Tvindy

Manifold Super Funny

Danger!

I came across this curious paper taped to a wall in the historic part of Lisbon. I've translated it below, leaving out the name and passport number:

Do You Know This Man?

If you don't, consider yourself lucky. If you do, then it's best to exercise caution. His name is *****, he's German, and his passport number is *****. He mostly hangs out in the areas of Príncipe Real, Bairro Alto, Castelo and Graça, and he's one of the biggest conmen to ever come to Portugal.

Never put money into his hand! You'll never see it again. . .

He came from Germany to escape from the debts he had there. He says he's a student, a teacher, a translator, a painter, but he's a salesman (The problem is that he sells contraband). . . Be very careful!

He never liked to work and has always depended on women to support him. He has betrayed friends and conned customers at a business that he created and then abandoned.

He specializes in biting the hand that feeds him. Furthermore he's homophobic and incapable of respecting anyone's privacy!

Be alert! Never trust him!

Smoking Kills!

Cigarette warnings are much more emphatic in Portugal than here in the US. This translates as "Smoking kills".

And here is one that says "Smoking may cause a slow and painful death":

The duty free shop in the airport carries cigarette packs with translated warnings:

The Little Red Romanian Hen

For our final project in Romanian class, we made a sort of animated version of The Little Red Hen. Unfortunately, we had severe audio problems, but, other than the fact that most of the Romanian is inaudible, it's still a cool movie. You can view it by clicking on the above image.

My Linguistic Profile

Your Linguistic Profile:

75% General American English

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? (from sucks)

Agonizing Translation Work

I suppose everyone is wondering what's going on with the book project. Things have a way of becoming hectic and staying that way for several days. I really haven't had a chance to get to it and probably won't this week. But next week things are looking up, since nearly all of my schoolwork this term should be completed by then. In other words, it looks like mid-March will be when I finally get it done and submitted. Once again, I apologize for all the delays.

For now though, I want to share with you a small piece of an enormous tranlation of a hellish legal document that I hope to have finished by tomorrow. It really goes to show that lawyers can obfuscate in any language. Here is one of my favorite sentences in the original Portuguese:

Desde que começou a participar do processo de licenciamento ambiental da UHE Barra Grande, no exercício de seu dever constitucional e de sua prerrogativa federativa, a FEPAM apontou inúmeras falhas e lacunas no Termo de Referência que iria subsidiar a elaboração do EIA/Rima (documentos R e S) e, posteriormente, no próprio estudo ambiental, tendo por diversas vezes solicitado ao empreendedor e ao IBAMA que realizassem estudos complementares ou refizessem alguns já realizados, por entender que as informações nele constantes eram inconsistentes, incompletas ou inverídicas.

And here is my translation. (Notice how I managed to preserve the original obfuscation.):

Ever since FEPAM began participating in the Barra Grande Hydroelectric Plant environmental licensing project, in the exercise of its constitutional duty and of its federative prerrogative, it has pointed out countless failures and oversights in the Termo de Referência that would subsidize the putting together of the Environmental Impact Study/Environmental Impact Report (documents R and S) and, later, in the environmental study itself, having several times requested the project undertaker and IBAMA to perform complementary studies or to redo some that had already been performed, understanding that the information contained within them was inconsistent, incomplete or untrue.

Portuguese Test

I gave a Portuguese test to my beginning students today, and I thought it was amusing enough to reproduce here. The students had to fill in the blanks of a dialogue with an appropriate word. You can view the English translation by clicking on the link below.

João: Bom dia, Maria.

Maria: Oi, João. Como é que tá?

João: Ótimo. Como se __________ "telefone" em inglés?

Maria: É "telephone number".

João: Qual __________ seu telefone?

Maria: O __________ telefone é 555-0666.

João: cinco cinco __________ __________ meia meia meia?

Maria: Sim. Odeio esse número.

João: Mas por que não gosta __________ número?

Maria: É muito satânico.

João: Ah, sim. 666 __________ um número diabólico.

Maria: Como se __________ o diabo?

João: O nome __________ é Lúcifer.

Maria: Não é Satanás?

João: Satanás é __________ sobrenome dele.

Maria: Senhor Lúcifer Satanás. Então o que é Beelzebub?

João: É o apelido dele.

Maria: Que nomes estranhos! Não __________ nomes brasileiros.

João: O diabo é da Itália.

Maria: E qual é o país de Deus?

João: Deus é brasileiro.

Maria: Você é muito inteligente.

João: Nós dois __________ inteligentes. A sua área de __________ é física, não?

Maria: Sim, _________ inteligente como você

João: E diabólica.

Maria: Tchau.

João: Tchau.

Romanian Presentation

As most of you probably already know by now, I study Romanian at the U of O through the Yamada Language Center. The curriculum requires that every class put on some sort of presentation for the other classes at the end of each term. Last quarter, I put together my own presentation. (There were only two students in the class.) It was the first time I used my iPod photo to do an in-class presentation. I made up some slides and then showed them on the TV. My teacher liked what I did and said I should make a permanent written version of it, so that's what I've done here. Please bear in mind when reading it that I know my scholarship is kind of sloppy (no footnotes, gross generalizations, a few sprinkles of BS), but most of the other classes just put on skits. The other student in my class taught the audience to do the Hokey Pokey in Romanian.

More Fun With Romanian

Whenever I'm too tired to write anything, I just put up a photo. This is something my Romanian teacher drew the other day when she was feeling artistic.

Llama Song Translation 2.0

Bakerina's comment on my previous post made me aware of some defects in my llama song translation. I believe I've ironed out all the major flaws. Click the link below to view the definitive translation.

A Canção Lhama

Snowball wanted me to translate the Llama Song into three Romance languages. (I'm not quite sure why.) Unfortunately, I only have time to do it in Portuguese. Here it is:

A Canção Lhama

Aqui está um lhama,
Ali está um lhama,
E mais um lhaminha,
Lhama felpudo, lhama engraçado,
Lhama lhama pato.

Lhama lhama torta de queijo,
Tablete tijolo batata lhama,
Lhama lhama cogumelo lhama,
Lhama lhama pato.

Uma vez fui casinha de árvore,
Eu morava num bolo,
Mas jamais vi a maneira pela qual a laranja assassinou o ancinho.
Eu só tinha três anos de morte,
Mas contou uma história,
E agora, escute, criançinha, o parapeito de segurança.

Já viu um lhama
Beijar um lhama na lhama
Lhama de lhama
Tem sabor de lhama,
Lhama lhama pato.

Meio lhama,
O lhama dobrado,
Lhama agricultor,
Lhama num carro,
Alarme um lhama
Lhama pato.

É assim que se conta hoje em dia?
É tudo tão velho assim?
É feito de água de limão?
Maçaneta de porta tornozelo frio
Agora a minha cançao está ficando escassa,
Já perdi a sorte.
Está na hora de eu me aposentar e virar pato.

Observations:

• My translation does not rhyme.
• It's very hard to translate words that have no clear contextual meaning. In "Doorknob ankle cold", does "cold" mean headcold or frigidness, or is it an adjective? In my translation, it looks like the song is refering to a cold ankle.
• There is no cheesecake in the Portuguese-speaking world, so I translated it as "cheese pie".
• "Lemon also gave me a headache. In Brazil, the word "limão" is used generally to refer to limes and a few related species that we don't have in the US. (One variety is even orange!) But there are no yellow lemons available in Brazil, except perhaps in import stores. A bit of online research revealed that what we call a lemon is actually a hybrid. I think "limão" works as a general lemon/lime term, so I used it in the translation. Otherwise I would have had to go with a Latin designation or some obscure term, like "limão-galego" that most Brazilians would not know.
• "Lhama" can also be "lama", but that would be too easy to pronounce (and also means "mud" when feminine).

Other Blog

Now that I'm teaching, I decided to make one of the main requirements for passing my Beginning Portuguese class to be participation in a class blog. I'd like to encourage people to check it out from time to time and leave comments. I'm hoping that when the students see that people out in the world are actually reading their entries, it will encourage them to write more. (So far only one student has contributed.)

I tried this once before with my classmates in the advanced Portuguese class. Everyone thought it was a great idea at the time, but I was the only one to ever write anything in it.

Young Society Matrons

In my language teaching course, the prof was showing us transparencies of old teaching materials. This is a page from a very old Spanish language textbook. I thought the caption under the photo was particulary interesting. Unfortunately, all of the matrons' faces are off-screen.

Francophone Hulk

Bill is having another contest. The object of this one is to tell the funniest joke. Well, what could be funnier than the Hulk speaking French? These scanned images come from an old French translation I purchased many years ago.

I suppose it may not strike you as that funny if you've never studied the language. It's not just that the Hulk is a savage brute speaking French. What's really funny is that he speaks elegant French while still maintaining his characteristic self-references in the third person. Other than that, as far as I can tell, his use of the language is flawless, even to the point of his having mastered past participle agreement in the plus-que-parfait tense of the indicative, which is often a stumbling block even to advanced students of the language.

When he says "Jarella était venue . . ." (picture on left, second panel, first balloon), he understands that "venir" is one of the handful of intransitives that require the verb "être" as an auxiliary (rather than "avoir") to form the perfect tenses. He further understands that when "être" is used, the past participle, which would normally agree in gender and number with a direct object preceding the verb, must instead agree with the subject. Furthermore, he grasps that, because he is speaking of an event in the past that occurred in relation to and preceding another past event, he must use the plus-que-parfait (past perfect) in lieu of the passé composé (present perfect). The Hulk may have his shortcomings, but I'll say this for him: His French is kick-ass!

Now why would the French do such a poor job of translating the Hulk's speech patterns? Here's my theory. The French take grammar very seriously and are incredibly protective of it. I'm not exaggerating. If a math teacher calls on a student to give an answer, and the answer given is mathematically correct but in improper French, then it is not accepted! If you compare colonial British countries with French ones, it's interesting to note that pidgins cropped up all over the place in the British Empire. In fact, the British were even known to reprimand the colonized for speaking proper English, since they used language as a class divider. On the other hand, look at the countries that were once under French rule. I don't think any French pidgins have developed anywhere in the world. They would never have been allowed to emerge.

So you can see how important it is for the French to clean up the Hulk's grammar, especially in view of all the children who would be exposed to the green goliath's grammatical bastardizations. The Hulk may be little more than a savage brute who deals with most problems by finding something or someone to smash, but, by God, there is no way in Hell that he will be allowed to speak less than perfect French. Think of the children!

Okay, just in case you're curious as to what the Hulk is saying, here is my translation.

First Panel:
letterbox: And all the Rage builds with the memories.
Hulk: "ARRGHH"
letterbox: All the suffering caused by the death of his beloved.

Second Panel:
Hulk: "Jarella had come to the Earth, because she needed Hulk."
Hulk: "But the world of Hulk killed her!"
footnote: In fact, Crypto-Man killed her in issue 23 of Hulk.

Third Panel:
Hulk: "Hulk will take Jarella home."
letterbox: Poings of [something] weaken the cement that covered the runway.

And here is what he says in the second graphic.

First Panel:
Hulk: "The soldiers fire at Hulk."

Second Panel:
Hulk: "They shoot stupid rockets."

Third Panel:
Hulk: "Hulk will catch them . . ."

Fourth Panel:
Hulk: ". . . and make of them a large ball of metal . . ."

Fifth Panel:
Hulk: ". . . then send it upon the soldiers!"
Hulk: "What's wrong, soldiers? Why don't you shoot anymore?"

I often tell people, "You haven't lived until you've seen the Hulk speaking French." Well, now you can relax, for you have seen it and been fulfilled.

Rare Comics

A couple days ago during my continuing adventures in cleaning, I came across these two comics. They have been missing for over a decade, and I had thought them long gone. In fact, I was convinced that they had never made it back to the US. But while I was looking through a box of some of my old Brazil souvenirs, I found them neatly wrapped in newspaper pages. Since I also saved many newspaper articles (and entire newspapers), some of which were also in that box, I had failed to notice the comics.

These were bought in Brazil in the very early nineties in one of those small used book shops that opens and then goes out of business within a few months. The comics were on display in the shop window. I used to be a comic book fanatic, and I was very much aware of what American comics were available in Brazil and their general look, but I had never come across anything nearly this old before. Not only were they old, but they are both first issues from 1970. And they were of the approximate dimensions of actual American comics, although of much lower quality. The interior pages are all in black and white.

I'm sure the store owners had some idea of their rarity, since they were on display and cost a substantial amount of money. I don't remember that amount, but the figure of the equivalent of US$7 apiece sticks in my mind. If so, that was a substantial price for a used comic in Brazil at that time.

Although one is the first issue of the Fantastic Four, it does not contain the first story, which explains their origin. Instead, it is a later story. But the cover explains that they now have their own comic due to popular demand, which implies that the earlier stories had appeared previously in anthology form, which, by the way, was also the later standard for printing Marvel comics in Brazil. (I have no idea how they do it currently.) In this issue, the Fantastic Four fight the Red Ghost. He is a villain, who, inspired by the origin of the Fantastic Four's superpowers (created by cosmic ray exposure when they went up in a rocketship), decided to get superpowers of his own. He went up in his own rocket with a bunch of monkeys, and it worked. He and his monkeys each received unique superpowers and were always up to no good. Of course, soon after that, American and Russian astronauts proved that cosmic rays do not actually give people (or monkeys) superpowers. A much later explanation was given that the members of the Fantastic Four had simply been unlucky and been in space during a rare period of unusually fierce cosmic ray activity. The Red Ghost realized this and calculated his space trip to coincide with another such period.

The second comic looks to be a Brazilian version of Tales of Suspense. Originally Iron Man and Captain America shared that single comic. They didn't work together or anything like like that. Each had a separate story in their half of the comic. Apparently in Brazil, the editors decided to stick Thor in there as well, despite the fact that Thor had had his own comic right from the beginning, when he appeared in, and ended up hijacking, Journey into Mystery. (Spiderman did something similar, appearing first in issue fifteen of Amazing Fantasy, but, instead of hijacking it, he went on to star in a separate comic called The Amazing Spiderman.) Tales to Astonish eventually went on to become exclusively the home of Captain America, and Iron Man separated off to start his own line of comics. (Or was it the other way around?)

I really don't know the actual value of these two comics. I suspect there is no actual set value. Although I'm certain they are extremely rare, as far as I know, comic books are not really collected in Latin America, at least not as objects representing monetary value. Someday that may change. In the meantime, I am delighted to have found them.

Brazilian Blogs

Ever since I started blogging, I've been hoping to find some good Brazilian blogs to read. I've logged more than three years living in Brazil, so this would give me a great opportunity to practice my Portuguese and keep up with the goings on there. Occasionally I would check out a few Brazilian blogs to see if I could find any gems, but I never did. Finding the blogs was never hard. Brazil is overflowing with them. And Blogger even has an entire section set up just for Brazilians.

Last night I decided that I would devote as much time as necessary to finding at least one excellent blog to make a regular read. I started combing through them one-by-one, but there just wasn't anything. The blogging phenomenon may have taken Brazil by storm, but it's just something done by kids. There is no real content, at least not in anything I found. Mostly it's just teenagers trying to have a cool-looking site rather than something unique or informative. The actual content is nothing more than day-to-day ramblings about school and friends, and sometimes there is bad poetry.

There is however, something to be said for cool. kittyss world has the most spectacular template I have ever seen in my entire life! I mean, holy poop!!! American blogs never look like that. I did some investigating and discovered that the template was designed by a fellow named Bruno Maximus, who is also Brazilian. Check out some of his designs. (It's too bad snowball already found someone to redesign her template; otherwise I'd be sending her over to Bruno for a Hello Kitty makeover.)

One interesting thing about Brazilian blogs is the abbreviated writing style. I know we American bloggers often take shortcuts. (For example, receptionista usually doesn't capitalize the first letter of each sentence.) But some Brazilian blog entries read like instant messenger conversations. I find this phenomenon really interesting because of my interest in language. Here is an entry taken from Blig: Meninas:

21/05/2004 00:31
oieeeeeee!!!!!!genteeeeee!!!
nossaa faix mó cara q eu 
naum escrevo aki neh???
eh a merda du meu mouse 
quebro....maix agora
ja comprei otro....
bom....
meu niver passo.....
ahhh tenhu 13 aninhus agora!!!!
rsrsrsrsrs....
bom naum aconteceu nada...de bom!!!
eh neh faze oq....

Now here's what it would like like in regular Portuguese:

Oi, gente!
Nossa. Faz a maior cara [???] que eu
não escrevo aqui, né?
É que a merda do meu mouse
quebrou, mas agora
já comprei outro.
Bom,
meu aniversário passou.
Ah, tenho 13 aninhos agora!
risos
Bom, não aconteceu nada. . . de bom!
É, né. Fazer o que?

It's practically a different language. And if you're curious, here is what it would be in English:

Hi, people!
Wow. I Haven't written here
for the longest time, right?
It's that my shitty mouse
broke, but now
I've bought a new one.
Well,
I had my birthday.
Ah, I'm 13 little years old now!
laughs
Well, nothing has happened. . . nothing good!
Yeah, right. Whatcha gonna do?

I'm still hoping to eventually find a few good Brazilian blogs, but the situation looks pretty bleak. Receptionista e-mailed me about dandrums, which is the only Brazilian blog I've come across with real content, but the Brazilian is blogging from London. If anyone out there knows of any others, please let me know.

I'm Famous

I've been here less than four and a half weeks, and already I've made a name for myself. Today I was quoted in a front-page article in the school newspaper. (Actually, the article starts on page one, but I'm quoted in the part of the article that's continued on the last page.) You can read it here. This is the part that mentions me:

Graduate student Kinsey Swartz said he's found the self-study courses to be a good way to learn the Romance languages he studies at a faster pace. He said he is trying to learn Italian quickly, but his 200-level class is holding him back.

"I would love it if there were Italian self-study classes," he said.

It may be short, but the reporter managed to find room for three factual errors. I am particularly disturbed by my allegedly having stated that my Italian class is holding me back. Not only is the meaning of my words distorted, but the context is completely missing. I'm sure my Italian instructor will be thrilled to read that.

In case you happen to be reading this post sometime in the distant future, and the link to the article has gone dead, I have preserved the text here, and you can read it by clicking on the link below.

Another Paper

While I'm recuperating and catching up on my studies, feel free to peruse the paper I wrote for one of my Spanish classes. Probably that's what made me sick in the first place.

My First Italian Composition

Now that I'm back in school, I'm generating more material (old school papers) that I can post on Tuesdays. Today I'm putting up the very first Italian composition I have written. The assignment was to write a modern fairy tale. I didn't know how to do that, so I just used the traditional model but added a computer to the storyline. It worked, and I got a 95%. Here it is:

Una Fiaba Moderna

C'era una volta un Re, una regina, ed una Principessa. La Principessa era triste, perché il suo computer non funzionava e non potava accedere l'Internet. I genitori non sapevano che fare. Si misero in contatto con un mago che usò la iettatura nel computer, ma lui non risolvette il problema. In seguito, chiamarono una chiromante, ma lei non potette fare niente, perché il computer non aveva mani. Anche non riuscirono con cartomanti, santi, e Babbo Natale.

Una giornata arrivò un Principe.

“Perché siete voi così tristi?” domandò lui al Re.

“Il computer della mia figlia non funziona più.” disse il Re.

“Io salverò su figlia!” affermò il Principe.

Velocemente il Principe trovò il computer infernale e installò un
programma anti virus che correggette il problema. In seguito, il
computer cominciò a funzionare perfettamente, il Principe sposò
la Principessa, e la famiglia viveva felice per sempre.

What I've Learned

I've completed my first week here at the University of Oregon. Here are some interesting tidbits I've learned so far, having just begun working toward my degree in Romance languages.

In Italian I found out that the italian word carnevale, which is the same carnival celebrated in in Brazil and in the US in New Orleans is actually derived from the words carne (meat) and valere (to have value). Carnival is celebrated just before Lent, which is the week Catholics give up meat (and other things), so during Carnival, everyone devours all the meat they can so as not to miss it so much in the week ahead. The interesting thing is that carne is also the word for flesh. It's interesting that both Spanish and Portuguese also have the words valer and carne (complete with double meaning), but I had never noticed the connection before.

In my medieval writings class, I learned that although medieval scholars believed the earth to be located in the center of the universe, they believed it to be a very tiny and insignificant part of the universe. Some medieval texts even stated that the celestial sphere was 118 million miles away! That would make it quite huge. Earth was seen to be in the center only because it was the smallest sphere, and all the spheres were arranged concentrically. That is from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C. S. Lewis.

In a Spanish literature class I got to read the Cantar de Mio Cid. It's an epic poem about an eleventh-century caballero (knight), who gets exiled but redeems himself by conquering a bunch of Moores and taking their lands back for Spain. In the process, he gets rich and powerful and becomes unexiled. His daughters marry noblemen, who turn out to be jerks, etc. The funny thing is that about two-thirds of the way in, there is section in which "the lion escaped from his cage". I find this very strange, especially since no lion is mentioned previously anywhere in the poem. There is never any explanation given for why el Cid had a caged lion on his property in Spain to begin with, much less how it managed to escape. Very strange. Anyway, you can read the whole lion incident here.

The French Subjunctive in Context

Yes, it's time once again to release one of my old college papers into the public domain. This is one I wrote for an independent study to complete my major in French. I compared the usage of the subjunctive in five romance languages to see if I could identify any fundamental difference in how it is employed. On the face of it, all the major romance languages seem to use it in in very similar ways, but I was curious about those instances in which one language would use it but another would not in a nearly identical sentence. Clearly there had to be something more going on, and I was very excited to find out what it was. This is the longest and most well-researched paper I have ever written, so you can imagine how disappointed I was when, in the end, I found nothing. Sigh. (Sorry if that spoiled the ending for you.)

I am publishing this as a PDF to retain the footnotes, which are, by far, the most interesting part of the paper. Also, I should say that originally there was a bibliography, but I can't seem to find it at the moment. One further shortcoming you may spot is that the Romanian characters are not accurately reproduced, since I could not locate them on the windows character map. Finally, I should note that the professor who oversaw and graded this grande œvre was Dr. James Hightower (now retired). Not many French teachers would have permitted a student to write such a paper in English.

The French Subjunctive in Context: a comparative study of the uses of the subjunctive in French compared to its uses in other Romance languages

Spanish Composition

Here's a nifty little essay I wrote for my Spanish Composition class last February. Bush was going after Saddam at the time, and that inspired my teacher (Dr. Moulin) to give us the assignment of writing a 500 word composition on the theme of preventive war. It's not Pulitzer Prize material, of course, but it was fun to write, and it earned me an A, so I'm reproducing it here. Hopefully everyone who reads it understands that it's all tongue-in-cheek and doesn't take offense. (By the way, it's in Spanish, so feel free to skip over this entry if Spanish isn't your thing.

Much of the inspiration came from a passage in The End of Nature about the possible political repercussions of the greenhouse effect. (This is really little more than a quote of a quote.):

Francis Bretherton, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Time that if the Great Plains became a dust bowl and people followed the seasonable temperatures north, Canada might rival the Soviet Union as the world's most powerful nation. (Bill McKibben, page 132)