Being in two minds

My attention was caught (while I was making other plans, as usual :-)) by a blog about bilingualism and its correlation with personality. I have to admit, though, that the distraction from those other plans was not as great as I'd hoped. Like many academic blogs it's more of an amuse-bouche than a main course.

It starts out with the less than flabbergasting observation that

You might think of the shy person who becomes much more extroverted when talking to family or close friends. Alternatively, we could think about someone who acts in one manner with his co-workers but acts very differently when having a drink with former college dormmates.
Source

Well GOSH. Next he'll be telling me the Pope wears a big hat. This observation seems to me like that Einstein line about time seeming to speed up when you're with a pretty girl [Einstein's sexism, yer 'Onner] and slow down if your hand's on a hot stove; it's  true but its relevance to Relativity (in the physics sense) is tenuous at best. What I wanted to be told about was whether processing different languages favoured distinct character traits (a point I touched on here, referring to a personal experience):

...[T]his has resonance in my own experience selling magazines in Spain. I found it much easier to be deceitful (not lying but painting a rosy picture of the future – I was selling subscriptions). My initial belief was that this was a feature of the language; this belief fitted in with vocabulary that related to my own position, back in England.

<autobiographical_note blush_factor="10">
I was a boy-friend to someone who thought I was a fiancé; the one word novio blurred the distinction. Did I love her?  I doubt it; but I was happy to say Te quiero, because – past-master as I was in the field of casuistry [fruit of an RC education] – I did want her, and querer can mean 'want' (cf. Kant's 'murderer at the door' dilemma, and this  [specifically 'All men are false']).
</autobiographical_note>

But maybe it's to do with speaking in foreign languages generally; maybe it works for any L1/L2 combination.

But, returning to that blog [do keep up] that disappointing aperçu was followed by a more promising  later reflection:

As I thought about it more, I realized that language might serve as a form of context that triggers certain memories. One interesting analogy comes from work with deep-sea divers. Divers often seem to forget what happened to them underwater. Follow up work on this observation has found that when divers are taught a list of words underwater they are better at recalling more of those words later underwater than they are outside water. The opposite was also true. They exhibited better memory for words learned above water when they were asked to remember outside of water. Hence, a particular context serves to elicit memories relevant to that context. In this view, memory is driven by a set of cues that elicit certain responses from us. 

Source [My emphasis]

But this is just about speaking different languages, not about bilingualism (growing up in an environment that uses two languages). Is a Catalan child cheekier, say,  when using Catalan than they are when using Castilian? And, given the same context, if they are being cheeky, are they more likely to use one language than another?

Dunno –  Maybe I'll have to take the course mentioned in that blog.

b

I don't really mien this

Is Latin really a cloak of secrecy?

<digression theme="The wonders of spell-checkers">
I originally spelt that cloac, and the spell-checker helpfully suggested that I might have meant cloaca. :-)
</digression>

Diane James is said to have written vi coactus after her signature, indicating that she was signing under duress:

The document formally notifying the Electoral Commission that Ms James had taken the Ukip helm was submitted on Monday with the phrase “Vi coactus” after her name, meaning “under duress”. The term is used in the belief that it invalidates signatures on legal papers. 

More here

I don't see how this works. If it's widely known what the Latin tag means ...

<digression>
...especially among the public-school educated ... 

<meta-digression>
(and for non-British readers, and maybe some  British ones who make the naive assumption that words mean what they say] I should clarify that this is the reverse of what you think unless you  know better – a "public" school, by a historical accident, is not at all public [in particular, it's not in public ownership]; it is public only to the extent that it is open to all – "like the doors of the Ritz", as some disputed quotee once famously said)
</meta-digression>

... people like Dulwich College alumnus Nigel Farrage
</digression>

... what is the point of using it as a coded message? Maybe it was a double-bluff: surely a grammar school girl and student of "tourism with languages" like Diane James would have known that if the phrase meant that she was under duress it should have been vi coacta. In that case there are three possible conclusions:

1. Ms James meant that some other (male) person was under duress.
2. Someone else wrote it in after she had signed, and simply made a mistake.
3. Ms James was making a deliberate mistake to indicate, secretly, that she wasn't acting under duress (although she wanted to give the impression – to witnesses of the event – that she was. Too clever by three quarters)

My brain hurts. Anyway she's gone. And squabbles and niggles and scuffles and ... and all other sorts of mayhem with the ending "-<double-consonant>le" have broken out. The name Strassbourg Oaths, known to me because of a seminal document in the history of French (discussed here and in many other places in this blog) now takes on a new reference – the language that presumably  preceded the alleged shenanigans.

b

PS – a clue:
Turn winch and have a good chat. (7)

Requiem

Just a quicky - Sundays should be IT-free, but Friday pm and most of Saturday were wiped out by  a system problem.... And as it's a 'requiemmy' sort of day:

Next week I'll be singing a bit of Fauré at a funeral - and at the rehearsal I fully expect the leader of the rehearsal to say to the sops 'What are you singing about? In Paradisum. "In Paradise". You sound as if you're singing about what you had for breakfast....' (Conductors mostly seem, in my experience, to regard breakfast menus as the nadir  of interest.)

But it doesn't mean that. In can mean many things in Latin, but when followed by a noun in the accusative it doesn't mean 'in'. If the words were In Paradiso they would mean 'In Paradise'; but they are In Paradisum ... going on ...deducant Angeli : 'May angels will lead you into Paradise...' One of many other meanings of in, this time followed by the dative, is exemplified in the next phrase: in tuo adventu: that's closer to 'in' in meaning, with a sense something like 'on the occasion of', though I'd favour a simpler translation: 'When you arrive...'.

Interestingly, deducere can also mean 'mislead', but I doubt if Fauré had this in mind - though Barrie Jones, collector of his letters, doubted his piety (on p. 24 of the 1989 edition). His most pious work, the sublime Cantique de Jean Racine (survivor of many a choir's mispronunciation: Verbe égal aux très-haut: 'Verb equal to thirteen waters...' - give me strength! - and de tes dons qu'il retourne comblés : 'of your teeth which he gives back because they're ... impacted?', was written in his teens). And in his later years he may have taken after his friend and teacher Camille Saint-Saens, who - according to one biographer - prescribed for his funeral a short service, if it had to be religious at all, and proscribed the singing of 'Pie Jesus' (sic - Either that final s is the biography's typo, or it was Saint-Saens's attempt to spare Fauré's feelings: 'I don't mean your setting of Pie Jesu.') 

But 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof'. The imagined solecism will probably not be perpetrated.

(And that's another thing: perpetrated/perpetuated. But I must stop. Duty calls.)

Update: 11 Nov pm - updated TESconnect stats, and tweaked second para.

Update:12 Nov am - Added to third para.  and added the fourth

Update: 2018.06.12.14.55 – Correction to deducant translation.

Faithful or attractive?

I heard Antony Gormley's music choices on Desert Island Discs Revisited this morning, and one was Gilberto's Gil's version of  'I just called to say I love you'. (The iPlayer link will only last a week, but you can download your own copy from the Archives. the relevant music is at 30'05".) I've admired João Gilberto's music since my older brother exposed me to Getz/Gilberto in the early '60s (it was recorded in 1963, and he was quick to respond to popular culture, as long as it avoided the Beatles - with whom his younger siblings were obsessed). And I confused the two Gilbertos.

As you may know, the hook-line occurs in the middle eight, and it took me a few bars to tune in to the Portuguese, so I still had time to wonder how the translator would handle those words ( 'I just called to say I love you'). Many years ago I was trying to make a living by various means - one of which was translating songs. So I am alive to the problems of translation,  and familiar with the sexist joke about a good translation being like a woman - faithful or attractive, but not both. In fact my one foray into the world of translating a Brazilian song was António Carlos Jobim's Engano, which rather than the rather prosaic 'Deceit' or the unfortunately punning 'Deception' - punning for linguists, anyway - I called 'How wrong'.

Você sempre me disse
Que é falso meu amor
Que os beijos que lhe dou
Não têm nenhum calor... [I think. It was 35 years ago, and Essex bl**dy Music didn't        return my copy of Boss Bossas - not that I bear a grudge, you understand.]

Anyway, returning to 'I just called to say I love you' I wasn't surprised by Só chamei, nor by te amo. But joining them was not p'ra dizer - which I half expected, in spite of the extra syllable - but porque. Good call - musically better, suiting the singer's plaintive voice, and giving an extra rhyme (chamei/porque).  Thinking back to my 'How wrong', I remember shying away from the heat of those kisses in ll. 3-4 of Jobim's original:

My love you always said
My love was never true -
My kiss, you said, was cold
And dum-di dum-di you

(The actual words escape me - though they may be in the loft, if they've survived 35 Spring Cleans).  I held over the idea of burning until I came to the later lines:

I only made a show
Of love whose fire was dead
And only kindled to
Another's warm Hello.

In  translating songs, faithfulness is the least (and perhaps last) of your worries.

Those were the days; still, Music and Language's loss was Technical Documentation's gain. And, by happy chance,  António Carlos Jobim (writer of the song I translated - keep up) appeared on the same Getz/Gilberto album. What goes around comes around - preferably on black vinyl.

b
Update: 2016.09.16.11:15 – Removed old footer and fixed typo