand –what are we reading today? Saramago. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Is it good? — before disappearing into the inner reaches of the office. At twenty past, Manon, the receptionist, looked up at me, bird-like, over her high counter. I'm sorry it's so late, she said, in her French-accented English that I find so endearing. But your crown is stuck in traffic. I laughed. I've already called the delivery person twice, she went on, he's trying his best to get here. It shouldn't be much longer.
It's fine, I said, glancing again at my watch, I'm enjoying my book. I had reached an important point — where Ricardo lays his hand on the arm of Lydia, the hotel chambermaid, for several moments too long, and she leaves the room, the teacups on the breakfast tray trembling along with her hands — when the office door opened and a young man came in, carrying two small white cardboard boxes. Each had type on its sides, inscribed along a curve with a tooth at each end: "We Deliver Smiles."
My appointment began and proceeded smoothly; we laughed and talked as usual in-between ratchetings and filings and tap tap taps on the red film that showed what needed to be adjusted in my bite to accommodate the new tooth. There was a CD playing in the background: first Mozart, then Arabic music, the faintly African rhythms. What is this? I finally asked, when the reedy nasal sound of a Turkish ney broke into a woman's voice in full aria-flight, and I couldn't keep from laughing. He asked the assistant to turn the volume up and laughed too; we both sang snatches along with the singer. It's an obscure disk from France, he said. Some crazy guy who's combined Mozart with middle eastern and African music, but it somehow works. It does something different to your brain – you know, if music is supposed to free our minds to imagine places and scenes, this takes me somewhere entirely new. I feel like I'm in… a souk somewhere. While with western music I'm often bored, I love it but I've heard it so much, it's predictable. And your brain is used to it so it doesn't take you anywhere, I said. That's why I like performing contemporary music, I have to think harder.
We spoke of his daughter, who I'd met recently, she's torn between the violin and chemistry; and about books, and politics; I told him about our recent trip to the U.S. He told me he'd hurt his back at the gym, overdoing it. Listen he said, laughing again –the Requiem with Arabic drumming – fou fou fou. Then at one point I said –I've started painting again. Good for you! he said. How does it feel? It feels good, I said, shrugging. It's different than before. I have no idea now exactly what I want to be doing or where I'm going with it, but that's OK. I'm experimenting. Enjoying it.
It doesn't matter, he said, nodding, and pressing the glued crown into its final destination with his thumb. At this point it's the journey and the process that are more important than the result. He paused, and then grinned. We know that, he added, widening his eyes behind his round glasses, because now we're mature.
I told J., after a discussion of the differences between "complaining" and "criticizing", that I was going to look up the etymology of "complain." That turned out to be even more fascinating than I'd expected.
Remembering the French verb complaindre, I assumed that our English word had come from that, and that complaindre had a Latin root. That was right; the word came into English in the late 14th century, from the Old French verb (12th c) meaning "to lament" which did come from the Latin complangere, which meant "to beat the breast." I was confused by the "com" in this word; the dictionary I consulted said in this case it's used here less in the sense of "with" or "together" than as an intensive prefix. The Latin verb plangere means "to strike or beat the breast," and "plaga", a noun from this word, means a stroke or wound and is probably the origin of "plague." And of course, in a less specific sense than the-plague-as-illness, the things that plague us are those we tend to complain about…the first recorded uses of "plague" meaning "bother or annoy" date from the 1590s.
I was familiar with the word "complaint" being used to mean "lament" from its common occurrence in Renaissance church music – during penitential seasons we sing many motets with texts like, "O Lord, hear the voice of my complaint," which doesn't mean "I'm upset about all the things that are wrong in my life," but rather, "I lament my sins and weaknesses."
That sense of the word lasted only until the 17th century, giving way to the modern meaning of the word. Its popularity in the language (and human behavior) seems particularly evident in the long and colorful list of synonyms and related expressions:
moan, whine, kvetch, beef, bellyache, chide, yammer, carp, grouse, rail, crab, quarrel, nag, gripe, bespeak, bitch, and kick.
Not surprisingly, some of these also have very interesting origins as synonyms for "complain." To look at just a few of them, I've heard some of my British friends use the word "whinge," unfamiliar to me, which is related to "whine." Whine/whinge come from the Old English hwinan which is the whizzing or whistling sound that arrows make through the air. hwinsian is the whining of dogs, thought to have come from the Old Norse hvina "to whiz," and German wiehern "to neigh". The use of "whine" meaning "to complain feebly" began in the 16th century.
To "beef" about something was a slang term that originated in the 1880s. The origin is uncertain, but it's thought that it might come from a common complaint by U.S. soldiers in the late
19th century about the quantity or quality of beef
rations.
"Grouse" is British army slang from the same period, first mentioned by Rudyard Kipling, and did not have to do with the lack of game birds in the military diet! Etymologists think it might have come the word "groucer", in the Norman French dialect, which came from the Old French groucier "to murmur, grumble."
And while we're in the animal kingdom, "carp" has nothing to do with the fish; the word was already used to mean "complain" in the early 13th century and probably came from the Old Norse karpa "to brag," influenced by the Latin carpere "to slander, revile," lit. "to pluck" (carpe diem="sieze the day") Together, these words somehow mutated toward a meaning closer to "find fault with."
As for "crab" in its use as a noun meaning a sour person, or a verb meaning to complain, it was probably a combination of the temperament of the animal "crab" (from Germanic roots for scratch, claw; the first mention of the constellation known as the Crab appears in English around 1000 A.D.) and the sourness of the fruit (a Scandinavian word for wild apple trees, crabbe, 13th century). The use of the word to refer to a complaining, sour person dates from the 1570s.
All of which is way more than I expected to learn when I offered to look up "complain"!
How to do (and not do) an American accent: lessons for Brits from a famous acting/speech coach. Living in Montreal, where many English-speakers are either truly British or have a British accent, I’m more aware than ever of my American way of speech but hard put to identify exactly what I do that gives it away: here’s the start of an explanation, amusingly delivered. Repeat after me: fleece, creep, speak…
Dolphin saves stranded whales.
Why are we still so surprised by stories like this? As a child I remember being astounded by researchers announcing that it was "possible" that some animals "communicated." Being out in the woods had shown me clearly that birds spoke to each other, and also that I could speak to them, whether in words or with unspoken calm, a quiet heart, and positive intention. I remain convinced, more than 50 years later, that we have barely scratched the surface of the possibilities of communication, even within our own species. I wonder if any of you have stories about this subject – it’s the sort of thing people don’t talk about much for fear of being thought of as nuts, but many of us have experienced odd moments of closeness or communication with other species, or witnessed animals clearly communicating with each other.
There is a very low level of optimism about relations between Islam and the Western world, according to a poll and a new report issued by the World Economic Forum. In mid-2007, about a thousand respondents in 21 countries were surveyed about their impressions of understanding, respect, and dialog between Islam and the West, and whether things feel like they’re getting worse or better. Not surprisingly, most respondents were not optimistic.
But what did surprise me was that people in the United States, Canada, Israel, and the Muslim countries all said they felt more interaction would be beneficial, while people in Europe said they did not want greater contact.
This seems to line up with the findings of the recent Bouchard-Taylor Commission on "Reasonable Accomodation" of minorities in Quebec. The people who are the most exercised about immigrants, especially religious minorities (read: Muslims) are the French, especially the rural French, who fear losing their traditional culture and language. The immigrants themselves objected to the very term: "We want to be accepted, not accommodated," they said over and over again at the many public hearings. And – again, it’s no surprise – acceptance is greatest in the areas with the most contact between cultures and religions, such as cities like Montreal, Toronto, and New York.
But rather than belabor a point that’s been made here before, I simple want to say that this is an area where blogging can do a great deal: to illuminate language, culture, stories of personal experience, of displacement and change, to create greater curiosity and less fear of the unknown. I intend to try to do more of that here in the coming months, and I’d like to especially invite readers from diverse backgrounds, countries, and cultures to make yourselves known and become part of the discussion here. You will find a warm welcome and respect, and interest in what you have to say, and I’ll be asking some specific questions from time to time to try to get the conversation moving.
For starters, it would be great to hear from readers: how many of you consider yourselves "ethnic" in some way? Were you or your parents born in a different country from where you are now living? Did you grow up speaking a language other than English in the home, or did you study another language intentionally? Is it important to you to maintain or discover your own cultural roots?
(I don’t mean at all to exclude English-speakers and North Americans from answering these questions – if you don’t know it already, I, for one, feel like an "ethnic American" for the first time in my life, since I now live in a foreign country – French-speaking Quebec. I’ve also been married for nearly thirty years to a Syrian-Armenian American, which has broadened and changed my whole perspective on personal identity.)
So – welcome to new commenters and familiar ones who may not have talked about this aspect of your life before: it would be great to hear from you. Let’s do our bit for opening at least this channel of exchange and dialog, and reversing that negativity.
(Be patient and watch to the end!)
This video was taken last night as I was walking to the bus on my way to a concert by the OSM (Montreal Symphony Orchestra). All the seats were pretty much full; most Montrealers just deal with the weather and do what they were planning to do anyway. At the end there was a standing ovation, and the conductor, Kent Nagano, who is relatively new to the city and already beloved, addressed the audience. "This is a special day for me," he said, "because I have never seen so much snow in my life!" He went on to say that it made him feel like Christmas, and offered a beautiful encore — Beethoven’s Egmont Overture – to the audience as a gift.
I’ll probably go to a couple other concerts during the season; my ticket, in the balcony, cost $22.50 which is enough that I/we don’t go often but feel we can if there’s something we really want to see. Access to cultural events is, obviously, one of the things I most love about being here. Last night’s concert included a pre-performance discussion; Arnold Schoenberg’s Symphonie de chambre no. 1; Mozart’s third violin concerto played by guest soloist Hilary Hahn (the main reason I went); and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Nagano is programming all of Beethoven’s symphonies during his first two years here, and even though it’s so well known and I’ve heard recordings so many times, this was a really excellent, exciting performance; I don’t think I’ve ever heard it performed live before.
When I arrived, I found my seat next to a man who was alone, and reading L’Art du Bonheur, by the Dalai Lama. I didn’t interrupt him but took out my own book and read until the concert began. After the Schoenberg it was clear that there would be a wait until the rest of the orchestra took their places, so I decided to try striking up a conversation and maybe get some French practice. "Que pensez-vous?" I asked. He smiled, and we began talking about modern music, how much concentration it took to listen to it, and about our own musical backgrounds. After Hilary Hahn had played and the intermission began, we continued talking about the Dalai Lama, Montreal as a city, and eventually about where I had come from. All this in French; I was pleased and a little curious because he didn’t switch into English; I was getting a good workout in both speaking and listening.
"Oh," he said, finally, still in French, "you speak French well, did you learn back in Vermont?" I rolled my eyes, since I know that’s not even close to true, and that I had been blundering along all evening, making plenty of mistakes. I told him I had studied the language in school but that had been a very long time ago; I was trying to improve and slowly it was getting better. "Vraiment," he said, "vous parlez très bien; je le sais, je suis professeur du francais à McGill!" At which point I wanted to fall down through the balcon, mezzanine, corbeil, and parterre into the underground! Instead I laughed, and from then on we spoke in both French and English, finally saying goodbye as I went off to the metro to go home, and he took off on foot. "Vous êtes au pied?" I asked. "Oui, je suis à pied," he answered, without emphasis on my mistake. I nodded and repeated, "à pied!"
My evening ended up à pied as well; instead of taking the bus I walked back home through Parc Lafontaine; the snow had stopped, and it was magical.
He wants to know when we’re coming down, because he has a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday – could we have lunch, instead, on Friday? Yes, I assure him, that would be fine. I ask how he is; he responds with the usual litany and its antiphon: "declining very rapidly."
"Your voice sounds good," I tell him. "And you always have something to say."
"I began with that and have kept it!" he responds, laughing. "You know the story about my birth, don’t you? The woman who came to deliver me was in mourning – her husband had died the day before – so she wasn’t speaking. When I was born, she didn’t give the usual "ululululu!"cry that means, "it’s a boy!"; she just whacked me on my bottom and said, "Shut up!" My mother knew from that that I was a boy, and she rejoiced."
"And you’ve never stopped talking since."
"No!" He laughed again. "How is your poetry book coming?"
This caught me off-guard; I had mentioned it once in passing and was very surprised he remembered. "It isn’t my book, it’s something that a number of us are doing together."
"So you are all poets?" – this in a decidedly skeptical tone.
"Yes, some more than others. Anyway, it will be out soon; I’ll get you a copy and you can see what you think."
"In Arabic we say, ‘The best poetry is the one that tells the most lies.’"
It’s a typical non-compliment, but I laugh anyway; I’ve never heard the proverb before and it explains a good deal. "Flattery will get you somewhere," I counter.
"The Arab one is better."
"It’s good, you’re right. Well, it’s nice to hear your voice. You sound OK, even if you don’t feel it."
"I’m declining very rapidly. Really. Every day is worse than the one before – I can see it."
"So everything is going to give out, and finally you’ll be left with nothing but your voice."
"In that case maybe we should discuss what my last words should be! If you continue on the way you are, I’ll say your name at the last!"
"That sounds very much like an illustration of your proverb."
"Hah!"
"The Young Man
Meets the Old Hermit," by an unknown artist, Moraqqa’ 1638, Golestan Palace, from an exhibition of masterpieces of Persian painting at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, spring 2005
After
lunch we went back to his room. It hadn’t been a good day so far; his legs ached; he’d pushed
the two halves of the ham-and-cheese croissant around on his plate, dismissed
the French onion soup as “no good,” and finally eaten a bowl of cottage cheese
with picked beets and onions on top. Back in his own chair in his own room, he
sighed with relief. I fished around for a subject that would engage him. “Did
you ever read Persian poetry when you were a student in Syria?”
I asked.
He said no, that they had only read Arabic poetry. “I’ve tried to read
Persian, and I can make out a few words but it’s quite different from Arabic,” he
said. “They’ve borrowed a lot of Arabic words, and we have some of their words
too. All these languages borrowed from each other; it was inevitable because of
the trade and travel.”
I
told him about an article I’d read recently, someone in Qatar was complaining
that the students now all spoke in dialect and none of them were learning
classical Arabic because it was never spoken in the home; the journalist asked
where the homes were where classical Arabic had been spoken for decades – this
was nothing new, he said. My father-in-law brightened. “That’s my next
project!” he said. “Of course, after we raise a million dollars for my
scholarship fund. I want to endow a department at AUB" (American University at Beirut – he is a graduate and used to teach there) "that will be devoted to
the study of classical Arabic language and literature. Imagine! All the focus
now is on studying the west. They’re turning out little Americans. Arabs should
be studying their own culture and this long wonderful tradition. But maybe no
one is interested. And we have a long way to go on the million dollars.”
“How
are you coming on your poem?” I asked. For the past year or so, he’s been writing a poem in Arabic that he says encapsulates everything he’s learned about the heart of religion. I don’t think he’s written anything down for months, and what he recited to us before wasn’t long – but it is epic in his mind and in concept.
“I
have most of it written down in Arabic, but not in English,” he said. “I need
two weeks of uninterrupted time, but I never get it. People come and bother me.
I’ve told you about my project that it came out of, haven’t I? About the twelve
people I studied, people who have had ‘epiphanies?’ I wanted to know what they
had in common, what they had discovered in common.”
“Tell
me again who the twelve were.”
“Let’s
see…” He shut his eyes. “Abraham. Moses. Isaiah – the second one, the one who
wrote ‘beat your swords..”
“…
into ploughshares.”
“Yes.
That Isaiah. Let’s see…Mohammad. Al-Hallaj – you know him, he’s the Muslim
philosopher who was executed because he ran out into the street crying “I am
God!” – they didn’t like that!’ I love him, I’ve spent a lot of time with Al-Hallaj…St. Francis of Assisi. How many is that?”
“Six.
If we’re going chronologically I think you forgot Jesus…?”
“Of
course. Jesus. Paul. And I think I put the Buddha in there too, for some reason.”
“We’re
still missing three.”
“Hmm.
Who isn’t there?” he repeated the list, counting them off on his fingers and
looking puzzled. “Oh!” he said, brightening up suddenly. “Of course – how stupid! I forgot the Greeks:
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.” He looked relieved.
“Great,”
I said. “That’s your twelve.”
“So
these were what I call ‘the originators of religion’ and most of them went to
the desert or some such place to meditate on the core of existence and that’s
where they got their epiphanies. In Arabic we call it al-din al-hanif:
literally, ‘the religion of the faucet, of the tap.’ My father would say, ‘go
fetch a glass of water from the hanif’ – the faucet in the courtyard. The
hanifa are a sect of Islam – it means “straight from the stream.” That’s what
these men were looking for: the pure thing, straight from the source."*
“So
what did you discover they had in common?”
“It
all has to do with wrapping yourself in love. And from that, seeking
self-esteem, justice, truth, goodness, beauty and excellence. This is all there
is. Then, of course, the priests come and make it into a system! I call it ‘churchianity!’
Because I am always looking for mischievous things, I find them!”
He sat back and laughed, shaking his big head at priests and the people who follow them.
"You
see,"he continued, "the most important verse in the Bible is ‘God is Love.’ There are so many
words in Arabic to express ‘love.’ Do you know there are over a thousand words
for camel? A lot of words for ‘sword.’ But I have no time anymore to pursue
these things…
In
Arabic we say, “When I love, I am no more.” It means to be lost in love, in the
sense of ‘being’– for one’s self to be annihilated. The verb is waliha – to be non-existent. ‘Ana
walhad’ – ‘I’m totally lost.’ That’s what we say when someone is in love.
That’s what love is. That’s what they were all getting at."
* My research tells me that hanif, in Arabic scholarship, was used to refer to the "original religion" – the original monotheists, of whom Abraham is the archetype. This pure monotheistic religion is considered by Muslims to have been corrupted in Judaism and Christianity; the Qu’ran states that Islam follows "..the religion of Ibrahim, the hanif, the Muslim.." As a capitalized word, it is a proper name that means "true believer."
–
We
left a little while after that. In the evening, after we’d gone to bed, the
phone rang. My sister-in-law said that she was with her father at the hospital;
he’d been taken there at 10:00 pm after suffering chest pain that his “little white pills” wouldn’t relieve. His
blood pressure had also been very high. They were in the emergency department
and she expected him to be admitted. Fortunately, we were in Vermont,
so we got dressed and went over. We stayed with him until 1:30 am, when he had been moved upstairs to intermediate
cardiac care, and was settled in a room. That was Wednesday night. They’ve had him on a nitrogycerin drip and are changing some of his medications. He seems to
be stable now, and has been in excellent spirits throughout. At his insistence, we’ve returned to Montreal;
we expect him to be released tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more about the
hospital stay in the next post.
The Office de la langue francaise (OLF) is launching a "sensitization campaign" to remind business owners in Montreal’s downtown of the language laws requiring French to be the language first used in greeting customers, and to appear first, and twice as large as English, in any signage. The program is coming out of a recent survey designed to study how language is being used in the city’s downtown core; the goal of the OLF (and the Quebec government) is to preserve the French character of the city. The survey revealed that French was the language of greeting 83% of the time, and the language in which customers were served about 90 per
cent of the time (I’m surprised by that; it seems like less to me.) Apparently the survey was carried out because of a lot of complaints in the French media that too much English was being used in the city’s business district. The OLF used 40 "francization counsellors" to conduct the survey; it employs seven other inspectors to enforce the language law.
