Journal Entries
On Oooooooooh Aaaaaaaaaaaah! (NaJoPoMo #6)
Posted Nov 6, 2011
You took the Star to his first fireworks display yesterday.
It’s not the first time he’s seen fireworks. You took him to the Ancestral New Town last year for rockets and Catherine wheels in the back garden. He loved it, so for 2011 you decided that it was time to take him to the real thing in the Big Park Near You. Oh, and the Comet. The Comet really benefits from being a second child. There is no way the Star would have been out so far past his bedtime at her age.
You set off with a good half hour to go, thinking that you would just pop on the bus and get to the place you and B had decided would be a good one to observe from.
This happened to be on the other side of the river to where the display was actually taking place. You are cheap, you see, and didn’t feel like paying the £20 entrance fee (‘kids go free!’ Yeah. Right).
First snag. You had insufficiently considered that everybody else in your corner of London would be doing the same thing. You were eventually forced to walk an extra 15 minutes to the other bus-stop, miss another two buses due to overcrowding, muscle your way into the last seats on the top floor on a third, roar off round the corner, and then get promptly stuck in a traffic jam.
You got off the bus.
You began trotting towards the river, determinedly dragging the toddler. But at some point, you and B decided that you weren’t going to make the far bank in time and cut left through the houses in order to go and ooh and ahh from the boundaries of the park.
As it happens, when the display started, the fireworks marshals were too busy removing the fencing in anticipation of the exodus to come, and so you and quite a lot of other people ended up standing just inside the park, with a pretty good view of the bangs and wizzes.
The Star really enjoyed himself. He ended up on his Papa’s shoulders shouting WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! and DAAAVAAAAAI, DAAAVAAAAAI!* at the top of his voice throughout.
The Comet started stoically at the pretty lights. Very occasionally, she blinked. You had your hand over her ears, but still, you’d expected a bit more reaction.
Then it was time to go home.
You meandered back along your side of the river, watching the party boats sail by and allowing the Star plenty of time to throw leaves into the water.
Then you got to your bus stop. They’d closed the roads round the park and the traffic was pretty chocka, but your bus was coming so you weren’t too worried.
The bus was terminating there and turning round again rather than trying to force its way through the jam any further. They do that. It’s irritating. It’s especially irritating when you have an over stimulated toddler and a baby to get home. Eventually you decided to bite the bullet and just walk.
You walked and walked and walked. B carried the Star, but the Star is 20kg these days and he could only do so far before you both had to find new incentives to keep the kid on his feet a bit further. Sadly, pigeon chasing is impractical at night. There are no pigeons.
You made it to another, different bus stop after a while. The Star entertained himself, as he is wont to do in such circumstances, by commanding passers-by to STOP! As ever, a few revellers did so, which just thrilled him right down to his little socks.
Your bus came.
And went again. Too overcrowded to even stop.
You ended up getting the Inconvenient Bus and then Yet Another Bus after that, arriving home at 10.30pm.
The fireworks finished at 8.30.
Next year, you will probably be partaking of your parents’ hospitality again.
*’Let’s go! Let’s Go!’
This sounds like a typical Solnushka and family outing... but is it?
See A87679886 for the 'Do you remember your first time?' challenge and make your own mind up.
Discuss this Journal entry [13]
Latest reply: Nov 6, 2011
On Stress Management (NaJoPoMo #5)
Posted Nov 5, 2011
Two weeks ago you wielded absolute power via Twitter over the BBC's Formula One coverage. After sporadic tweeting over the course of a number of races, Martin Brundle, the lead commentator for the BBC's coverage if Formula One, called you 'someone having a moan on Twitter' and accepted your correction of his pronunciation of the Russian driver Vitaly PetROV's name.
You were ecstatic.
Two weeks later he had changed his mind and this time you were shamed on live international TV.
He'd asked PetROV how to pronounce his name, and come away with the impression that the way that he, Martin**, and every other English speaker says it ('PETrov') was, in fact, correct.
'After all he should know,' he ended triumphantly.*
You can think of a number of reasons for the discrepancy between your understanding of the pronunciation and Martin's.
You are wrong. This is clearly not an option.
PetROV is wrong. Now he has been living abroad for a while. You strongly suspect that he has given up worrying about the mad things English speakers do to his name. If Martin said 'Am I saying this right? PETrov?' you can well imagine him thinking himself lucky that his name wasn't being pronounced 'Peters' and nodding enthusiastically.
Martin is wrong.
Now you do not rule out option two, but in fact you are going for door number three as you would not be at all surprised if the truth is that when PetROV growled 'PetROV', Martin heard 'PETrov regardless. And here's why.
One of the problems people encounter with language learning, when learning a new language rather than acquiring more than one language as a child, is the amount of interference they get from their native tongue.
This is particularly pronounced when it comes to pronunciation.
Theoretically, babies are born with the potential to speak any language, although recent studies show that even in the womb they are picking up elements of what will become their native tongue. It doesn't take long before babies are showing a marked preference towards what will become their mother tongue(s). Even babies' babble is different for different languages.
This means that out of the full range of sounds a human mouth can make, sooner rather than later, they start to fixate on a really rather limited number. And it's not just sounds either, but things like patterns in sentence and word stress and intonation. Babies quickly get used to a particular way of declaiming a language and, and this is the important bit, they start to lose the ability to really hear, let alone produce, nuances in the pronunciation in other languages.
People tend to think it's the individual sounds they need to pay attention to in pronunciation. But while you can have a lot of fun discussing sheets with B on laundry day because Russians do not have a long/ short vowel distinction and tend to pronounce the 'i' and 'ee' in 'trip' and 'tree' the same, mainly all that mispronunciation of sounds does is tip other people off that you are someone with a charmingly other accent.
Word stress is important for comprehension, much more so than the pronunciation of individual sounds. There are some real WTF moments to be had when struggling to work out what somebody who has just put the stress on the wrong syLAble of a key word actually means.
Now stress in English is achieved in three ways. Firstly, a stressed syllable will be louder than other syllables. So far so obvious. But it will also be longer than other syllables and higher in pitch.
This is not the same in all languages. In French, for example, all syllables take the same mount of time to say, regardless of stress.
Russian has a much narrower pitch range than English. Their lows are not as low and their highs are not as high.
This is mainly a problem in intonation, especially as they also change pitch less often in any given utterance.
And what does intonation convey? Politeness, interest, emotion. In particular, in English we show politeness and interest by starting really high, changing pitch often and swooping up to the full height or full low of our range.
Most Russians, then, tend to come across as flat, monotone, disinterested, rude.
It also means that English speakers sound tragically over excited about virtually everything when they speak Russian. Russians habitually think that English speakers are more tired, more excited, more angry, more everything than they actually are whether they are speaking Russian or English.
And that means it is harder for a native English speaker to spot, let alone reproduce, word stress in Russian. They are only doing two and a half of the three things the English speaker does.
It doesn't help that in this case, English two-syllable nouns almost always put the stress on the first one.
Now spotting pronunciation nuances, including word stress, is one of those skills that comes with practice.
You are pretty good at it. You have spent 15 years in classrooms wondering why Kirill is virtually incomprehensible and trying to fix it. That's a lot of time tuning your ear into mistakes.
Martin Brundle clearly isn't.
Not that he should feel too bad about it. He can hear things in the note of an engine that you wouldn't even with a pause button and the volume turned up high.
But given that he might feel a little dubious about accepting the expertise of some pseudonymous Internet weirdo, and because you, obviously feel the need to prove to the Internet at large that you are the one who is right, you have decided to provide him, and the rest of the Formula One presenters with some more, some many more examples of Russian people, commentators, newscasters and random fans saying 'petROV', sometimes quite loudly, in the hope that if it is repeated often enough they will be able to get their ear in.
You would also like them to pay attention to the fact that there's a rolled R and the 'v' sound at the end is much softer, more like an F, than they are expecting.
But you will be magnanimous in victory and give them till the end of the season to get that right.
The video evidence*** is actually here: http://solnushka.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/on-stress-management/
This is because it is all in Russian and you have lost track of the etiquette. Even though you left of the really sweary one. Because they called him Vitaly.
*The race is till up on iPlayer for one more day if people would like to witness your humiliation first hand. The section in question is sometime soonish after the halfway point in the race. No, you are not going to be more specific than that.
**Now you are in an actually back and forth dialogue, you are even more sure that you are on first name terms with Marty.
***It is legal, apparently, for you to splice these videos together to make one long 'petROVpetROVpetROVpetROVpetROV' drone. Something to do with satirical purposes.**** You would appreciate any help on whether it is possible.
****Satirical? Someone on the TV is WRONG! This is deadly serious.
Discuss this Journal entry [10]
Latest reply: Nov 5, 2011
On unusual brevity (NaJoPoMo #4)
Posted Nov 4, 2011
It's my birthday.
Send cake.
Discuss this Journal entry [16]
Latest reply: Nov 4, 2011
On the Voyage of the Beagle (NaJoPoMo #3)
Posted Nov 3, 2011
B’s problem with dinosaurs is that at the moment every book he picks up when he wants to read to the Star contains pictures of snarling teeth devouring smaller, cuter animals and he is having difficulty finding euphemisms to explain it.
But the Star is completely animal, insect* and fish** mad and it is impossible to avoid the topic of what they, let alone dinosaurs, eat completely. You tend to wince and say ’I expect that rabbit is having a sleep’ when you get to that bit. It’s hard to look a three-year old in the face and say, yes, that owl is eating that mouse, look at that blood splatter, imagine the crunch of its delicate little bones as you peruse the encyclopaedia, when not five minutes before you were reading a story about a kind-hearted hamster in a tutu and his best friend the cat in a bowler hat. The kind-hearted talking hamster no less.
That said, it’s probably you and B who are the sensitive ones. It does not seem to bother the Star in the slightest. He cheerfully lists all the animals a lion might be expected to chomp on and many that are improbable, and his eyes light up when he finds a picture of a fox bearing down on an unsuspecting gaggle of chickens. One of his favourite things is to bounce up to the fish counter in the supermarket, point to the most fishy looking fish there and say ‘I eat fish!’ He is even sanguine about the possibility of personal danger. ‘That dinosaur eat me up?’ he asks with relish every time we come across a T-rex.
In fact, the only thing he seems a bit upset about is when it’s insects getting savaged.
The Star really really likes his bug-friends.*** He has a particular downer on spiders for this reason.
This is not B’s only objection to dinosaurs, however. He feels that the Star is putting a lot of effort into learning some really useless facts. He came to this conclusion after the Star had taken him through the latest library book and accurately named all the terrible lizards, and told him about how sauropods swallowed stones.****
You feel B has a point there. The Star would be much better off learning to recognise formula one cars.*****
But your main objection to the dinosaur phase is that it leads you to have to explain evolution over breakfast.
Well there was this timeline picture in the book, showing how we went from microbes to human beings, with a detour via the dinosaurs and you were unwise enough to read the text which went with it. 42 whys later and the Star was frankly disbelieving whilst you had given up. The Star has, after all, only just grasped the concept of the past, which he refers to as ‘last night’ regardless of when it actually happened.
At which point you also realised that the problem with creationism is that it makes a far better picture book.
The devil has the best stories.
*Also, related organisms like spiders. Do not get pedantic.
**And crabs. Yes, you know they aren’t fish. Whatever.
***It’s really time to get him a dog, isn’t it?
****Because they didn’t have proper teeth so needed a bit of extra help to grind up the leaves they ate. See, you are learning something too.
*****This weekend, your MiL taught the Star to read ‘baba’ (or rather ‘baba’ in Russian) and you taught the Star to pick out a Red Bull Formula One car from the others. So so proud.
Discuss this Journal entry [4]
Latest reply: Nov 3, 2011
On wearing your underpants over your tights (NaJoPoMo #2)
Posted Nov 2, 2011
You have realised that you have neglected to mention that the Star has a secret superhero identity, and has had it for a good six months now.
He is Rescue Boy! A name which can only be said with a fist pump, swirl of an imaginary cape and a rhetorical flourish worthy of the best Hollywood voiceover.
His special power is retrieving felt tip pen lids.
You discovered it thus.
There you were, spending an idle twenty minutes encouraging the Star to colour inside the lines, when the blue pen’s top rolled of the table.
Immediately, the Star bounced out of his seat, and with a cry of ‘Rescue Boy!’* he burrowed under the table and came up triumphantly clutching the item in question.
When another pen lid ended up on the floor as pen lids are wont to do, he did it again. And again. And again and again and again. Then he started surreptitiously sliding whatever items he could find off the table so he could dramatically pick them up. Soon that became unsurreptitiously chucking them on the floor.
Which is when you put a stop to it.
Until the next time you both sat down to draw.
You find yourself charmed but slightly nonplussed by this behaviour as you were not aware that the Star had a particular interest in comic book characters. Bugs, yes. Peppa Pig, yes. Dinosaurs, yes. Flowers, yes. The Wot Wots, yes. Trains, yes. Football, up to a point.** Wearing his underpants over his tights? Meh, was what you had thought were his thoughts on the subject. You couldn’t even recall him coming across any of the baggy-trouser challenged brigade. Until you remembered this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/gigglebiz/watch/gigglebiz-captainadorable/
Still. While Justin Fletcher clearly has a lot to answer for, secret superhero identities must be hard-wired into little boys’ psyches.
*Said with a fist pump, swirl of an imaginary cape and a rhetorical flourish worthy of the best Hollywood voiceover. Of course.
**Sharing the ball is the point, but that’s a post for another day.
Discuss this Journal entry [6]
Latest reply: Nov 2, 2011
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