The Marvelous Land of Oz

Everyday, a bookworm asked if I had read The Marvelous Land of Oz that she emailed so I had to read it =D. The book I could tell was written by a male species, I could tell from its tone since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz where I related more to the scarecrow =D than all the Dorothys who fell in love with the story and encouraged the author to come up with this second book. The scarecrow, as well as Pumpkinhead, was served to frighten but Dorothy and Tip befriended each. Hurrah, I am done reading the Ebook! I am teasing a friend (My turn now. =D) to read Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that I lent to her which I have bought from M/V Doulus’s last voyage to the island. Where am I today in real life? Dorothy has found me and I still am traveling with the rest of the gang to Emerald City; excited to meet the wizard who will bestow me some brains and unaware that he will leave me the city that will be overturned soon by Jinjur and finally replaced by its original successor, Ozma.

Destructive Wisdom

Let the child who does not know her/his rights be to the same friends. Although, s/he may or might not be happy with them, s/he just doesn’t know that s/he has the right to choose anyway.

Let the child play with children who are sent to schools that are almost beyond their parents’ means to pay. These children will teach envy.

If you can’t spend quality time, let another grown up whom you aren’t sure if s/he is abused watch the child. You are unsure so it is uncertain if there is a cycle that will repeat by itself.

Let the child be with children who go to schools that are exclusive to one gender so s/he will catch that same ignorance towards the opposite sex.

Let the child play only with people of her color, religion and economic status and s/he will learn to be discriminating.

Make promises. They are expected to be broken anyway.

Renege. You can always bribe.

Worry not about feeding time. You can always assume that the parent(s) of his/her playmate/s fed the child.

There is not a need to communicate to the child so s/he will not learn that speech is power until she goes to school.

To avoid a noisy the-baby-is-crying day, give in to the child. S/he is queen or king of the house, and will grow up to become Ms/Mr Selfish one day.

Do not trouble yourself remembering when the child had measles. The nanny will remember anyway.

Do not be there on the child’s graduation day. The teacher can act as proxy.

Say no to all permissions asked of you to show off your authority in the house.

Talk about yourself; nothing but yourself and when the child starts talking, say “It is time to recline.”

Do not take note of school holidays and send the child to school day. Leave her/him there bored to death waiting for someone to fetch her/him. It’s a smart way to check if s/he can find the way home by herself/himself.

Do not teach the child your full name. Her/His finder will never trace who you are.

For life is not a flower-strewn pathway and the encounters are either rubbish or worthwhile. Given a vehicle different from others who are as well busy getting on, it is possible to accumulate some kind of an appalling and dispensable list as mine.

Diary of a Madman

Required to read short stories (If they have been full novels, I don’t think I would have finished the course last semester), the Diary of a Madman is one of those. At the literal level, it is about a man suffering from a delusion–people are going to eat him; even the dogs connive. Who could describe a personality disorder better than the author Lu Xun who is a medical doctor himself? It is interesting to note from the readings of others that the intent of the short story is to ridicule traditional China morphing the Confucian ways as a cannibalism that is eating a weak society. For all people including his own family who are into that system already established, the diarist is seen as deranged to be against it. Reading this interpretation before coming to the ending, I agree that getting well and obtaining a job is a lost cause–a devouring up by a society of cannibals to become one of them but then hope is expressed in the last page of the diary. It reminds me how others have written in disguised themes during a revolution to further a cause.

Learning Romanian

This semester we got individually tasked to report on a language that was not offered in the university. I especially chose Romanian because of the one night Dracula came to my window and I had trouble comprehending his language. Joke =D. Where Koreans and Kenyans outnumber all other aliens, I was not really sure if I could find a Romanian student in any of its campuses. I was thankful to get the basic information including a downloadable audio device that rates on how well one can imitate it. I only researched and do not speak it. For a foreigner to learn how to speak and use it, one needs six months to a year of studying Romanian.

GENEALOGY

Romanian is the easternmost member of the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. It developed from Vulgar Latin during the 5th-6th centuries when the territory which is now Romania was part Castle of the Roman Empire. During the 7th and 8th centuries, Romanians came into contact with their Slavic-speaking neighbors who exerted a great deal of influence on their language, religion, and culture. Other influences included Hungarian, Turkish, and Greek (Languages of the World: Romanian limba Romanian).   Romania, a country located in Eastern Europe, shares a border with Hungary and Serbia to the west, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova to the northeast, and Bulgaria to the south Geography of Romania HSW 2). The word Romania entered in the dictionary in 1868 to mean a native or inhabitant of Romania or the Romance language of the Romanians. Rumanian is a spelling variant of Romanian (Merriam-Webster Online). Like other languages, it has evolved.

From Portal Romania: The territory’s recorded history encompasses such eras as the Dacians, Roman Empire (leading to the development of Romanian language), Kingdom of Hungary, and Ottoman Empire…At the end of World War II, parts of its territories (roughly the present day Moldova) were occupied by USSR and Romania became a member of the Warsaw Pact. It joined the European Union in January 1, 2007.

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS

Romania has the 9th largest territory and the 7th largest population among the European Union member states. (Wikijunior: Europe/Romania) Romanian is spoken by around 24 to 28 million people primarily in Romania (where it has its official status and spoken by about 20 million speakers. The language is used in school from elementary through university and read in magazines and newspapers ) and Moldova (where it is spoken by about 3 million); in Moldova—a former Soviet republic, where it is called Moldovan for political reasons; and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia. Up to an additional 1 million speakers of Romanian live in Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro, Moldova Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece. In addition, there are Romanian speakers in Canada, the United States, Germany, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, mainly due to post-World War II emigration. Furthermore, they are scattered across many other countries, notably Italy, Spain, Portugal, United Kingdom and France. (Languages of the World: Romanian limba Romanian). As a foreign language, Romanian is taught as a foreign language in 38 countries around the world—mostly in neighboring European countries such as Germany, France and Italy, as well as the Netherlands, and elsewhere, like the USA. It is one of the syllable-timed languages, along with other Romance languages—French, Spanish, etc. (Information about Romanian Language).

PHONOLOGY

In general, Romanian is a fairly phonetic language, with a written word corresponding to the spoken form, and vice versa. Like any language, there are some peculiarities between the written and spoken forms (Wikipedia).
The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the Latin alphabet. Currently, it has 31 letters (Romanian Alphabet):

А а, Ă ă, Â â, B b, C c, D d, E e, F f, G g, H h, I i, Î î, J j, K k, L l, M m, N n, O o, P p, Q q,R r, S s, Ş ş, T t, Ţ ţ, U u, V v, W w,X x, Y y,Z z

The letters Q (read kü or chiu), W (dublu ve), and Y (igrec or i grec) were officially introduced in 1982 although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words, such as quasar, watt, and yacht. The letter K is relatively older, but it is still perceived as foreign due to the fact that it appears only in borrowings, many of them still neologisms (Wikipedia).
It is made up of 28 basic phonemes, 21 consonants and 7 vowels:

CONSONANTS		Stop	Affricate	Fricative	Glide	Semi vowels
Labial	-voice	p	-	f	-	(w)
	+voice	b	-	v	-
	nasal	m	-	-
Dental	-voice	t	ts	s	-
	+voice	d	-	z	l, r
	nasal	n	-	-
Palatal	-voice	-	tS	S	-
	+voice	-	d3	3	-	(j)
	nasal	(ñ)	-	-
Dorsal	-voice	k	-	h	-
	+voice	g	-	-	-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VOWELS		Front	Central	Back
High	-round	I	ï	-
	+round	-	-	u
Mid	-round	e	ə	-
	+round	-	-	o
Low	-round	-	a	-

Note that the three sounds in parentheses are reflexes of other sounds, but are listed because they are morphophonemic. There are also several diphthongs (vowel units in groups of two) ai, au, əu, ei, eu, ïi, ïu, oi, ou, ua, ui > and other orthographic diphthong and even triphthongs. (Romanian Orthography and Phonology). No need for memorization, just put the two vowel sounds together to make the diphthong sound (Lesson 1: Pronunciation).

Letter	Phoneme	Approximative pronunciation
A a	/a/	a in “father”
Ă ă (a with breve)	/ə/	a in “above”
 â (a with circumflex)	/ɨ/	like the unwritten vowel between n and t in “rant”, but slightly longer
B b	/b/	b in “ball”
C c	/k/	c in “cat”
	/ʧ/	ch in “chair”
D d	/d/	d in “door”
E e Letter	/e/	e in “merry”
	Phoneme	Approximative pronunciation
	/e̯/	(semivocalic /e/)
	/je/	ye in “yes”
F f	/f/	f in “flag”
G g	/ɡ/	g in “goat”
	/ʤ/	g in “general”
H h	/h/	h in “house”
I i	/i/	i in “machine”
	/j/	y in “yes”
	/ʲ/	(palatalization)
Î î (i with circumflex)	/ɨ/	like the unwritten vowel between n and t in “rant”, but slightly longer
J j	/ʒ/	s in “treasure”
K k	/k/	k in “like”
L l	/l/	l in “lamp”
M m	/m/	m in “mouth”
N n	/n/	n in “north”
O o	/o/	o in “floor”
	/o̯/	(semivocalic /o/)
P p	/p/	p in “post”
Q q	/k/	k in “kettle”
R r	/r/	(trilled r)
S s	/s/	s in “song”
Ş ş (s with comma)	/ʃ/	s in “sugar”
T t	/t/	t in “tip”
Ţ ţ (t with comma)	/ʦ/	zz in “pizza”
U u	/u/	u in “group”
	/w/	w in “cow”
V v	/v/	v in “vision”
W w	/v/	v in “vision”
	/w/	w in “west”
X x	/ks/	x in “six”
	/ɡz/	x in “example”
Y y	/j/	y in “yes”
	/i/	i in “machine”
Z z	/z/	z in “zipper”

OTHER IMPORTANT PHONOLOGICAL RULES:

• Speak and p in peak are not the same sounds: The second is aspirated. Romanian /p/ is not aspirated. The same holds for /t/ and /k/.

• While in English they are alveolar, pronounced by touching the alveolar ridge with the tip of the tongue, in Romanian and other Romance languages they are dental, obtained by touching the roof of the mouth just behind the teeth with the flat of the tongue. The same remark is valid for consonants /n/, /s/, and /z/, although the difference is not as obvious.

• Consonant /r/ is an alveolar trill, informally also called “rolled r,” present in a number of languages such as Italian, Spanish, or Russian. Romanian phonetics sources classify this sound as dental. It is sometimes compared with the consonant in the middle of “get up” in informal American English (spelled “geddup” to mark the changed pronunciation); this phrase could be transcribed phonetically in Romanian as “gherap.”

MORPHOLOGY

The number names from 1 to 10 derive from Latin. The table below gives the cardinal numbers in Romanian and its three dialects, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian.

When counting, the number names for 1 and 2 change according to the gender of the noun they modify or replace. It is worth noting that the two adjectival forms of the cardinal number for 1 (un and o) are identical with the corresponding indefinite articles.

* un băiat (one boy, a boy),

* unul dintre băieţi (one of the boys),

* o fată (one girl, a girl),

* una dintre fete (one of the girls),

* doi băieţi (two boys),

* două fete (two girls).

The numbers 11-19

Unlike all other Romance languages, Romanian has a consistent way of naming the numbers from 11 to 19. These are obtained by joining three elements: the units, the word spre (derived from Latin super = over, currently meaning towards), and the word for ten. For example, fifteen is cincisprezece: cinci + spre + zece which literally means “five over ten”.

The number name and the noun it modifies must agree in number and gender. The gender agreement is somewhat complicated by the fact that the Romanian nouns are classified into three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Specifically, the neuter gender is a combination of the other two: A neuter noun behaves like a masculine noun in the singular, and like a feminine noun in the plural. The gender has implications on the morphology of some of the grammatically connected words, including the number names. When the units digit of a number is 1 or 2, its name has two distinct forms, masculine and feminine. The only exception is unsprezece (eleven) which has only one form used for both genders.

Plural Formation

Like the gender, the plural formation is an intrinsic property of the noun, and is acquired by native speakers one by one together with the respective noun. The tables below show the plural formation modes for nouns according to their gender, in the non-articulated nominative/accusative case. The asterisk c(*) indicates irregular plural formation, requiring the insertion of consonants belonging neither to the stem nor to the plural ending, the deletion of stem consonants, or some unusual vocalic shifts.

 

 

Depending on gender, otherwise similar nouns will inflect differently. For example, the nouns “câine” (dog, compare Latin canis) and “pâine” (bread, compare Latin panis) have phonetically identical endings in the main form (nominative singular), but the former is a masculine noun, while the latter is feminine. For this reason, when inflected they behave in very different manners.

• Definite article: “câinele” (the dog) – “pâinea” (the bread);
• Plural, with definite article: “câinii” (the dogs) – “pâinile” (the loaves of bread);
• Genitive/dative: “câinelui” (of/to the dog) – “pâinii” (of/to the bread).

Also, the gender of a noun determines the morphology of most determiners, such as articles, adjectives, demonstratives, numerals. The two nouns taken as examples above will give:

• masculine: “om” (man, human being), “copil” (child), “bou” (ox, bull);
• neuter: “ac” (needle), “drum” (road), “ou” (egg), “lucru” (thing, job);
• feminine proper nouns of foreign origin or diminutives: “Carmen”, “Corinuş” (diminutive from “Corina”), “Catrinel”, “Lulu.”

Nouns ending in a consonant or in vowel or semivowel u are almost always masculine or neuter with some feminine exceptions::

• masculine: “ochi” (eye), “pui” (chicken), “unchi” (uncle);
• neuter: “unghi” (angle), “ceai” (tea), “cui” (nail), “nai” (Pan’s pipe);
• feminine: “zi” (day), “tanti” (aunt).

SYNTAX

As in all Romance languages, Romanian verbs are highly inflected for person, number, tense, mood, voice. The usual word order in sentences is SVO (Subject – Verb – Object). Romanian has four verbal conjugations which further split into ten conjugation patterns. Verbs can be put in five moods that are inflected for the person (indicative, conditional/optative, imperative, subjunctive, and presumptive) and four impersonal moods (infinitive, gerund, supine, and participle).

Simple Sentence (James E. Augerot):

Am păzit palatul.

I guarded the palace.

Clauses linked by a coordinating conjunction (Laura and Radu Daniliuc):

Ana este o fată şi Ion este un băiat.

Ana is a girl and Ion is a boy.

Syntactically, Romanian nouns can be in any of five grammatical cases:

* nominative, when the noun is the subject;
* genitive, when the noun shows the possessor;
* dative, when the noun shows the receiver of an action;
* accusative, when the noun is the direct object, often also required by prepositions;
* vocative, when the noun shows the (usually animate) addressee of what is said.

The short definitions above are only an approximate indication of the actual usage. Here are some examples with the noun “băiat” (boy) in the various cases:

Nominative is the case of the subject and of the predicate nominal. Here are some examples:

Subject:

• • Apa trece, pietrele rămân. (Water passes, rocks stay.)
  • Poştaşul sună întotdeauna de două ori. (The postman always rings twice.)
  • Mă doare capul. (I have a headache. – lit. The head hurts me.)
  • Îmi plac merele. (I like apples – lit. Apples are likable to me.)

Predicate Nominal:

• • Fotografia este o artă. (Photography is an art.)
  • Ochii sunt oglinda sufletului. (The eyes are the soul’s mirror.)
  • Roma a devenit un imperiu. (Rome became an empire.)

CITATIONS

“Geography of Romanian.” Discovery Communications. c1998-2008. Sept 24, 2008. <http://geography.howstuffworks.com/europe/geography-of-romania1.htm>

“Information about Romanian Language.” Ipedia.Net Free Information Center. c2008. 24 Sept 2008. <http://www.ipedia.net/information/Romanian+language>

James E. Augerot, “Romanian / Limba română: A Course in Modern Romanian,” Center for Romanian Studies (2000) referenced by Wikipedia. 10 Sept 2008. 24 Sept 2008.

“Languages of the World: Romanian limba Romanian” National Virtual Translational Center. c2007. 24 Sept 2008 <http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/january/Romanian.html>

Laura Daniliuc and Radu Daniliuc, “Descriptive Romanian Grammar: An Outline,” Lincom Europa, München, Germany (2000) referenced by Wikipedia. 10 Sept 2008. 24 Sept 2008.

“Learn Romanian for Free.” <www.byki.com.> Transparent Language, USA. c2007. 8 August 2008. Note: This website offers free downloadable software.

“Lesson 1: Pronunciation.” 6 Dec 2005. 24 Sept 2008. <http://www.romanianlessons.com/Lesson1.htm>

Merriam Webster Online Dicationary. 12 September 2008. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/romanian>

“Portal: Romania.” Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia. 3 March 2008. 24 Sept 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Romania>

Pronunciation of the Romanian Language <http://www.linguata.com/romanian/Romanian_Pronunciation.html>

Romanian Alphabet <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Romanian_alphabet>
The Purdue Owl Family of Sites. “Web Sources.” Purdue University. Sept 15, 2008. Sept 24, 2008. <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/09/>

Romanian Vowels <//www.101languages.net/romanian/vowels.html>

“Romanian Orthography and Phonology.” 28 Dec 2004. 24 Sept 2008. <http://www.unilang.org/wiki/index.php/Romanian_orthography>

The Leading Online Romanian Course <http://www.easyromanian.com/>
Romance Language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Romanian_language>

“Romanian Phrasebook, ”http://www.ravenglass.com/vlad/romania/romphrase.html> 19 Aug 1997. 3 October 2008.

“Wikijunior: Europe/Romania.” Wikibooks. 31 July 2008. 24 Sept 2008. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:Europe/Romania

I Hate an Incessant Chatter

I hate waking up not because of an alarm clock but by a loud voice of someone who keeps telling the same story over and over like a broken record. She is just two doors away and I can hear her recounting about the day she met her chat mate. As the next door right after mine slams, I know she has come close to my door where she is not wanted. My God! It is the same story that contaminated my last dream. I hear her mobile is ringing. She picks up excusing herself and guess what? She is repeating the same story to the caller. Well, I might as well have brunch. She has put the phone down now.

“Where are we?” she asks as I gobble up my food. I can hardly hear the soft voices of others. Just hers.

She never tires telling her chatroom experience to people. She is very inconsiderate. I work graveyard Saturday evenings and I always am awakened by her awful voice on a Sunday.

“I was told that a Japanese couple complained about my being a noise,” she tells them of the spa she and her chat mate have gone to.

Well, I am not surprised.

It is time to go back to sleep. Sunday is when I try, if I can, to compensate for the sleep that I don’t get enough for the rest of the week.

Time flies fast.

Evening is here and here I am, awakened again by the same f… voice. WTF!

I am about to finish brushing my teeth; she is at that patio narrating the same experience to the landlady who prods her to.

It is time to sleep again. I have to wake up 2AM tomorrow.

The story she’s saying is not a happy one. So like yesterday and today’s, tomorrow will be another story of her online chats and eyeballs in her quest for a Man.