Now that the summer holiday season is here, and COVID restrictions have been lifted for now, a lot of people are heading overseas (not us, I'm happy to say: such people are surely mad, bad, and dangerous to sit next to). Which means a lot of foreign-language phrase books will be finding themselves packed next to the sunscreen. Whether they'll ever actually get used is another question: the typical phrase book in the hands of the typical tourist is a pretty useless combination.
Phrase books are never entirely useless, of course, provided they are up-to-date, and you have at least a rudimentary grasp of the foreign language in question. It never hurts to know the current everyday, idiomatic way of asking directions, for example, or how to ask for a table for two in a restaurant without sounding like an idiot. Whether you'll be able to understand the reply is, of course, the point at which "usefulness" may collapse back down again into looking like an idiot. Communication is not a one-way street [1]. My German and French, for example, are in theory quite good, and I ought to be able to hack a bit of Spanish and even some Russian, too, but I have found that the attempt to buy something as simple as a bus ticket is the true test of fluency and comprehension and yet, oddly, has never figured in any examination, written or oral, that I have ever sat.
The problem is the sheer depth of idiomatic understanding required. It is no good stepping up to a bus driver, and burbling, fluently but ungrammatically, "Good day to you, sir, I will want buy some ticket, which take me after the central station, and then let me to come back this same place later by this same exact day. Please, sir." No good at all. The driver wants to hear the right ritual exchange, pitched at the right level of formality and politeness, and briskly expressed using the right vocabulary. Something like, "Hi, there. Central station, please. Super Saver return? Cheers, mate!" Except spoken in French or German, obviously. Let's pass over the fact that French or German are probably not the first language of most French or German bus drivers, nor mention the humiliating fact that they usually manage to speak serviceable English, too.
What they definitely don't want is to tell you how much your ticket will cost, only for you to gape in incomprehension or, worse, for you to hand over a 50 euro note for an 80 cent fare. Numbers! Most languages have some aspect that strikes you as mad when you first encounter it in the wild, and distressingly often it is something as simple and as essential as numbers, which can be utterly baffling when spoken out loud. How such a self-declared rational people as the French, for example, ended up representing "99" as "four twenties and nineteen" (quatre-vingt-dix-neuf) is beyond me. Even the Italians have come up with a word for "ninety". I dread dealing with money in France, and always end up behaving like a true tourist at the till, shoving large denomination notes across the counter, and hoping for nothing more than an eyeroll, or at worst a minimal, incomprehensible tongue-lashing.
In Portuguese, I discovered that the "mad" thing is not the numbers but, of all things, the names of the days of the week. There's none of your good old "Mercury's day / Woden's day", and the rest of the Norse or Roman litany. It seems that the Catholic Church in Portugal, uniquely in Europe, banished all that pagan nonsense centuries ago. In an act of stunningly eccentric overreaction, the days of the week were given instead the names of the days of Holy Week: that is, the one week in the year in Catholic Europe when nobody was expected to work. So, apart from Saturday and Sunday, all the days are named as numbered feiras, meaning "fairs" or "holidays": Monday is segunda-feira ("second holiday"), Tuesday terça-feira ("third holiday"), and so on. Confusing is hardly the word, but here's where a decent phrase book can help, provided you take the trouble to read it before encountering, as I did, a roadside notice that says that parking restrictions apply "from second to sixth holiday". Huh?
There is a famous (but probably apocryphal) expression, "
My postillion has been struck by lightning", that had purportedly survived from various antique foreign-language phrase-books; it's a good example of a "meme" before memes were a thing. Or, indeed, before being a thing was a thing. As well as being inherently amusing (unless you happened to be a postillion), it was intended to illustrate the useless fossilisation of phrase-book language; after all, who, in the days after horse-drawn coaches ceased to be a thing, even knew what a postillion was? (FYI: "the person riding the leading nearside horse of a team or pair drawing a coach or carriage"). Or how likely or how often – if ever – such an expression might have been needed, even in the days when supply postillions were hanging out at every coaching inn waiting for employment? "Find me a fresh postillion! Immediately / tomorrow / by next week! This one is injured / dead / mangled beyond reasonable repair!"
Personally, I love old phrase books, and if I had the shelf-space I might even collect them: they are indeed fossils, a remarkable deposit of bygone necessities and yesterday's routine politenesses. I do have a few. Here are some random pages from the Collins' German Phrase Book, for example, published in 1951, reprinted in 1961, but still oddly redolent of 1851:
I say "redolent of 1851" advisedly. And not just because of its peremptory tone, or the apparent need to know the cost of your servants' board and lodging (always a problem in hotels, I find; the answer is to take as few servants as is tolerable). Compare it with the star item that I own: a well-used, very grubby English-Greek phrase book published in Ermoupoli in 1858 that I found in a second-hand bookshop years ago. The resemblance is striking, right down to the layout and the surreal stream-of-consciousness dialogues that seem to be taking take place in some accident-prone bilingual pessimist's head. Somewhere in there, I'm sure, a postillion will actually have been struck by lightning, but I have yet to stumble across it. There are 276 pages, after all, and I always feel the need for a bath after handling it even briefly. So I'll simply scan a few page-spreads for your instruction and amusement:
It took me a while to realise that this phrase book was not intended for the English in Greece, but for Greeks visiting England. I mean, wake up, Sherlock, does it ever get too dark to see at five in Greece? Or snow? And what the hell are we doing feeling seasick in the mouth of the Thames? But if it is intended for Greek-speakers, as it clearly must be, then why on earth does the English come first? Whatever, the extended bickering over the validity of the shillings on pages 133-4 is priceless, and I'm sure that would have gone down just as well with a London cabbie in 1858 as it would have in 1951, or indeed in 2022. There is still a good deal of base coin about, I hear.
For comparison, here are some pages from a current phrase book, the BBC German Phrase Book & Dictionary. Handy small size, colourful layout, but not a word about accommodating the servants, or how to deal with counterfeit currency. Useless!
And the pronunciation guides... Ish mershte? Ish browke?! Puh-lease... If you didn't feel like an idiot before, you will after trying those out in the local cop shop.
Ish bin oonshooldig, officer! No, really – I had no idea that he was an unlicensed postillion! Lemme see: Ish browke iynen anvalt (der english sprisht), yeah? Oh, you speak English? It seems like everybody does...
Look, don't take this the wrong way, I'm not being funny, but I don't suppose you sell bus tickets?
1. Eine Einbahnstraße / une rue à sens unique / una calle de sentido único / улица с односторонним движением.
No comments:
Post a Comment