The Mysterious Orient/Occident (a politics-free post)

On Christmas Day, I followed the traditions of my people by eating in a Chinese restaurant. This particular one was a very good, and seemingly authentic, new one called the Sichuan Gourmet House. In between my bites of jellyfish (no tentacles; good but rather bland) and bitter melon (bitter), I pondered the age-old question: Why is the standard American spelling "Szechuan"? Where does the "z" come from?

Short answer: I don't know. I couldn't find a satisfactory answer on the Internet.

Slightly longer answer: I only know of one language where sz is pronounced as we pronounce the letter s (and s is not pronounced as we do): Hungarian. If you want to show an s sound in Hungarian, you have to write it sz. So I speculate that the distinctive cuisine of Sichuan was introduced into the US by some native of famously foodie Hungary.

Much longer answer: Blame the Romans.

When the Roman Catholic countries of Europe (some later Protestant) sat down to invent written languages for themselves, they used the Roman alphabet. This was natural, because the literate class read Latin, which was the language of the Church. (Similarly, the Persians, being Muslims, adopted Arabic script. The Eastern Orthodox Russians, Ukrainians, and Serbs used Cyrillic; not so the Catholic Poles, Czechs and Croats.) But there's a problem with using language A's alphabet to write language B: there are generally some sounds in language B that language A (in this case Latin) lacks, and for which it therefore has no letters.

People tried various ways of representing the missing sounds, usually by modifying existing letters. English relied heavily on adding h.  Thus we have ship and chip, whose initial sh and ch sounds do not exist in Latin. For the same sounds Polish made use of the z, baffling future generations of English-speakers by writing sz and cz where we would use sh and ch.

Hungarian, for some reason, used an approach opposite to Polish. It used the letter s for the sound the Poles write sz. But then it used sz for the sound that most languages use s for. Thus we have the financier George Soros, whose name is pronounced Shorosh in his native Hungarian. And thus, perhaps, we have Szechuan.

A couple more points. First, German doesn't have a sound like the ch of chip. So it used ch for the sound at the end of Bach. When English-speakers needed to romanize the Cyrillic alphabet of  Russian, they faced the problem that Russian has both a Bach sound and a chip sound  So English romanizations use kh for the Bach sound. Hence, Chekhov.

Finally, many people are puzzled by the way Qs and Xs have suddenly started popping up in Chinese words. What's the deal with tai qi for t'ai chi? Pretty simple. Romanization of Chinese has always been technically complex. As a result, there are many competing systems floating around, which is confusing. The Chinese government has tried to solve this problem by decreeing the correct system. That system ended up enlisting some otherwise unnecessary letters to represent some of the familiar problem sounds. Thus, q is (roughly) the ch sound in chip, and x the sh sound in ship.

Next time maybe I'll answer the question, "Tomato: Vegetable or Fruit?" Probably not, though.

More Than You Wanted on Libyan Linguistics

Wrong again. The name of Gadhafi's tribe is القذاذفـة, which I, consulting a Wikipedia article on the Arabic alphabet, read as Al-Gadhadhfah ("dh" like the first sound in "this"). So "Moammar El-Gadhafi" (which, you will recall, should really be "El-Gadhdhafi") means "Moammar of Al-Gadhadhfah tribe." Apparently rendering the definite article as "el" rather than "al" is another regionalism that's not considered standard Arabic, which is why we don't study elgebra and drink elcohol. I may be inconsistent in using "al" with the Libyan G. This tribe's home is in the Sirte region, which is where the next big battle is coming up.

Insanely obscure linguistic fact of the week: although Icelandic has a letter (ð) that's pronounced like the first sound in "this," the newspapers spell his name Gaddafi, not Gaððafi.

STILL MORE 3/30/11: The New York Times spells the name of  the tribe Qaddafa. According to Wikipedia (which uses "Qadhadhfa") the name means "those who spit out or vomit." He would never get elected in a democratic system: "Hi, I'm Fred Puker."

Update on Libyan Linguistics

I was wrong. A New York Times blog connects to this explanation by the AP of the different spellings of Qaddafi's name. Contrary to what I guessed, the first consonant in Qaddafi (to use the Times spelling) is indeed the same Q as in Al Qaeda or Qatar, one pronounced like an English k but further down in the throat. This is distinct from what is usually  transliterated as K, which is more or less the same as in English.

So why all the different spellings of the name? The first complication is that while this is the pronunciation in Classical Arabic, in the Libyan dialect that letter is pronounced as a g. I don't know if it's pronounced like an English g or further down in the throat; I suspect the latter. Next, the second consonant is doubled, which doesn't affect pronunciation in English but does in other languages, including Arabic. It's really pronounced like two letters, which basically just means you hold it longer.

Finally, the second consonant should be transliterated as dh, which is pronounced like the first two letters in "this" or "that," as distinct from the sound in "thick" and "thin." But writing "dhdh" looks silly, so some people, like the Times, have gone with "dd." As it happens, a lot of Libyans pronounce it dh as d anyway (like "dis" and "dat" in certain American cities).

In the end the AP decided to go with how he spells it himself, in accordance with "general policy," and found a letter where he called himself "Gadhafi." So that's what they use, and I guess what I'll use from now on.

Actually, he called himself "Moammar El-Gadhafi" which means "Moammar the Gadhafi." I would guess, though my guesses haven't been too good thus far, that "Gadhaf" is either a place or a clan.

Th_ee mo_e obse_vations on the missing __

1. Contrary to what I implied in my posting of August 20 ("The R in English Literature"), dialects that drop the R in words like "hard" or "father"--such dialects, I have recently learned, are called "non-rhotic"--are apparently not universal in Britain. There are still some rhotic speakers in the west of England and in Scotland. Of course, many features of American speech, and culture in general, that we think of as differentiating us from the British can be traced back to particular regions in Britain whence the settlers of America came.

Rhotic dialects in England are disappearing under the pressure of the higher social status of standard pronunciation, just as non-rhotic dialects are in the U.S. There's an interesting research question here: In the U.S., a strong non-rhotic Boston or New York accent marks one as being of lower social or intellectual status, but a non-rhotic British accent is a mark of higher status, and is often even considered affected. This presumably goes back to an American sense of cultural inferiority. What I wonder is how most people in Britain now perceive an American accent, and how that's changed over time.

2. People who listen to non-rhotic speakers in the U.S. often believe that these speakers overcompensate, as it were, by adding an R to words ending in a vowel. Thus, my brother-in-law jokes that his relatives refer to his cousin Marla as "Mahler." As far as I can tell, though, this is generally not true; the R is inserted only between two vowels. There is a startlingly clear demonstration on Geoff and Maria Muldaur's Pottery Pie album, when Maria, a native of New York, sings "Georgia On My Mind":

Georgia, Georgia,
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgeron my mind, Georgeron my mind...

Oddly, or not, this is where non-rhotic speakers usually preserve a real R. Incidentally, Gregg Allman used to listen to a continuous tape loop of Amos Garrett's guitar solo on this track. Just thought I'd mention that.

3. A non-rhotic children's joke:

What did the chick say when the hen laid an orange?
 "Hey! Look at the orange marmalade!"

The R in English Literature

In the 1980s there was a British/Nigerian singer named Sade. A number of people informed me that her name was pronounced Shar-day. I didn't believe it. No one whose name is pronounced Shar-day is going to spell it Sade. Just ignore the R? Finally I figured it out: this was a British rendition of the pronunciation Shah-day. If you say Shar-day with pretty much any British accent, it comes out Shah-day.

It took me a long time, though, to understand just how widespread this British approach to transcription is, and how much confusion it creates for Americans. The next time it clicked for me was thinking about a passage that had puzzled me since childhood:

"But I thought he was a boy?"
"So did I," said Christopher Robin.
"Then you can't call him Winnie?"
"I don't."
"But you said--"
"He's Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don't you know what 'ther' means?

If you're an American, of course, you have no idea what ''ther" means. But now we see that Milne was trying to show that the word was pronounced "the" and not "thee."

Examples start to come thick and fast after a while. Why did P.G. Wodehouse, who spent a lot of time in the US, have his American characters say, "You betcher!" No American ever says "You betcher!" And neither do these; they're really saying "You betcha!" And why do people say "Er..." in books when they interrupt someone? I've never heard anyone say "Er..." But in fact they're making a sound fairly close to what would be rendered in American English as "Uh..." or "Unh..."

Some jokes don't come off as well, either, if you don't know the secret. When Alice asks why they called their teacher the tortoise if he wasn't one, the Mock Turtle says, "We called him the tortoise because he taught us, of course!" Pretty lame with a Midwestern accent. If you have a British accent, though (or a strong New England or Bronx or Southern accent), those words are nearly homophones.

Just today, I woke up from a dream in which I was playing Tevye the dairyman on stage (and also directing, if you're interested) and didn't have my costume ready. And I suddenly understood how the word "yarmulke" got its spelling. (I think the "l" is also supposed to be silent.)

This still leaves the question, why do they do it? Why don't the British just write "shah-day" and "You betcha!" Beats me. Why do they drive on the left?