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April 1, 2005
"Like puzzle pieces"
There comes a point when expressing yourself in one language is not enough. The only way you can make what you want to say clear and solid you have to speak at least two different tongues. I never had a problem filling in the blanks of one language with another language. English and Russian come together like puzzle pieces when you learn where each piece goes. But I am lucky; no one I know could construct that puzzle because they would only have half the pieces.
(From Olga Boyko's Confessions.)
I'm not going to pretend that my Russian is at anywhere near the level it would need to be to influence or enhance my English in any concrete way. But I know what Olga Boyko is talking about. My mother is the only person who can interpret my hybrid of English and kitchen Cantonese, which I've spoken since we moved from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, when I was seven years old. We moved back a few years later, but it stuck. I've never really tried to dissect it, but I'm vaguely aware of some loose, unconscious rules that determine which language is used for which sentiment. It's seamless - a single Cantonese noun will crop up in a long English sentence, or vice versa. Adjusting my voice for Cantonese tones and monosyllables means that the English in between is choppy and oddly inflected.
My Cantonese, which I've called kitchen Cantonese ever since I heard the head of our Russian department dismiss a student-in-disgrace, the child of Russian immigrants, as a speaker of "kitchen Russian", is a funny artefact, not really of its time. It's a survey of the Cantonese habits of one not particularly talkative family (I lived for many years with my mother's parents), is almost entirely uninfluenced by television (I could never stand Hong Kong broadcasting) or peers (I went to an English/French school), and is utterly free of any "cuss words": I couldn't swear convincingly if I tried. Furthermore, it contains hopelessly out-of-date expressions, equivalents of "Heavens above!" and so on, which I am probably the only person under 50 in Hong Kong to use. Huge chunks of specialised vocabulary are missing, I can barely watch the news. Crucially, it's the Cantonese of an illiterate person - I can't read any Chinese. And yet my grammar and intonation are native and perfect.
And now for the "puzzle pieces". Certain concepts mean themselves more in Cantonese than in English, and vice versa - I can't really explain it. (To be honest, it is only when I substitute a Cantonese word for an English one that this is my reasoning - if the "decision" can be said to be motivated by any sort of reasoning. When I substitute an English one, it's generally because I don't know its Cantonese equivalent!) My kitchen Cantonese is a sentimental, spontaneous little prosthetic to my cerebral English, language of my self-control. The combination must sound very strange to everyone but my mother. She, in turn, speaks to me in her own hybrid, which favours Cantonese.
A personal dialect, born of migration. A small page on the tendencies of Runglish, one that's a little more widespread.
Posted by michele at April 1, 2005 2:55 PM
Comments
So, so true.
Another example - French-American in Paris, with similar problem (which she enjoys tremendously, it seems)
http://lacoquette.blogs.com/la_coquette/2005/03/reason_37_why_i.html
Posted by: Tatyana at April 3, 2005 3:36 AM
That's great, I'd never seen her site before. I remember playing around a lot in Russia with constructions like "she's govoreeting with so-and-so", etc. Also, my Petersburg mindscape was inhabited by little fictional characters that sprung up from features of the Russian language - for example, there was the Irishman, Remont O'Boovy, and - via my friends - an Indian gentleman named Vigladesh Singh ("ty prekrasno vyglyadish") and an indigenous tribe called the Choot-Choots. There is a good phrase in Essentialist Explanations (http://locke.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html#Slavic) - "Russian is essentially Englishovat'." Vive la muddled ideolect!
Posted by: Michele at April 3, 2005 3:44 PM
Don't forget the ever-present Japanese Toyama Tokanava (to yama, to- kanava)
Posted by: Tatyana at April 3, 2005 4:21 PM
:)
Posted by: Michele at April 4, 2005 11:45 AM
Wow. I can't believe people outside of my friends and family read anything I write. Good luck with Russian.
Posted by: Olga Boyko at February 4, 2006 6:24 PM