Language Notes

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.