Watch your tongue with foreign languages
Travel can turn many of us into more experimental versions of ourselves, and tackling an unfamiliar lingo is a big part of it.
Travel can turn many of us into more experimental versions of ourselves. We may be much more likely to, say, kit up in a baffling amount of special-interest clobber and undertake adventurous activities we’d never consider at home.
It’s as if we don an invisible and impervious armour. We may not pass this way again so let’s ride that bronco, raft those rapids, leap into that jetboat, eat that alpaca steak or crispy grasshopper, wear that purple Neoprene jumpsuit.
A less dangerous element of travel is practising language skills and nailing the pronunciation. Any of us who watch SBS foreign language series may believe we have a working command of Danish, Icelandic, French and Korean. I am well known, at least in our loungeroom, for swearing in Spanish when the Pumas are playing the Wallabies, and it’s surprising how many insulting words I have memorised. Do you happen to drive a Pajero? The colloquial translation from Spanish describes most rugby fans’ impressions of umpires. It’s a very handy word.
But navigating the world as a would-be linguist presents a booby-trapped landscape, and not just the blue-footed variety trotting about the Galapagos Islands.
Stay in Hawaii for any length of time and names like King Kamehameha just roll off the lips and ordering a plate of the official state fish, which has 21 letters, becomes a show-off doddle. But the ability to nail Hawaiian native words evaporates as soon as you (or I) fly out of Honolulu.
Similarly, when in Chile, the switch is easy to make to Chil-ay but what show-offs we all sound back home. Still, it doesn’t really matter how much we mess around with names, as long as we are understood, even at the end of the world, or in Ushuaia (oo-swah-ya), to be exact.
Brand names can be a fizzer, too. Moet rhymes with poet. It’s not Mo-ay, end of story. To be a stickler, “Mwet” is absolutely correct.
I travelled to France as a guest of G.H. Mumm some years ago and attended the Monaco Grand Prix. Aside from learning it is perfectly acceptable for debonair French men to wear velvet slippers in public, I discovered there is such a thing as breakfast champagne. Importantly, the correct pronunciation is not Mum but more like Moom.
“Just remember Moom sort of rhymes with vroom,” a retired Formula One racing driver whispered in my ear. Full speed ahead, I replied in my most sparkling version of French.