Always look on the bright -cide of life

We engage in -cide every day. Some acts of -cide might be beneficial to you; others might land you in prison for the rest of your life.

Here are the basic facts: -cide comes from the Latin caedere, which means cut or kill. It formed compounds with the altered form -cidere, as in circumcidere, concidere, decidere, excidere, incidere and praecidere, from which we get circumcise, concise, decision, excision, incision and precision respectively. A lot of cutting but nothing really killing about these words. But then we come to the death-dealing creations with -cide, such as fungicide, insecticide and homicide. Now the -cide part carries a lot of connotations, depending on the first part of the compound. An insecticide is normally considered a chemical compound which causes the death of insects. However, I want to look at it in another light, namely as an act of killing.

Engaging in the act of killing something may or may not carry criminal associations. The act of killing an insect is not normally considered a violent act conveying the threat of punishment consisting of an extended stretch in prison at the very least. The act of insecticide is usually trivial, unless, of course, you're the insect. It stands to reason, however, that if you find yourself shrunk to the size of an insect in the manner of many a children's cartoon feature from Hollywood, the implications of insecticide might be more deleterious to your prospects of long term freedom, particularly if the insects have arthropodal courts of law in which they can put humans on trial and exoskeletal prisons to confine them to.

Homicide, on the other hand, is rather more serious than insecticide, since it results in the death of a human being. The -cide bit of this compound carries serious connotations of wrongdoing. On the other hand, it depends on the agent of the homicide. Just as humans do not generally consider the act of killing an insect something serious or heinous, a mosquito biting a human host would not give serious consideration to the consequences of its action in infecting the human with dengue fever or malaria, quite probably resulting in his/her death.

Admittedly, this is most likely to be a function of the inability of the mosquito to rationalise its actions and prognosticate about the implications of its deeds, largely because its brain is significantly lacking in the quantity and quality of those neurons which allow us to engage in these mental machinations. If the mosquito indeed had the use of such highly evolved mental faculties, and was challenged with the question “do you realise your act of biting this human will probably result in his or her demise?” one would surmise that the answer would be something on the lines of “sod off; I'm just having a quick bite to eat and I don't give a flying toss what happens to the victim”.

The result, however, is strangely symmetrical: we consider the act of inflicting death on another human as probably the most serious act any of us can perpetrate on society, yet we consider the swatting of a fly as a rather insignificant act to remove the source of an annoyance. With the proviso, outlined above, that insects lack the mental faculties of us humans, insects are equally uncaring about the effects of their -cide on us, but would probably view the act of insecticide of one of their species on another in the same light as we would when it comes to human on human killing.

Now, I admit that this doesn't really get us anywhere in the grand scheme of things, but I think you will agree that depending on how a compound word is formed, the second element often has connotations which are introduced into the compound by the first element and which are not present in the bare form of the second element. Think more on these compounds and see what you can come up with on the same lines.

• ludere, play: allude, collude, delude, elude, illusion, interlude, prelude
• praehendere, seize, grasp: apprehend, comprehend, reprehend
• sedere, sit: dissident, insidious, obsession, preside, reside, subsidy, supersede
• sentire, feel: assent, consent, dissent, presentiment, resent
• signum, sign: assign, consign, design, designate, insignia, resign
• specere, look at: aspect, circumspect, despicable, despite, introspection, inspect, perspicacious, perspective, prospect, respect, retrospect, suspect

The Changing Name and Nature of the PRINCE OF WALES

Kilburn in north west London is the epitome of the inner-city mix of peoples, wealth and poverty, creativity, bustle, hope, despair and decreptitude. Take a walk down the High Road as far as Kilburn High Road station, and then take a right down to Kilburn Park station. There, by the station, stands a pub, the PRINCE OF WALES. You might not think that there is anything particularly significant about a pub with such a name anywhere in Britain; after all, there must be at least one pub bearing that name in every city in the country.

However, this particular PRINCE OF WALES is characterised by its slow, seemingly inexorable decline, epitomised by its gradually evolving name, resulting from the growing lack of care afforded to that name; to be precise, the gradual loss of letters from the name on the side of the pub facing the road is clear testimony to the lack of care and money lavished on the external appearance of the pub. However, it can also be construed as a fascinating insight into the changing nature of the establishment, or indeed, the evolving character of the royal personage after whom it is named.

Here is the process of evolution laid out in stages, as if a series of mutating prehistoric forms excavated from a fossil-rich vein stretching back millions of years. The first loss of a letter from the PRINCE OF WALES rendered it the PRICE OF WALES. Now, I have no idea if the cost of living in the Principality is rising to the extent that the whole country has become more costly, but that certainly seems to be the intimation here.

The next mutation resulted in a rather defective form, known as the PRICE OF WALS. If the “L” were doubled, then it would be of particular concern to builders up and down the country, who are engaged in purchasing bulding materials for the fashioning of walls of all shapes and sizes. However, the single “L”, while displaying a certain lack of orthographical exactitude, still conveys to the reader the impression that walls are going up – in price, that is.

These initial stages of letter-loss have since progressed to the third, and current, stage, possibly the most awkward of all: the PRIC OF WALS. Now, all kinds of interpretations spring to mind, not least by placing a “K” on the PRIC, though quite how that renders the nature of the WALS is anyone's guess. One could replace the missing “E” in WALS, producing the PRIC OF WALES, which would reflect many an opinion of the current heir apparent, but let's not go there (the Tower of London can get quite cold in winter).

So, what else is in the offing? I shall certainly continue to pass the pub on the bus, as I occasionally do, and look out to see if any of the following come to pass: the RICK OF WALS, the RICE OF WALS, the RICE OF WALES, the RINCE OF WALES, the PRINCE OF ALES, the PRIC OF ALES...the possibilities are almost endless. So there we have it; a landlord's lack of care has become a source of social commentary on the state of the modern monarchy; or if you wish, deep philosophical musings as to the nature of life, society and the world we live in.

Oh, sod all that; it's just bloody funny.

What they really meant when they wrote it.

Have you ever read a book and felt that the content of the book doesn't match the promise of the title? What if the writer had misspelt the title and had really meant the content to be something else? Well here are some re-imaginings.

The Lord of the Files

This is the terrifying and gripping story of a group of schoolboys who are flying in a plane over the Pacific Ocean when the plane crash lands on an island. They try to organise themselves under the leadership of Ralph, who rescues important files detailing the students' homework for the next term. He is aided by Piggy, who, as the boy with glasses, is the only one intelligent enough to interpret the files and allocate the homework which needs to be done before they are rescued, especially as the glasses convey mystical powers onto the wearer, a secret known only to Piggy. However, a faction led by the evil Jack rebels and attempts to steal the files and take Ralph's place as the boys' leader by virtue of possession of the Sacred Files. In the ensuing battle, Piggy loses his magic glasses, and with that his intelligence, and he falls off a cliff to his death. Then the true lord comes to reclaim the Sacred Homework Files and the boys start crying.

King Solomon's Fines

This is the epic story of a gruelling expedition across the Dark Continent by a group of intrepid explorers with their trusty native African porters to the ancient land of Sheba to uncover the hidden history of the fabled visit by King Solomon to the court of the legendary Queen of Sheba, most beautiful and alluring of ancient women of power, and to locate the treasure said to be hidden there. They risk man-eating wild animals, fiercely hostile tribes, ferocious storms and rancorous internal disputes over the beautiful but pointless female that they take with them to arrive at their destination, only to discover nothing more than the records of penalty notices issued to the retinue of King Solomon by the Sheba State Police for parking their camel trains in the wrong place.

The War of the Words

One ordinary day in Woking, south west of London, or maybe in New York, depending on your viewpoint, nothing much is happening. Then there is a flash in the sky and a strange spaceship crashes to earth. A crowd gathers round as the never-before-seen alien craft, throbbing loudly in a very non-pre-synthesiser-age manner, and giving off an eerie reddish glow, lies smouldering. Then a strange arm-like object slowly rises from the object with a flashing red light on the end. Suddenly, a volley of words flies out from the end of the arm. The words are so painful that people fall to the ground clutching their heads and explode in clouds of dust, with comments like “you earthlings are a bunch of non-entities” and “we Martians will wipe the floor with you puny humans” horribly ringing in their ears. The evil Martians fan out around the world and proceed to infect anyone within earshot with their terrible put-downs, until suddenly, all the machines start going out of control and crashing, with the Martians slowly perishing from an unknown cause. It turns out that they have been infected by the most banal utterances known to humanity, which humanity has grown so used to that they have developed total immunity. Unfortunately for the Martians, they have never encountered these utterances before and it proves deadly to them – politicians' promises. Armed with this knowledge, people all over the world blast the Martians with proclamations of tax cuts, manifesto pledges of prosperity and solemn-faced promises of firearm reform, and the world is saved!

Great Expectorations

This is a warm and touching 19^th C novel about a young orphan called Pip and his attempts to escape his lowly position and make a success of his life. When he is young, he encounters a horrible escaped convict called Magwitch, who forces him to bring him food and a file to cut away his chains. Pip is mostly impressed by Magwitch's ability to clear his chest of phlegm in huge quantities and resolves to be like him, even after Magwitch is recaptured. He spends his youth improving his chest-clearing abilities, and goes to live with an old woman called Mrs Havisham, where he falls in love with Estella and trains her in the niceties of throat clearance in exalted company. He then finds out that he has received an inheritance consisting of finance to build a chest-clearing device factory. He becomes rich and finds out that it was Magwitch who gave him his inheritance. Unfortunately for Magwitch, he falls desperately ill after the biggest chest-evacuation he has ever attempted and dies. The factory collapses and Pip loses all his money and with that his ability to perform outsized mucus movements. However, he finally makes up with Estella and they live out their lives together with their great expectorations reduced to modest but manageable levels.

Peter Pun

This is the magical and heart-warming story of boy who never grows up and can fly owing to his ability to produce an apposite turn of phrase for any occasion. He arrives at Wendy's house and persuades her to fly with him to Neverneverland, where they will be able to indulge in magical word plays all day. They fly off together after Tinkerbell sprinkles Wendy with witty expressions to give her the power of flight. Once in Neverneverland, they encounter Captain Hook, a dour, humourless pedant, who leads a band of mirthless pirates that combat any kind of witty wordplay with swordplay. Peter constantly raises his ire with expressions like “have you hooked up with anyone recently?” and “come on captain, I'm waiting for you to get stuck in”. Eventually, the epic struggle of verbal witticism against cold literalism reaches its climax when Hook is eaten by a giant crocodile, with Peter wisecracking “fangs for the memory, it was a jaw-dropping experience!”

The Lord of the Rungs

This is the epic tale of a small and simple Hobbit called Frodo, who, aided by his fellowship of eight companions, must risk his life to protect his world and rid Middle Earth of the greatest evil in its history, the evil lord Sauron. In the mists of time past, Sauron created a giant ladder leading to the top of Mount Doom which he invested with most of his power. However, the ladder was destroyed in an epic battle at the end of the second age and all its rungs were scattered far and wide. Now Sauron has managed to recover most of the rungs, but one rung remains, the last and greatest rung, which will complete the ladder and allow him to ascend to the top of the mountain and regain his lost power. Frodo's doughty band, led by the great wizard, Gandalf, whose knowledge of ladders and rungs is unsurpassed, battle through danger, horror and treachery, not least from the evil Gollum, who himself once possessed the Great Rung and used to stand on it to become invisible. Frodo, aided by his trusty servant, Sam, manages to fling the rung into the fire of Mount Doom, thereby denying Sauron his last chance to reach the top of the mountain, destroying the ladder and his power in the process and saving the world. One small step for a Hobbit, but a giant step for Elfkind, Mankind, Dwarfkind and every other kind in Middle Earth.

Moby Duck

A crazed ship captain known as Ahab swears vengeance on the denizen of the ocean which has blighted his life for years. He pursues the creature, a gigantic white quacking waterfowl known as Moby, and finally corners it near an island where the bird is exhausted and doesn't have enough room to take off. Ahab launches himself with his duck harpoon at the massive aquatic avian, and in the ensuing struggle gets himself tangled up, with the result that they both go to their doom at the bottom of the ocean.

The Adventures of Tom Lawyer

This is the ripping story of the adventures of a poor boy living in a small town on the banks of the great Mississippi river. His shenanigans involve falling in love with his classmate, Becky Thatcher, hanging out in a graveyard with his friend, Huckleberry Finn, and getting into all kinds of trouble. However, he dreams of becoming a respected attorney, and seizes his chance when he defends the town drunk, Muff Potter, framed for murder by the local mob don Injun Joe, who actually committed the crime in an attempt to take over the local crime syndicate. Revealing, in truly dramatic fashion in the courtroom, that Muff is indeed innocent, and Injun Joe is guilty, he earns the accolades of the townsfolk and the eternal hatred of Joe, who escapes and swears his revenge. In the end, Tom triumphs in the face of adversity and travels abroad as a great international advocate.

Look out for more of these in the future if I can think of any.

The Prehistory of the World in Welsh Tribes and Chalk

What's in a name? Why do certain phenomena have certain names? To my mind, one of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic naming processes was that of naming the periods in prehistory up to the end of the dinosaurs: Cambrian, Devonian, Silurian, Ordivician, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. Generations of palaeontologists, geologists, bonehunters and schoolchildren have had them rolling off their tongues, probably with no real idea of how these names actually came about, what they're named after, and how the names have resonated in time.

So, how did these periods get their names? Clearly, the people who researched these times over the last couple of hundred years, after interest in the prehistory of the world really took off, had their own favoured naming strategies. Let's start at the beginning, quite literally

The first period of the Palaeozoic Era, literally “ancient-life era”, was the Cambrian period, from about 541m to 485m years ago. It was characterised by the first explosion of multi-cellular life forms, the fossils of which were first found in rocks in Wales, known as Cambria in Latin, and Cymru (pronounced “come-ree”) in modern Welsh, ultimately from an ancient British form meaning “fellow countrymen”.

The Cambrian was followed by the Ordivician, which lasted until about 443m years ago. The Ordivices were a Celtic tribe living in North Wales and conquered by the Romans in 77-78CE. Their name was applied to the period whose rocks mostly appeared in their territory. The Ordivician was followed by the Silurian period, lasting till about 419m years ago, the Silures being a tribe living around South Wales and the English borders, where the rocks from that era predominated. Strangely, the use of Silurian to describe an ancient race of human-like reptiles in Doctor Who is inappropriate, not because the Welsh tribe actually consisted of humans as opposed to reptiles, but because no reptiles existed at the time, the most dominant life forms being early bony fish and giant sea scorpions

So far, so Welsh. For the next period, we have to move south, across the Bristol Channel. The Devonian period lasted till around 359m years ago, and was named, surprisingly enough, after Devon, where such rocks abound. However, Devon gets its name from the Dumnonii, a Celtic tribe which occupied the furthest south-western region of Britain, so in essence, they were an extension of the Welsh. So there we have it; the first four Palaeozoic periods named effectively after ancient British tribes.

So what of the next one? Was there a tribe called the Carboniferi? No. The Carboniferous period, which lasted till about 299m years ago, literally means “carbon-bearing”, because this was the period when huge forests dominated the land and were transformed over time into the coal that fuelled the industrial revolution. This was followed by the Permian period, the last of the Palaeozoic, lasting till about 252m years ago. So, who were the Perms, actually, Permians, and how were they related to the Welsh tribes? Well, they weren't. Permia was a medieval kingdom on the western slopes of the Urals in Russia and gave its name to the age as a result of the rocks found there which dated from that era

The Mesozoic, or Middle Life, Era is probably the most famous in prehistory, mainly because it was the period of the dinosaurs. The first of the three Mesozoic periods was the Triassic, running till about 200m years ago and named after the three-colour rock formations, black on white on red, which were found mainly in Germany. Then the most famous period, the Jurassic, followed, lasting till about 145m years ago and named after the Jura mountains straddling the French-Swiss border. The third and last period, lasting till the end of the dinosaurs about 66m years ago, was the Cretaceous, named after the Latin for chalk, creta, which was laid down in western Europe in the shallow seas of this period.

So, there we have it: Wales and two of its tribes, an ancient west country tribe, bearers of carbon, a province in Russia, three German rock layers, French/Swiss mountains and western European chalk; a motley and varied crew defining almost 500m years of prehistory, named mostly according to the personal whims of the geologists who defined them. And if you look into virtually any other area of science, you will find remarkably similar stories.

Lost, or Found, in Translation

Be or not be, here in which question.

Be or not be, such is the question.

That I am or that not I am, this is the question.

Three literal translations from three languages into English, effectively reversing the original translation of probably the most famous and most translated phrase ever uttered in English: To be, or not to be, that is the question. (The languages and the original texts are given below – try to guess first!) This shows how tricky it is to translate the essence of one language into the essence of another, for that is essentially what translation involves. You have to be as non-literal as you need to be in order to render a translation faithfully. The art involved is crucial.

This art is seen at its most critical, pivotal and open to misinterpretation in the translation of the Greek logos in the first line of John's Gospel: In the beginning was the Word. Logos had a variety of meanings from ancient Greek through to New Testament Greek, depending on its use in vernacular, religious or philosophical discourse. Suffice it to say that logos could mean “word, thought, speech, account, meaning, reason, proportion, principle, standard” or “logic”, among other meanings; so which translation should a translator choose? What does a translator want to express? The meaning in the mind of John could have been “cause, reason” or it could have been “divine intermediary”, or indeed, any other of the meanings

 

What is clear is that the actual meaning has been argued over and translated with widely differing terms since it was written. What is also clear is that the translation, “word”, is most likely not the intended meaning. The problem is, of course, that once a term has been translated into a target language, it is generally accepted that the meaning which the translator has given it is the true meaning, especially as the likely reader will have limited or no understanding of the original language and the meaning of the original word. Hence, the expression “the Word of God” has a fundamentally different meaning in the context of John's gospel to that of utterances God may have actually said, if you believe in them, which is the way it is generally understood today. Result – confusion, disagreement, misconception and permanent misunderstanding.

So, what is the essential meaning of an utterance? How can that meaning be rendered in another language with the same intended meaning of the source language? Here's an example of such a quandary: “the quick brown fox jumps over lazy dog”. What's so special about this sentence in English is, of course, that it's the most efficient sentence containing every letter of the English alphabet. If you translated it into any other language, the literal meaning of a speedy dun-coloured member of the vulpine family launching itself over an immobile and indolent member of the domestic canine family would be immediately clear, albeit somewhat puzzling. What would be the point of it? In order to translate the essential intended meaning of the sentence – namely that this sentence contains every letter of the alphabet at least once – the translator would have to find out or work out what the equivalent sentence would be in the target language. This would mean that the literal meaning of the original would be lost in its entirety and only a restricted meaning of “here are all the letters of the alphabet in one sentence” would be transmitted. The essence of the message effectively transcends the medium through which the message is sent - i.e., the words, syntax and grammar of the languages in question. 

How about “the cat sat on the mat”? Again, a literal translation would be understood in any other language whose speakers appreciate the past mini-carpet-occupying sedentary habits of diminutive domesticated felines. However, the aim of the utterance, to show minimum pairs (minimum triplets?) or practise the pronunciation of /æ/ in English, would be largely lost in translation, though appreciated by the language students practising their pronunciation. In fact, the surface meaning described above is most definitely not the intended meaning of the utterance. Obviously, other languages would have their own strategies for expressing this type of utterance and conveying this type of pronunciation message.

So what does that tell us about understanding meaning in different languages and rendering meaning from one to the other? How can we successfully represent the meaning of a word or phrase in another language, especially when there may be no direct translation of a term, or when the concept in the original language is absent from the target language? For example, if you look up the Portuguese word ginga, the translation will normally be “waddle, scull, sway”, but these meanings are totally lacking in conveying the movement of a great football player, an expert capoeirista or a sexy Brazileira, as the word does in its use in Portuguese, especially in Brazil. 

 

Similarly, kefi in Greek can be translated as “high spirits”, but while this goes some way to describing the basic meaning, the essential “Greekness” of the word is lost in translation and can only be understood by being in a real Greek celebration. Which leads me to filotimo, which can loosely be translated as “love of honour”. However, this translation does little to express this amalgam of integrity, pride, honour and courage, an essential and central element of Greek life which has existed since ancient times. You would have to spend a while living in the country and experiencing Greek culture to begin to have an inkling of it. And throw timi, “honour”, and dropi, “shame”, into the mix, and you have a combination of ideas which would need a thesis to explain. And these ideas involve European languages, with similar modes of thought throughout history. Think of the problems when dealing with Indonesian, Chinese, Khoi-San, Inuit or Hopi.

So, I'd like to finish up with a term which I think will require no explanation; though it's expressed in a variety of ways, it's understood in only one way (in languages that I have learnt or have attempted to learn): feliz novo ano, feliz nuevo aňo, kali protokhronia, bonne annèe, s novym godom, selamat tahun baru, glückliches neues Jahr, onnellista uutta vuotta!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

PS. Here are the original languages:

Russian: Быть или не быть, вот в чем вопрос - Be, or not be, here in which question.

French: Être ou ne pas être, telle est la question - Be, or not be, such is the question.

Greek: Να είμαι ή να μην είμαι, αυτό είναι το ερώτημα - That I am, or that not I am, this is the question. 

Don't forget to visit http://www.blessthebuccaneer.com to find out about my book on word origins, Bless the Buccaneer with Barbecued Blood.

No Safety in Numbers

Numbers are weird. By that I don't mean that numbers per se, that is 1, 2, 3, etc., are weird, though they are strange in many ways, as any mathematician will tell you. I mean numbers as represented in individual languages. After all, this is a language blog.

All languages have words for numbers, though they reflect their speakers' interpretation of numbers in a myriad ways (there, you see; I've just used myriad, which is the Ancient Greek for "ten thousand" - why have a word for ten thousand?). Some languages have over a hundred words for numbers, while others might have only two or three (one, two, many). A short comparison of such treatments will provide some numerical food for thought.

Have you ever noticed how similar the numbers from one to ten are in most of the European languages and many Asian languages? That's because most, if not all, of the numbers from one to ten in these languages share a common ancestry and still survive in the modern languages, showing their derivation from their Indo-European ancestor. Take the number "two": French deux, Russian dva, Greek dhio, Welsh dau and Hindi/Urdu do. We might want to add to that Indonesian dua, but actually, this is pure coincidence, and dua has no connection with the Indo-European forms, belonging to a separate language group altogether.

Staying with Indo-European, nine seems to be similar to new, and possibly not without reason, as it may well have been quite literally a new number thousands of years ago. However, some of the most fascinating ways languages play with numbers can be seen in modern languages. Here are a few nuggets.

In English, we have one to ten, thirteen to nineteen and twenty to ninety, with -teen and -ty clearly variants of ten. So far so regular. But where do eleven and twelve come from? Surely we should have oneteen and twoteen? It seems that our Germanic ancestors, and hence the ancestors of German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and all the other long dead Germanic languages, thought it good to combine en (an alternative form of one) and two with an old form of leave, creating the forms we have today and an original  meaning of something like “one left over, two left over”. 

 

A similar thing can be seen in Finnish, except that they extend it to all the -teen numbers. The word for ten in Finnish is kymmenen, so to create twenty to ninety, they just join up one to nine with a form of ten: kaksi (2) + kymmenen = kaksikymmentä (20). However, for eleven to twenty, they join up one to nine with -toista, literally “of the second”, in the sense that eleven to twenty is the second series of numbers after one to ten: kaksitoista (12).

The French have their own weird way of counting when it comes to the higher -ty set, as most British schoolchildren have known and hated for years. Everything is fine up to sixty-nine, soixante-neuf (no puns intended here; this is a serious language blog - if you want to believe that). But then things go strange: soixante-dix, literally “sixty ten”, and so on up to soixante-dix-neuf, “sixty nineteen (79)”. You might think that things would return to normal for 80, but you'd be wrong; they get all nerdy-mathematical here with quatre-vingt, “four twenty”, which goes on till quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, “four twenty nineteen” (99). What do French schoolchildren say when they want an ice cream with a chocolate flake in it? “Can I have a four twenty nineteen please?” If only the French had listened to their Swiss-French neighbours and stuck with good old septante, huitante, and nonante.

Now, let's turn to Russian. If there's a language which loves to complicate counting, Russian takes the biscuit. Russian is an inflected language, which means that it changes the endings of words depending on what the words are doing in sentences. Let's take student, which means, naturally, “student”. “A student” is student; “of a student” is studenta; “students” is studenty; and “of students” is studentov. So far, so good. Now, let's start counting our students with literal translations from Russian: “one student” - odin student, “two of student” - dva studenta, “three of student” - tri studenta, “four of student” - chetyre studenta, “five of students”, pyat' studentov. This continues up to “twenty of students”, but then we get to “twenty one student” - dvadtsat' odin student, and it all starts again, the same format all the way through to infinity: “thousand of students” - tysyacha studentov, “thousand one student” - tysyacha odin student, “million of students” – million studentov, “million one student” - million odin student. And just when you thought it was safe to learn all the other numbers, the system runs over into the multiples of ten: twenty – dvadtsat', thirty – tridtsat', fifty – pyat'desyat, sixty – shest'desyat, seventy – sem'desyat, eighty – vosem'desyat, ninety – devyanosto, hundred – sto. When you say "fifty students", it's pyat'desyat studentov, but "of fifty students" becomes pyatidesyati studentov. literally "of fifty of students". Oh, did I miss something? I forgot to mention the bundle of furs, srak, from which comes sorok, forty. Presumably Russian trappers bundled up their furs in units of forty.

If we move east of Russia, we get into even stranger territory. In many Asian languages, it's not possible to say simply “one house, two men, three dogs”, and so on. You have to know how to measure out the quantity of the noun that you are counting. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the word for three is san, and the word for dog is gou, so you could reasonably expect “three dogs” to be something like san gou. However, you need to add a special word known as a measure between the number and the noun in order to package up the quantity of the noun, rather as we would say “three loaves of bread”. OK, so you just learn the measure and put it in the middle, but it's not as simple as that. Nouns in Chinese can be classified by what measure they use in common. Added to that, the measure in question for a particular classification of nouns may not seem to be obvious, based on the meaning of the measure and the nouns that are classified with it. Dogs are classified with tiao, hence san tiao gou, “three dogs”, but tiao is used for long, winding, wriggly things, like rivers, so how did dogs get in there? Were they long and wriggly in the ancient Chinese mind?

Indonesian shares the idea of measures with Chinese, but one of the easiest things about this language, apart from its relatively uncomplicated pronunciation, is the number of separate words that need to be learnt in order to count from one to a billion, a total of 15: 1 to 9 - satu/se, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan; the word denoting multiples of ten – puluh; the word denoting the numbers from 11 to 19 – belas; hundred – ratus, thousand – ribu, million – juta, billion – milyar, hence: 10 - sepuluh 11 – sebelas, 12 – dua belas, 20 – dua puluh, 39 - tiga puluh sembilan, 256 – dua ratus lima puluh enam. Easy-peasy.

Yet, across the Indian Ocean, the exact opposite occurs. While you only have to deal with fifteen words in Indonesia, if you want to learn Hindi/Urdu, for 1 to 100 you have to learn, well, literally one hundred words. This is because all the numbers from eleven upwards are each effectively fused into single units, with the unit number from 21 to 99 forming the first part. The numbers from twenty to thirty illustrate this: bis, ikkis, bais, teis, chaubis, pacchis, chabbis, sattais, attais, untis, tis. On the bright side, all the numbers ending in, say, “five” in English will begin pa- in Hindi/Urdu. But don't get your hopes up too much as there are yet more numbers to learn: hundred – sau, thousand – hazar, hundred thousand – lakh, million – mil or das lakh, ten million – kror (also spelt crore), plus some even higher ones. 

 

I think that's enough on numbers now, even though I've only just scratched the surface, or else I feel my number will be up, I'll be at sixes and sevens and lose my place on cloud nine. If you have any more fascinating examples of human creativity and mental agility regarding numbers, I'll be happy to see them on this blog.

The Obscurity of a Vision's Vision

Truth is, indeed, occasionally stranger than fiction. The truth for the London bus driver is something which could not be made up. London bus drivers are required to have something quite ethereal, quite insubstantial, in their vicinity at all times when driving in order to do their job properly. It seems to be a requirement of their employment that this insubstantiality is maintained at all times, unencumbered by the very people whose patronage ensures their continued employment, but who nevertheless carry a threat that could put the drivers' continued employment, indeed their very safety, in jeopardy. If all this has you gradualy losing your grip on reality, or indeed sanity, then let me explain.

London bus drivers are required to have a vision with them at all times when they are driving. The nature of this vision, however, is not specified by the bus companies. Presumably then, one driver might maintain a vision of beauty about their person, while another might do likewise with a vision of horror. Yet another might well opt for a religiously inspired vision. Whatever vision the driver chooses, it must be kept active at all times and in full view of the driver while on the road. Passengers are required not to place themselves between these visions and their drivers in order to maintain the safe running of the buses. Furthermore, the passengers must not engage in conversation with any of the visions, regardless of how amicable and forthcoming they may be. The consequences, one assumes, must be dire.

So there we have it; drivers must maintain their chosen vision at all times and passengers must not attempt either to come between the vision and its driver, or to engage in conversation with it. Indeed, this is clearly spelled out on a notice next to the driver's seat:

PLEASE DO NOT SPEAK TO OR OBSCURE THE DRIVER'S VISION 

WHILE THE BUS IS MOVING

There is another, highly unlikely, interpretation of this notice: the people who devised it have a rather dubious and tenuous command of sentence structure in English. This hypothesis, though, can be safely discarded as no one in their right mind would go to the trouble of devising such an erroneous notice, printing thousands of them and placing them prominently in every bus in London, where devious-minded English language teachers can see them and dream up improbable explanations for their existence. Perish the thought!