language

I spent a lot of time this weekend alone with Iris. I had wide swaths of such time in Orion’s first two years, because Jenny was at work full time, thus I was the on-call parent for sick days and so forth. I also worked a lot harder to give Jenny breaks from childcare, so I’d have Orion solo for an entire Saturday, for example.

I’m always struck with how different my kids’ personalities are, even at tender ages like 14 months.

Orion was a poor conversationalist for a long time. He didn’t babble much before about 11 months, and then began producing (or approximating the sounds of) words, usually in the form of a demand or question. His babbling was discretely encoded: “brrrrrrnnn” meant “balloon,” and so forth. When he wasn’t trying to communicate something encodable he would just produce incoherent hollering.

Once he mastered a basic vocabulary — around fifty or a hundred words, maybe — it was like a dam broke. He talked — and still talks — pretty much constantly. Often in gibberish or make-believe talk, but always with these en/decodable word units.

Iris began ba-ba-ba-ing at a pretty tender age, perhaps before 6 months. She’s making some clearly encoded words now, like “duh” for “dog” and “aye-n” for “Orion.” But much of her speech is just wordlike noises, rendered with startlingly conversational rhythms. She and I took a loooong walk in the forest Sunday. I would speak to her about any old thing — “look at this pretty ferns, I wonder if we’re lost, oh here’s a slug” and she’d ba-ba-ba with a kind of “oh, really?” or “my yes!” inflection. Or I’d ask her a question and she’d ba-ba-ba with a distinct “yes, please” or “I don’t know” inflection.

She also has a bunch of nonverbal communications. If you offer her something she doesn’t want, she’ll shake her head for example. This is different from Orion, who had acquired a few hand signs — “more,” “all done,” etc. — which Iris has not acquired. Again: her nonverbal “speech” is more organic, less transactional.

(Orion also made a lot of animal and machine noises in lieu of the actual words for the things that produce those noises. He couldn’t say “motorcycle” but “vrrrrm, vrrrrm” did just as good. Iris never makes a noise that doesn’t sound like human speech, AFAICT.)

There may be some kind of Venus/Mars thing here, I dunno. I’m certainly a transactional conversationalist, and Jenny spends a lot of time talking to her friends on the phone in a way that (to me) doesn’t seem to convey much actual information but which is probably more warm and sociable. I’m leery of too much Venus/Mars stuff though, Iris is already way better at throwing and catching than Orion.

Courtesy of James Fallows, I learned that the Mandarin transcription of “Obama” is 奥巴马. I’ve written previously about the danger of “translating” foreign words from Chinese based on their characters, which are chosen primarily for their calligraphic appearance, not their semantic meaning. But it’s fun to do anyway.

Also, as soon as I saw this t-shirt I realized “I can read those characters!” Of course, those characters say “Obama,” helpfully translated above, but still: a fun party trick.

奥 is a common character for foreign transcription, usually for the long o or ah sounds. You find it in the Chinese words for Austria (奥地利), Australia (澳洲), and Olympics (奥林匹克). It means “mysterious.”

巴 is (I think) a noun particle (and thus essentially meaningless); dict.cn also translates it as “hope” which is very fitting indeed. I recognized it as the sound-part of the second character in 酒吧, which is the Chinese word for “bar” (as in “the place where you get drunk”).

马 means “horse,” which is the core of a common Chinese tongue-twister. Again, this is a common character for transliterations of foreign words; last year for example, Jenny and I ran in the 厦门国际马拉松.

So, the literal, direct, character-for-character translation of the Chinese transliteration of “Obama” is “Mysterious hopeful horse.”

…

This post comes in the midst of a little nostalgia Jenny and I are feeling for Xiamen. For example, scarcely a week goes by when we don’t lament our inability to get noodles from Bu Er Zhai.

One of my coworkers is leaving this week for a tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which prompted some conversation around the office about life as a foreigner or outsider. In relaying this to Jenny I realized what I really missed about living in China: I am no longer special. In Portland, I’m just another white guy on a bicycle, a demographic pretty well represented here anyway. In Xiamen, it was impossible not to attract a lot of attention everywhere we went. So, to our neighbors we were special, because we were 老外. And to our friends and family “back home,” we were the exciting couple living an adventurous life in China.