So Saturday, emerging from a short shorts party and an epic collective apartment hangover, John and I descended to Virginia to watch Ireland play France in a World Cup qualifier. The place we had picked out was called the Four Courts and it looked great from the outside, classic Irish pub. We saw Guinness glasses and soccer on tv upon arrival. Unfortunately and to our incredulity, we learned that the Ireland match was not available to the pub. It was across the street though at this sports bar, for a whopping $20 cover. John and I elected to head home and watch it online from a stolen feed.
For some reason, the feed that worked best was in Romanian - I would have preferred English or even French, but this did provide some cool tidbits, including evidence of a Sprachsbund at work. Romania is surrounded by Slavic-speaking lands but is itself a Romance language. A Sprachsbund is basically when unrelated languages start to sound like each other, and Romanian sounds very much like a Slavic language to me.
Here are some random things I've picked up recently relating to language:
1) The Family Guy episode "Spies Reminiscent of Us" deals with Russian spies. In a closing gag, Meg gets hypnotized and makes a phone call to Vladimir Putin in Russian. Earlier in the show, Mayor Adam West delivers a much shorter line in Russian. If you think Meg's Russian sounds very fluent, it's because Mila Kunis, who plays Meg, was born in the Ukraine and didn't even learn English until her teenage years. Ukrainian is a different language, but very closely related to Russian and most Ukrainians speak both.
2) Some sports language notes. In a pretty random coincidence, two LA Lakers speak Italian: Kobe Bryant and Sasha Vujacic. It's well documented that Kobe speaks Italian, growing up there while his father played in the Euroleague, but I hadn't realized Vujacic is from Slovenia and played basketball in Italy, and can as well. Even more random is Ronny Turiaf, who played for the Lakers from 2006-2008, who also spoke Italian! He's from Martinique and spoke Creole natively, as well as French, English, Spanish and Italian. I think 5 languages is pretty impressive for a professional athlete and I'm struggling to find someone who has more.
3) Roger Federer speaks Swiss German, German, English and French. I'll give him credit for 3.5 there. Little known fact is that his mother is South African - he may have spoken English at home.
4) Yi Jianlian, from Shenzhen, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, and his English isn't bad. Unfortunately, his jump shot is.
5) 3 different main cast members of Friends spoke French.
6) Marco Polo claimed that he learned 4 languages, but didn't specify which. Reading different historical accounts, these are believed to be Persian, Uyghur, Mongolian and either Arabic or Chinese. It's hard to understand what these even meant in 13th century context but I think that's pretty cool.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Travel Quiz
One of the biggest parts of my senior year has been Monday night Tombs Trivia. I'm a big fan of trivia anywhere, spawned by the large database of useless facts I've accrued from years of Wikipedia-surfing, sports page combing, Sporcle-playing and crossword-making. As this would suggest, I'm pretty good, and I've found a group of people led by the indomitable Maggie Lonergan and Arthur Smith, my roommate John Curtin and the mysterious Henry Fingerhut to form a consistent contending team. The trivia is divided into 4 rounds of 10 questions. The first two rounds have some sort of theme that can be very random, ranging from 4 letter words to the month of October. The next round is a music round where a song is played for like four seconds and we have to figure out what the title and artist is.
As such, I'm in trivia mania, and I've composed a quiz based almost exclusively on things I learned while traveling abroad. Here are ten questions that someone who's really followed my blog, and has a lot of useless knowledge, may do pretty well on.
1. Though Chinese is the most spoken first language in the world, the Chinese Wikipedia only has over 200,000 articles, compared to nearly 600,000 for Polish and 473,000 for Portuguese.Although the number of articles does not always correlate too highly with number of speakers, what is arguably the main reason why there are so few Chinese-language Wikipedia pages?
2. What European city did Ronald Reagan, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Michael Jackson and Usain Bolt all famously step foot in?
As such, I'm in trivia mania, and I've composed a quiz based almost exclusively on things I learned while traveling abroad. Here are ten questions that someone who's really followed my blog, and has a lot of useless knowledge, may do pretty well on.
1. Though Chinese is the most spoken first language in the world, the Chinese Wikipedia only has over 200,000 articles, compared to nearly 600,000 for Polish and 473,000 for Portuguese.Although the number of articles does not always correlate too highly with number of speakers, what is arguably the main reason why there are so few Chinese-language Wikipedia pages?
2. What European city did Ronald Reagan, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Michael Jackson and Usain Bolt all famously step foot in?
3. I passed by a covered kayak recently. On its covering, someone wrote
4. What is the least spoken official language of the European Union?
5. What are the four written scripts on a plaque in the entrance to the
6. Where is Victoria Coach Station?
7. What novel written by an American author about a Polish city won the 1929 Newberry Medal?
8. What city’s main bridge was allegedly started on 1357 / 9 /
9. What letter is strongly associated with a line in the
10. What European capital city has a psychological syndrome named after it?
Please post your initial answers or thoughts if you can.
Answers
Here are the answers to the questions posted above, with an explanation of how I conceived this question.
1. Literacy in China is 90%, and while computers are not available to a large portion of the population and typing in Chinese is difficult, I believe the biggest factor limiting the number of Chinese-language Wikipedia pages is that Wikipedia has been banned in China. You can read about the details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Wikipedia_in_mainland_China and actually the article states that currently the website are unblocked. The bans have mostly been to prevent people reading about topics controversial to the PRC government (Tiananmen Square). As a result, the website probably hasn't attracted a popular following and I'd be willing to bet that most of the articles on the site have been created by posters in Taiwan, Hong Kong or elsewhere in the world. Wikipedia's banning in China was a huge factor for me during my stay there.
2. This city is Berlin. Ronald Reagan gave his famous speech during the Cold War where he said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Joseph Stalin entered at some point after the Soviets conquered the city at the end of the European action in World War II. Adolf Hitler of course worked here. Michael Jackson dangled a baby outside the balcony of the Hotel Adlon right near the Brandenburg Gate. Lastly, Usain Bolt ran a 9.58 100m dash in the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, breaking the world record he set in Beijing. Like many great cities, many famous people will step inside it. I mean, who hasn't been to New York? But Berlin is special because so much happened there in the 20th century, and the fact that all these famous people did famous things in that city in so many different walks reflects why I find the city fascinating.
3. The owner of the kayak was evidently an Olympic hopeful who failed to qualify for the 2004 Games in Athens and set his/her sight on the 2008 Games. Now every reader of this blog will know that the 2008 Games were in Beijing. However, since Beijing was an inland city, all the sailing and kayaking events took place in Qingdao, a coastal city that was once a German colony and more commonly known on Western maps as Tsingtao. The Germans set up a brewery in the city and now Tsingtao beer is the most popular in China and I am very familiar with its taste.
4. Irish is the least spoken language of the European Union. The official languages of the EU are simply the official languages of its member nations, although this was a relatively recent policy and Irish was not accepted as an official language of the EU until January 1, 2007. Irish, a Celtic language often miscalled Gaelic, is obviously the official language in Ireland (along with English), and just about all official signs in Ireland are bilingual. Well known is city centre, which in Irish is An lar, because we would see that on the buses about 10 times a day. Irish is taught in the schools very early on and for many years. However, I found that most students only had a basic grasp on the language, even after nearly a decade of study. The official data is that Irish has 355,000 native speakers and another 1.8 million claiming to have some knowledge. Wikipedia states that Maltese had 371,000 speakers in 1975, but the country's population estimate is now 413,000 and you'd have to imagine that the vast majority of them speak Maltese. Another source I found has 500,000 for Maltese. Estonian has just over a million and no other language is really close. In fact, several unofficial languages including Catalan, Galician, Russian and even Corsican have more speakers than Irish. Since they are not official languages of any EU member state, even though some are protected languages, they are not official languages of the EU.
5. The plaque to the Forbidden City that I am referring to is on the right. I am 100% sure of the scripts, although I may not be matching them up correctly, but from left to right, they are Manchu, Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian.
6. Victoria Coach Station is in London, Lake Victoria is the African great lake that touches Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya (although this has nothing to do with my travels), Victoria Peak is the main mountain in Hong Kong and a place I've gone just about every time I've visited, and Greater Victoria is the metropolitan area around the British Columbia capital in Western Canada.
7. Eric P. Kelly wrote The Trumpeter of Krakow while studying in the city. The legend of the trumpet call is murky which you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hejna%C5%82_mariacki . Anyways, I had forgotten about the book until I was on the train to Krakow and realized that I was going to visit the city of the book. I did hear the trumpet tune break off abruptly but it didn't seem as if most people there were even aware of it.
8. Charles Bridge in Prague was constructed on the palindromic date/time by King Charles. The construction was overseen by the legendary Peter Parler and he allegedly found th
e mortar to be too weak and ordered eggs to be added to it. All this was written on a sign in my hostel in Prague. A scientific study was done recently and found that the Charles Bridge mortar does in fact have an organic component.
9. The Irish and British do not "line up" - instead they "queue." On rare occasions, I would see signs ordering people to Q here, and it took me quite a bit to understand what to do.
10. The Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological response where hostages sympathize with their captors, and was named so after a bank robbery in Stockholm.
1. Literacy in China is 90%, and while computers are not available to a large portion of the population and typing in Chinese is difficult, I believe the biggest factor limiting the number of Chinese-language Wikipedia pages is that Wikipedia has been banned in China. You can read about the details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Wikipedia_in_mainland_China and actually the article states that currently the website are unblocked. The bans have mostly been to prevent people reading about topics controversial to the PRC government (Tiananmen Square). As a result, the website probably hasn't attracted a popular following and I'd be willing to bet that most of the articles on the site have been created by posters in Taiwan, Hong Kong or elsewhere in the world. Wikipedia's banning in China was a huge factor for me during my stay there.
2. This city is Berlin. Ronald Reagan gave his famous speech during the Cold War where he said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Joseph Stalin entered at some point after the Soviets conquered the city at the end of the European action in World War II. Adolf Hitler of course worked here. Michael Jackson dangled a baby outside the balcony of the Hotel Adlon right near the Brandenburg Gate. Lastly, Usain Bolt ran a 9.58 100m dash in the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, breaking the world record he set in Beijing. Like many great cities, many famous people will step inside it. I mean, who hasn't been to New York? But Berlin is special because so much happened there in the 20th century, and the fact that all these famous people did famous things in that city in so many different walks reflects why I find the city fascinating.3. The owner of the kayak was evidently an Olympic hopeful who failed to qualify for the 2004 Games in Athens and set his/her sight on the 2008 Games. Now every reader of this blog will know that the 2008 Games were in Beijing. However, since Beijing was an inland city, all the sailing and kayaking events took place in Qingdao, a coastal city that was once a German colony and more commonly known on Western maps as Tsingtao. The Germans set up a brewery in the city and now Tsingtao beer is the most popular in China and I am very familiar with its taste.
4. Irish is the least spoken language of the European Union. The official languages of the EU are simply the official languages of its member nations, although this was a relatively recent policy and Irish was not accepted as an official language of the EU until January 1, 2007. Irish, a Celtic language often miscalled Gaelic, is obviously the official language in Ireland (along with English), and just about all official signs in Ireland are bilingual. Well known is city centre, which in Irish is An lar, because we would see that on the buses about 10 times a day. Irish is taught in the schools very early on and for many years. However, I found that most students only had a basic grasp on the language, even after nearly a decade of study. The official data is that Irish has 355,000 native speakers and another 1.8 million claiming to have some knowledge. Wikipedia states that Maltese had 371,000 speakers in 1975, but the country's population estimate is now 413,000 and you'd have to imagine that the vast majority of them speak Maltese. Another source I found has 500,000 for Maltese. Estonian has just over a million and no other language is really close. In fact, several unofficial languages including Catalan, Galician, Russian and even Corsican have more speakers than Irish. Since they are not official languages of any EU member state, even though some are protected languages, they are not official languages of the EU.
5. The plaque to the Forbidden City that I am referring to is on the right. I am 100% sure of the scripts, although I may not be matching them up correctly, but from left to right, they are Manchu, Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian.
6. Victoria Coach Station is in London, Lake Victoria is the African great lake that touches Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya (although this has nothing to do with my travels), Victoria Peak is the main mountain in Hong Kong and a place I've gone just about every time I've visited, and Greater Victoria is the metropolitan area around the British Columbia capital in Western Canada.
7. Eric P. Kelly wrote The Trumpeter of Krakow while studying in the city. The legend of the trumpet call is murky which you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hejna%C5%82_mariacki . Anyways, I had forgotten about the book until I was on the train to Krakow and realized that I was going to visit the city of the book. I did hear the trumpet tune break off abruptly but it didn't seem as if most people there were even aware of it.
8. Charles Bridge in Prague was constructed on the palindromic date/time by King Charles. The construction was overseen by the legendary Peter Parler and he allegedly found th
e mortar to be too weak and ordered eggs to be added to it. All this was written on a sign in my hostel in Prague. A scientific study was done recently and found that the Charles Bridge mortar does in fact have an organic component.9. The Irish and British do not "line up" - instead they "queue." On rare occasions, I would see signs ordering people to Q here, and it took me quite a bit to understand what to do.
10. The Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological response where hostages sympathize with their captors, and was named so after a bank robbery in Stockholm.
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