Family separations bring call for rare language interpreters

PHOENIX (AP) — As word spread that the Trump administration was separating migrant families, urgent calls went out across the internet: Interpreters were needed at the U.S.-Mexico border to help immigrants understand their legal cases.

But this call was not for Spanish speakers. These interpreters needed to speak the lesser-known indigenous languages of Guatemala and Mexico, including Mayan languages and Zapotec.

Messages filled social media. An online fundraiser generated more than $12,000. Translators quickly began impromptu legal training.

“The Interpreter Brigade is springing into action again!” Esther Navarro-Hall, of Monterey, California, wrote on her group’s Facebook page.

Guatemalans have been the largest group of immigrants apprehended at the Mexico border this year, with almost 29,300 families arrested from Oct. 1 to May 31, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. Many of them are not fluent in Spanish and instead speak Mayan languages known as K’iche’ and Mam.

As families were separated and children were put into government shelters, indigenous language speakers had few options to communicate.

Navarro-Hall is organizing interpreters to help attorneys communicate with non-Spanish-speaking indigenous children and their detained parents to ensure their legal and medical needs are met and that they understand immigration proceedings.

“Everyone has the human right to understand any legal process against them in their own language,” said Odilia Romero, a trilingual interpreter who is working with Navarro-Hall. She speaks English, Spanish and her native Zapotec spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Romero recruited her friend Bricia Lopez, of the popular Guelaguetza restaurant in Los Angeles, to launch a gofundme.com campaign that raised the money to send Mayan interpreters to Arizona and Texas.

The original plan was to send six speakers of Mayan languages, but that number grew to 20, Romero said. She said she expects them to be on the ground on the border in the next few days or weeks.

Although indigenous languages are far less common than Spanish, they are still used by hundreds of thousands of people. The most widely used of Guatemala’s Mayan languages, K’iche’, is spoken by more 1.2 million people, according to that country’s last official government estimate from 2002.

Navarro-Hall started her Interpreter Brigade to organize Spanish speakers to help victims of the deadly earthquake last September in Mexico City. To work with separated families, she’s teamed up with a Fresno-based group of indigenous interpreters that Romero leads, the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations.

Los Angeles immigration attorney Robert Foss provides the legal component of training sessions Romero and Navarro-Hall are organizing. He said he worries about children who may be disciplined or not get needed medical care because they cannot communicate in Spanish.

An accurate rendering of an indigenous person’s words can be critical in asylum cases, said Foss, who said he speaks rudimentary K’iche’ and has handled asylum cases for Central Americans since the 1990s.

“If you cannot articulate well enough what happened to you, the court will probably find that you did not establish a motive, or a nexus, for your asylum,” Foss said. Having an interpreter is essential “for due process, for a full and fair hearing.”

Judy Jenner, spokeswoman for the American Translators Association , said it’s important that interpreters be professionally trained, not just fluent speakers of K’iche’ or other languages.

“Just because you have two hands doesn’t mean you can play the piano,” she said. She also noted that interpretation is for the spoken word and translation for the written.

Jenner and Romero both said relay interpretation, using a third person to provide the Spanish-English rendering either in person or over the phone can be useful in emergencies, but should be a last resort.

“It’s really like playing the telephone game. If I’m in the middle, I’m hoping that the K’iche’-Spanish interpreter is providing a good interpretation,” Jenner said. “It’s pretty scary.”

At the Texas border with Mexico, activists who don’t know indigenous languages were scrambling to find ways to communicate with a wave of Guatemalan migrant families, said Brenda Riojas, spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese in Brownsville.

“In most cases, we call the (Guatemalan) Consulate to send interpreters, or we try to find volunteers working with us who know a few words and can help,” she said. Riojas said some working with the migrants had picked up a few words that could facilitate basic communication, such as getting names and places of origins, and some indigenous Guatemalans had learned a little Spanish along the way.

Mesoamerican language specialists are not the only interpreters sought amid the wave of family separations.

The Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon issued a call on social media seeking speakers of Punjabi and other languages for at least 70 South Asians separated from their families and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Sheridan, Oregon, southwest of Portland.

In recent years, thousands of people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have become part of a burgeoning immigration pipeline to the U.S. as they travel from the other side of globe and through numerous countries, asking for political asylum when they reach the southern border with Mexico.

“The detainees have culturally specific needs that are not being met — including translation services, legal assistance and religious services,” said Jai Singh, a field organizer for the Asian Pacific American Network. “Isolating them from these resources is both illegal and inhumane ... Seeking asylum is not a crime.”

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https://apnews.com/ff140d3396e64a9ba83485ddeaa776be/Family-separations-bring-call-for-rare-language-interpreters

Davos jargon: A crime against the English language?

The annual World Economic Forum takes place amid freezing temperatures in snowy Davos, but inside the myriad meeting rooms and conference halls, there's more than a little hot air.

Some of this is generated by a form of English unique to this gathering, which can be mystifying - even to the seasoned WEF watcher.

To help, we've compiled a short list of bewildering terms and phrases overheard or read at Davos, and attempted to decipher them, with limited success.

• More from Davos on the BBC

Benchmarking

Brings to mind a bulging, sweaty weightlifter attempting to beat their personal best.

According to Bain, benchmarking is when "managers compare the performance of their products or processes externally with those of competitors and best-in-class companies, and internally with other operations that perform similar activities in their own firms".

So that's all clear then.

Circularity

To quote the inimitable Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word; I don't think it means what you think it means."

According to the dictionary, circularity does mean: "the fact of an argument or a theory using an idea or a statement to prove something which is then used to prove the idea or statement at the beginning".

Circularity does not mean: a measure of the process by which a product is reused in a "circular" economy.

Cyber realities

Is this virtual reality? Is it the reality of the digital world in which we live? Is it a reality experienced by cyborgs? Beats me. Probably best elucidated by sci-fi novelist Philip K Dick.

Deep dive

If you're not talking about Tom Daley, avoid.

Flashpoints

A place, event, or time at which violence or hostility flares up. Not the point at which all Davos traffic is diverted down side roads by people in high-vis jackets waving glow sticks, apparently.

Implementation mode

"Defined as to what extent a system is coupled to organisational objectives during the implementation process. An implementation mode which decouples performance indicators (PIs) from organisational objectives seems to further implementation success."

You can thank A Johnsen's 1999 work, Implementation Mode and Local Government Performance Measurement: A Norwegian Experience, for that.

Influencers

People who influence. How they differ from Thought Leaders is anyone's guess.

Interplay

Definitely not the same as interaction. Or indeed Linkage, see below.

Linkage

A word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which sadly does not pronounce on literary taste.

Material improbabilities

This comes from Marsh & McLennan's new report. The following paragraph should clear things up:

"Producing an inventory of material emerging risks requires both divergent and convergent thinking: on the one hand, thoughtful research and wide-ranging consultation; on the other, an effective mechanism for triaging issues and aligning on top concerns."

Multifaceted metrics

Look, you'll know one when you meet one.

Multi-stakeholder platform/principle

A "crucial mechanism". For instance, actively involving a "wide range of stakeholders - from civil society, to academia, business, and more - in order to ensure that all members of society benefit from intellectual property", according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Negative feedback loop

Like, this article? On a serious note, this describes the cascading effect that one sector of the economy failing can have on other sectors or countries.

See more at: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42791874

The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English

Late in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me through a line of Ancient Greek. “Polytropos,” Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice, pointing to the fifth word — πολuτροπον — of the 12,110-line epic poem that I had come to her office at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss. On the wall hung pictures of Wilson’s three young daughters; the windows behind her framed a gray sky that, as I arrived, was just beginning to dim. The poem lying open before us was Homer’s “Odyssey,” the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the “Iliad,” in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them.

Since the “Odyssey” first appeared in English, around 1615, in George Chapman’s translation, the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseus’s ill-fated 10-year attempt to return home from the war in Troy to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope, has prompted some 60 English translations, at an accelerating pace, half of them in the last 100 years and a dozen in the last two decades. Wilson, whose own translation appears this week, has produced the first English rendering of the poem by a woman.

“One of the things I struggled with,” Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack “polytropos,” the first description we get of Odysseus, “is of course this whole question of whether he is passive — the ‘much turning’ or ‘much turned’ — right? This was —”

“Treat me,” I interrupted, “as if I don’t know Greek,” as, in fact, I do not.

“The prefix poly,” Wilson said, laughing, “means ‘many’ or ‘multiple.’ Tropos means ‘turn.’ ‘Many’ or ‘multiple’ could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner.”

As Wilson spoke, I recalled a little formula by the American critic Guy Davenport about the difference between Homer’s two poems: “The ‘Iliad’ is a poem about force; the ‘Odyssey’ is a poem about the triumph of the mind over force.” Wilson was parsing the nature of that triumph, embedded in the poem’s very first adjective, a difference in mind that would make for a difference in Odysseus’s nature, both as a warrior and as a husband.

“So the question,” Wilson continued, “of whether he’s the turned or the turner: I played around with that a lot in terms of how much should I be explicit about going for one versus the other. I remember that being one of the big questions I had to start off with.”

That there could still be big questions about a nearly-three-millenniums-old poem that most everyone has heard of — it has exerted an influence on writers, from Virgil to Milton to Joyce — has everything to do with how Wilson is seeking to redefine the job of modern literary scholarship, an ambition that seems, in part, an inheritance. Born in 1971 in Oxford, England, Wilson comes from a long line of academics on her mother’s side. Her mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Shakespeare specialist, taught English literature at Oxford; her mother’s brother, Roman history at Cambridge; her mother’s father, “a disappointed philosopher” — disappointed because, though he went to Cambridge, he couldn’t get a job there — taught at Birmingham; and her mother’s mother, Elsie Duncan-Jones, also at Birmingham, was an authority on the poetry of Andrew Marvell.

That inheritance was as much literary as it was a matter of temperament. Her mother’s experience as a female academic, Wilson said, over lunch the next day at a noisy bistro, “was tied up with her colleagues in Somerville,” the women’s college where she taught. “The older colleagues were mostly childless women and had this whole sort of anger — anger and also refusal to understand that there might be extra demands on my mom’s time, because she had children.” Wilson’s mother and another colleague took matters into their own hands. “It was revolutionary,” Wilson tells me, with uncomplicated pride, “and it was resented: I was the founding member of the Somerville crèche. She and another female colleague who had a child who was the same age as me organized this day care, first in my house and then it moved to this building near Somerville College.”

Mostly, Wilson recalls a quiet, almost somber childhood with her younger sister, the writer Bee Wilson, and her father, the prolific biographer, novelist and critic A.N. Wilson. “There was a lot of silence,” Wilson says. “As a kid I was just aware of unhappiness, and aware of these things that weren’t ever being articulated, but the sense that nobody is going to be saying what they feel or encouraging anyone else to say what they feel. If you’re unhappy, all you can do is go to your room and cry silently.” Her parents divorced shortly before she went to college.

In school, Wilson was shy but accomplished. She liked French but was in terror of talking in class. “The potential shame of pronouncing a French word wrong was pretty inhibiting,” Wilson said, laughing. “It’s very easy to pronounce a French word wrong.” But with Latin, Wilson found an instant home. She loved the systematization of it, the reams of things to memorize and to get right. “You have all this information, and you can regurgitate, in the sense that you can strategize to translate an English sentence or a Latin sentence. You can do it all in writing. You don’t have to have beautiful Latin pronunciation. It took away a whole level of shame.”

As an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, Wilson studied classics and philosophy. Though her education there, she says, offered her a strong introduction to literary study, it wasn’t lost on her that none of her professors were women. “There was an awareness of it being sort of a boys’ club. Just the fact of never having a female teacher, but it’s a difference to how you feel when you don’t have any mentors who don’t even know what it would be like. I never had a female mentor in classics.” Still, the appeal of classics as a discipline was profound, particularly the way that Greek drama presented great emotional tumult. “I had a childhood where it was very hard to name feelings, and just the fact that tragedy as a genre is very good at naming feelings. It’s all going to be talked out. I love that about it.”

Read more at: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html

Resistance to changes in grammar is futile, say researchers

Linguists say that random chance plays a bigger role than previously thought in the evolution of language – but also that ‘English is weird’.

When it comes to changes in language, there’s no point crying over spilt milk: researchers charting fluctuations in English grammar say the rise of certain words, such as spilled, is probably down to chance, and that resistance is futile.

Comparisons have long been drawn between evolution and changes in language, with experts noting that preferences such as a desire for emphasis can act as a type of “natural selection”, affecting which words or forms of grammar are passed on between generations. 

But a new study shows that another evolutionary mechanism might play a key role : random chance.

 Should the Americanisation (or Americanization) of English worry us?

Rebecca Rideal

 

Read more

The authors of the study say that the work adds to our understanding of how language changes over centuries.

“Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English – and indeed other languages – is that the language changes,” said Joshua Plotkin, co-author of the research from the University of Pennsylvania. “The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side.”

Writing in the journal Nature, Plotkin and colleagues describe how they tracked different types of grammatical changes across the ages.

Among them, the team looked at changes in American English across more than one hundred thousand texts from 1810 onwards, focusing on the use of “ed” in the past tense of verbs compared with irregular forms – for example, “spilled” versus “spilt”. 

The hunt threw up 36 verbs which had at least two different forms of past tense, including quit/quitted and leaped/leapt. However for the majority, including spilled v spilt, the team said that which form was waxing or waning was not clearly down to selection – meaning it is probably down to chance over which word individuals heard and copied. 

“Chance can play an important role even in language evolution – as we know it does in biological evolution,” said Plotkin, adding that the impact of random chance on language had not been fully appreciated before.

For just six of the 36 verbs, the rise of one form over another was clearly not only down to chance, but was largely a result of active preference – akin to natural selection.

The study also revealed that a flower today is more likely to be “smelled” rather than “smelt” and that the neighbour’s cat probably “dove” behind the sofa – although, as Plotkin notes, British felines remain more likely to have dived.Specifically, “woke” is increasingly preferred over “waked” and “lit” more popular than “lighted”, while “weaved” and “snuck” are on track to eventually overtake “wove” and “sneaked”, respectively. 

But there was a puzzle. “The prevailing view is that if language is changing it should in general change towards the regular form, because the regular form is easier to remember,” said Plotkin. However, four of the six verbs show a rise in the irregular form of the past tense.

That, the team note, might at least in part be down to whether the word sounds similar to other commonly used words of the age. For example the increasing popularity of “dove” rather than “dived” in American English coincides with the development of cars, and hence the rise of soundalike “drive” and past tense “drove” in describing journeys. The team add that they suspect similar effects might be at work in a number of the verbs that currently look like they might be changing by chance alone.

 After Brexit, EU English will be free to morph into a distinct variety

Cathleen O'Grady

 

Read more

The authors add that the research suggests rare words are more likely to vary over time and be subject to random chance.

The study also explores the use of negation in sentences, such as “I say not”, across English texts dating from the 12th to the 16th centuries, revealing that the placement of the negative word has changed more than once due to selection, possibly because of a desire for emphasis.

“There a was period of time where double negation ... was the way to negate things, just as it is in French today,” said Plotkin.

Dr Christine Cuskley, from the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, agreed that similarities to commonly used irregular verbs could affect which form of past tense is on the rise.

But she said that it was likely that there were other pressures affecting which form of a past tense is favoured. What’s more, Cuskley added, it is not clear if the conclusions from the latest research could be applied to other languages.

“English is weird,” she said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/01/resistance-to-changes-in-grammar-is-futile-say-researchers?CMP=share_btn_tw

A word in your ear: the interpreters who speak for world leaders

There are few professions that offer a front-row seat to history, or a chance to rub shoulders with world leaders, as well as the odd tyrant. Interpreting is one of them, and it is interpreters who have given us some of the 20th century's best phrases. 

The Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, who died in May, aged 81, famously rendered Nikita Khrushchev's threat to the west, made during his first visit to the US in 1959, as "We will bury you". (What Khrushchev actually said was, "Communism will outlast capitalism," but it was the more brutal, and not entirely accurate, phrase that stuck.)

Typically interpreters spend their days "in the booth". This means sitting in a soundproof cubicle, wearing a headset, listening to their own voice, one ear covered and the other ear slightly covered. They work in same-language pairs. Each does a stint of 30 minutes because "after an hour your brain explodes," one says. That simultaneous interpreting should be possible seems something of a human miracle. "I still don't know how I can listen and speak at the same time. There is something happening in my brain I can't understand," I was told.

Like acting, the best interpreters capture the personality of the person who is speaking: the emotion of Ahmadinejad, or the sardonic deadpan of Putin. (This doesn't signify approval, merely a fidelity of rendition.) Interpreters strive for the idiomatic rather than the literal; as one puts it, "You have your favourite synonyms and idioms, like pocket change."

Sitting in on top-level meetings and negotiations, interpreters strive to be invisible. Sometimes clients come up with specific demands. One interpreter who agreed to translate for the fashion designer Ralph Lauren was given a long list of instructions, including what clothes she should wear (black) and how to tie her hair and do her makeup. She turned the job down.

Here's how three translators recall their toughest assignments.

• Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/interpreters-world-events-gorbachev-reagan-deng-xiaoping-ahmadinejad

Pidgin - West African lingua franca

What is Pidgin?

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Pidgin is: A language containing lexical and other features from two or more languages, characteristically with simplified grammar and a smaller vocabulary than the languages from which it is derived, used for communication between people not having a common language; a lingua franca.

Simply put, Pidgin English is a mixture of English and local languages which enables people who do not share a common language to communicate.

Most African countries are made up of numerous different ethnic groups who do not necessarily have a lingua franca, so Pidgin has developed.

It is widely spoken in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

There are differences, because English is mixed with different languages in each country but they are usually mutually intelligible.

A form of Pidgin has developed into a mother tongue for the Krio community in Sierra Leone, which non-Krios can find difficult to understand.

What is so special about Pidgin?

"It's quite fluid, it keeps changing all the time and it's expressive as well," says Bilkisu Labran, head of the new BBC language services for Nigeria.

"Sometimes, if you don't have a word for something, you can just create an onomatopoeic sound and just express yourself. And it will be appreciated and understood.

"I can talk about the gun shots that went 'gbagbagba' and you get my gist. So it vividly captures it instead of describing or trying to find a word to say: 'The gun shots were very loud'."

Also, Pidgin hardly follows standard grammatical rules so "you can lose things like verbs", by saying: 'I dey go' to mean 'I'm going'.

Other examples are:

• I wan chop ( I want to eat)
• Wetin dey 'appen? (What is happening?)
• I no no (I do not know)
• Where you dey? (Where are you)

How many people speak it?

It is difficult to know the precise number of speakers across the region as it is not formally studied in schools and is spoken in varying degrees of proficiency.

But many millions of people undoubtedly speak it on a daily basis, especially young people.

Nigeria is estimated to have between three and five million people who primarily use Pidgin in their day-to-day interactions. But it is said to be a second language to a much higher number of up to 75 million people in Nigeria alone - about half the population.

Although it is commonly spoken, Pidgin is not an official language anywhere in West Africa.

In many schools, children are disciplined if they are caught speaking Pidgin, rather than English.

However, some local radio stations do broadcast in Pidgin.

How did it originate?

West African Pidgin English, also called Guinea Coast Creole English, was a language of commerce spoken along the coast during the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th and 18th Centuries.

This allowed British slave merchants and local African traders to conduct business.

It later spread to other parts of the West African colonies, becoming a useful trade language among local ethnic groups who spoke different languages.

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38000387

'Th' sound to vanish from English language by 2066 because of multiculturalism, say linguists

Visitors expecting to hear the Queen’s English spoken on the streets of London in 50 years may need to "fink" again.

By 2066, linguists are predicting that the "th" sound will vanish completely in the capital because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants - the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

Already Estuary English – a hybrid of Cockney and received pronunciation (RP) which is prevalent in the South East – is being replaced by Multicultural London English (MLE) which is heavily influenced by Caribbean, West African and Asian Communities. But within the next few decades immigration will have fundamentally altered the language, according to experts at the University of York.

The "th" sound – also called the voiced dental nonsibliant fricative – is likely to change to be replaced an "f", "d", or "v" meaning "mother" will be pronounced "muvver" and "thick" will be voiced as "fick". However the ‘h’ that fell silent in Cockney dialect is set to return allowing ‘ere’ to become ‘here’ once more.

Dr Dominic Watt, a sociolinguistics expert from the University of York,said: “Given the status of London as the linguistically most influential city in the English-speaking world, we can expect to see significant changes between now and the middle of the century.

“The major changes in the way we speak over the next 50 years will involve a simplification of the sound structure of words, they’ll become shorter probably

“By looking at how English has changed over the last 50 years we can identify patterns that seem to repeat. British accents seem to be less based on class these days. 

“Languages also change when they come into contact with one another. English has borrowed thousands of words from other languages: mainly French, Latin and Greek, but there are ‘loan words’ from dozens of other languages in the mix.”

The Sounds of The Future report was produced from a study involving analysis of recordings from the last 50 years as well as social media language use. Other changes likely to become widespread by 2066 include a habit known as "yod dropping" in which the "u" sound is replaced with an "oo". It means that "duke" becomes "dook", "news" is pronounced "nooze" and "beauty" changes to "booty".

Consonant "smushing" is also predicted where two sounds collapse together completely so that "wed" and "red" will soon be indistinguishable. Likewise the "l" at the end of words will be dropped so that the words "Paul", "paw" and "pool" all sound the same. Similiarly, "text" will lose the final "t" to become "tex".And, the glottal stop pronunciation of "t" – a brief catch in the throat when the tongue tip closed against the roof of the mouth – will be the default pronunciation.

Brendan Gunn, a voice coach who is currently working with Pierce Brosnan on his new US series said: “The younger generation always wants to be different from the older generation and that process will continue throughout history.

“Text speak which is a form of shortening will become ordinary speak, so you may end up saying ‘tagLOL’ or ‘toteschill’ which means hashtag laugh out loud or totally chilled.

“Even in the Royal family it is probable that Prince George will speak much differently to the Queen. In London I think we will see the ‘th’ becoming an ‘f’ all the time.”

Technology will also change the way people speak, and the experts predict that as artificial intelligence emerges the, computers could begin to invent new words.

Dr Watt added: “It is conceivable that some of the words that will come into English in the next 50 years will have been invented by computers because as computers become more intelligent it may be they start creating words of their own and feeding the, back to us.

“Already we’re seeing text words phrases coming into respected dictionaries. As time goes on we’re going to see more and more of that kind of thing.

“The traditional dialects will die out and others will morph into the speech of large urban centres.”

The Sounds of the Future report was commissioned by HSBC to coincide with the launch of its new voice ID, which is currently being rolled out to 15 million users.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/28/th-sound-to-vanish-from-english-language-by-2066-because-of-mult/

Le parole per descrivere la felicità in 26 lingue

Lo psicologo Tim Lomas raccoglie termini, non traducibili, che raccontano uno stato d’animo o un’esperienza positiva in idiomi diversi: dal corano all’inuit.

Un vocabolario della felicità, in continua evoluzione. Ecco cos’è «The Positive Lexicography Project», raccolta di parole intraducibili, ideata da Tim Lomas, docente di Psicologia Positiva della University of East London. «Ho cercato i vocaboli online, su siti, blog e tra i paper accademici — racconta a “la Lettura” —. Le persone, inoltre, mi inviano suggerimenti per sottopormi termini nuovi». I quali entrano a far parte del vocabolario a due condizioni: non devono avere un equivalente in inglese e devono descrivere esperienze, stati d’animo e tratti personali positivi. 

«Non utilizzo criteri stringenti — continua Lomas — perché parte del progetto è proprio esplorare cosa è il benessere umano in tutto il mondo. Trovo quindi suggestivo includere parole indirettamente collegate all’ambito della percezione e dell’emotività». Tra cui, ad esempio, «chiaroscuro», inteso come esperienza estetica, una versione visiva dello«yin» e «yang». Seicento sono i vocaboli raccolti finora e organizzati in tre categorie: sentimenti, relazioni interpersonali e carattere umano. Ventisei, invece, sono le parole selezionate per «la Lettura». Per provare a descrivere una sfumatura in più dell’animo umano

Agape

(Amore incondizionato, disinteressato e smisurato. Greco). Tre sono i tipi di amore in greco: eros, legato all’attrazione fisica; philos, sentimento fraterno e di profonda condivisione e, appunto, agape. Il vertice più alto dell’amore, provato da chi dona tutto se stesso senza pretendere nulla in cambio. Come Gesù: nella tradizione cristiana, infatti, il termine indica l’amore di Dio per gli uomini.

             

Balikwas

(Saltare improvvisamente in un’altra situazione e sentirsi sorpreso. Tagalog). Scrive in Balikwas: How to Emigrate to The Philippines Chris Payne, ex professore della University of Maryland emigrato a Tanauan, nelle Filippine: «Il termine significa saltare dall’altra parte, sentirsi sorpresi per una nuova situazione ma anche andare contro corrente». Ossia: abbandonare la propria zona di comfort. Come fanno i visionari, spiega Hal Gregersen del Mit, che dubitano delle certezze, cambiano situazioni, raggiungono risultati sorprendenti.

Chrysalism

(Amniotica tranquillità di essere in casa durante la tempesta. Inglese, neologismo). È una delle parole ideate dal designer John Koenig e raccolte in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. L’autore immagina termini nuovi con l’obiettivo di colmare un vuoto linguistico e attribuire un nome alle emozioni difficili da descrivere. Chrysalism viene da crisalide e vuole rendere l’idea di sentirsi protetti, come in uno stato embrionale.

Dadirri

(Atto di profondo e riflessivo ascolto. Ngangiwumirr, lingua aborigena). «Dadirri è dare voce alla primavera dentro di noi», ha detto Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Bauman, attivista e artista aborigena. «Quando vivo una esperienza dadirri torno a essere completa. Anche se qualcuno caro se ne è andato posso ritrovare così la mia pace». Perché dadirri, spiega Judy Atkinson della Southern Cross University, è un metodo di cura, una pratica per superare traumi e dolore.

Engentar

(Desiderare di stare soli, ricercare una serena solitudine. Spagnolo). Parola diffusa in Messico, indica il desiderio di allontanarsi dagli altri gioendo della propria solitudine. E per chi non sa stare engentado, esiste una guida, How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself di Robert Paul Smith, che spiega tutto in una frase di commiato: «Mi scusi, ho un appuntamento con me stesso per sedermi a guardare l’erba che cresce».

Fargin

(Orgoglio e sincera felicità per il successo di qualcun altro. Yiddish). L’opposto dell’invidia. Ma attenzione, ammonisce Michael Wex, scrittore canadese: il fargin è raro e, avendone l’occasione, pochi lo provano. Come racconta in Born to Kvetch: «Un angelo appare a un uomo. “È il tuo giorno fortunato — gli dice — puoi avere tutto quello che desideri, in quantità illimitata, ma il tuo vicino ne riceverà il doppio”. È esasperante, pensa l’uomo. Poi ha un’idea e dice: “Voglio perdere la vista da un occhio”».

Gumusservi

(Il riflesso della luna sull’acqua. Turco). Termine evocativo che Yee-Lum Mak ha inserito nel blog di parole stravaganti «OtherWordly», da cui è nato l’omonimo libro. Grazie al suo potenziale estetico Gumusservi è parola nota anche a chi non parla turco: è un hashtag sui social e anche il titolo di un brano. Malinconico, ovvio. E romantico insieme.

Hygge

(Senso di calore, atmosfera accogliente e amichevole. Danese). Nella classifica 2016 delle parole dell’anno dell’Oxford Dictionaries è finita anche hygge. Termine di moda, ma non nuovo. Tanto che nel 1957 Robert Shaplen sul «New Yorker» ha scritto che l’hygge è dovunque a Copenaghen. «Provo a rendere la mia casa hygge», dice Lomas. La stagione più hygge? L’inverno. Perché, ha scritto Helen Russell in The Year of Living Danishly, hygge è una tazza di tè caldo o un paio di calzini di cashmere. Mondadori ha appena pubblicato in Italia Hygge. La via danese alla felicità di Meik Wiking.

Iktsuarpok

(Quando si aspetta qualcuno e non si riesce a smettere di controllare se sta arrivando. Inuit). Tiffany Watt Smith della Queen Mary University non ha dubbi: iktsuarpok è una sensazione che proviamo tutti, tanto da meritare un posto nel suo The Book of Human Emotions dedicato ai sentimenti più comuni. Per la studiosa la nostra tentazione di controllare ripetutamente la casella email non sarebbe altro che una versione «aggiornata» dell’iktsuarpok. «Non è colpa della tecnologia — spiega — ma del nostro desiderio di contatto in un mondo sempre più isolato».

Jugaad

(Trovare soluzioni innovative, improvvisate e geniali, utilizzando quello che si ha. Hindi). È l’arte del life hacking, la capacità di trovare soluzioni creative, frugali e inaspettate. Proprio come spiega il libro Jugaad Innovation. I due autori, Navi Radjou e Jaideep Prabhu (Cambridge Judge Business School), lo spiegano così: jugaad è una rivoluzione culturale, l’innovazione dal basso, diffusa nei Paesi emergenti. Senza grandi investimenti.

Kanyirninpa

(Abbraccio protettivo e salutare. Pintupi). Per il popolo Pintupi l’abbraccio non trasmette solo affetto, ma infonde salute fisica e mentale. Ha scritto Brian McCoy, studioso di tradizioni aborigene, in Holding Men: «Kanyirninpa è la protezione della famiglia verso un nuovo nato. Per gli adulti il significato cambia: non cercano più l’abbraccio della madre ma quello degli altri uomini. Così i più anziani introducono i giovani all’età adulta».

Lagom

(La giusta misura, né troppo né troppo poco. Svedese). Il lagom è lo spirito della Svezia, dove tutto è misurato, dai temporali al design. «Il termine ha molte applicazioni — scrive Meg, autrice del blog “Something Swedish” — e rappresenta l’ideale sociale e culturale svedese di uguaglianza e libertà». L’origine? Dalla locuzione laget om usata dai vichinghi per indicare l’esatta quantità di idromele che si può bere dal corno prima di passarlo ai compagni.

Mepak

(Il piacere delle piccole cose. Serbo). La felicità? Non dipende dai grandi avvenimenti della vita ma dalle piccole esperienze. Lo spiega il termine mepak e lo conferma l’indagine Little Things in Life Make Us Happiest, in cui Glenn Williams, della Nottingham Trent University, dichiara: «I piccoli piaceri ci aiutano a costruire vite più significative». Qualche esempio di mepak? La ricerca ne cita molti: mangiare cioccolata, stendersi su lenzuola pulite, prenotare un viaggio.

Nunchi

(Capacità di interpretare gli sguardi e di leggere le emozioni altrui. Coreano). Si legge sul blog dell’ambasciata coreana in Canada: «Per un canadese sì significa sì e no vuol dire no. In Corea, invece, sì può significare: è una buona idea ma so che il mio capo non l’approverà e poiché non voglio farti preoccupare preferisco dire sì». Per capire l’interlocutore è necessario leggere il linguaggio non verbale. Ossia sviluppare il nunchi. Come? Osservando: uno sguardo laterale o un respiro profondo dicono molto più di una parola.

Orenda

(Il potere di cambiare il mondo a dispetto di un destino avverso. Urone). Per l’Oxford Dictionariesorenda è il potere magico che i nativi americani Iroquois credono pervada tutta la natura sotto forma di energia spirituale. È la forza dei temporali e del vento ma anche il potere miracoloso che solo alcuni uomini possono esercitare. Gli sciamani, per esempio. Orenda, però, è anche una benedizione: permette a chi ne è dotato di sfidare gli eventi avversi e superarli.

Passeggiata

(Camminata piacevole, tranquilla e rilassata. Italiano). «Non avevo mai sentito la parola finché non sono stato in Italia. Qui — dice Lomas — ho capito il piacere che ne deriva. La passeggiata come il cibo fa parte dell’immagine del Paese». Ne è convinta anche Diane Hales autrice di La Bella Lingua: «All’imbrunire — scrive — qualcosa sembra attirare le persone fuori da case e uffici per partecipare alla passeggiata». Segna la fine del lavoro, a vedere e a farsi vedere — spiega. Indossando, magari, gli abiti appropriati.

Queesting

(Accogliere l’amante nel proprio letto per chiacchierare. Olandese). Il termine, in pieno revival su internet, ha una storica tradizione, descritta dal medico statunitense Henry Reed Stiles nel 1871 in Bundling: its origin, progress and decline in America. La donna, spiega, lasciava di notte le porte della propria camera aperte nell’attesa che l’amante entrasse e le parlasse. Lo faceva per conquistarlo e con il pieno consenso dei familiari.

Ramé

(Caotico e gioioso insieme. Balinese). Qualcosa ramé a Bali? Il gamelan. Si tratta di un’orchestra composta da numerosi strumenti, tra cui tamburi, gong, xilofoni, flauti di bambù e strumenti a corda. La musica prodotta è complessa e articolata, con melodie sovrapposte e più linee ritmiche suonate insieme. Il risultato? Caotico, allegro, vitale. In una parola: ramé.

Samar

(Sedersi insieme per raccontare storie all’ora del tramonto. Arabo). «Samar — dice Lomas — racconta in una sola parola un’intera cultura». E una tradizione antica nel tempo. L’ha descritta il teologo Kenneth E. Bailey su «Themelios», rivista di studi religiosi: gli abitanti dei villaggi si incontrano la sera per raccontare storie e declamare poesie. L’atmosfera è informale e chiunque può partecipare anche se a parlare sono di solito gli individui più in vista. E i più anziani: uomini in grado di tramandare la tradizione orale della comunità.

Tithadesh

(È l’augurio che si rivolge a chi ha acquisito qualcosa di nuovo. Ebraico). Un’auto nuova? Tithadesh! Il termine, allegro, ha però un retrogusto amaro, rivelando l’attaccamento alle cose materiali, come ha spiegato con una storia David Frishman. Il figlio di un povero sarto, ha scritto, si lamenta con il padre che realizza abiti nuovi per i ricchi ma non può permettersi di regalargliene uno. Nessuno, così, in sinagoga gli rivolge tithadesh. Un giorno, però, lo riceve: per il suo funerale. Indossa un abito luccicante per l’occasione ma ha perso quello che conta: la vita.

Ubuntu

(Umanità verso gli altri, sentirsi parte di una grande comunità. Bantu). Sono chi sono in virtù di ciò che tutti siamo. Ecco l’etica ubuntu che ha ispirato anche il nome e la filosofia dell’omonimo sistema operativo basato su Linux, con l’obiettivo di portare l’idea di condivisione anche nel mondo software. Chi ha l’ubuntu, infatti, non può perseguire solo il vantaggio personale. Lo ha spiegato l’attivista e arcivescovo sudafricano Desmond Tutu: «Una persona con l’ubuntu è aperta e disponibile. Quando fai del bene si diffonde, è per tutta l’umanità»

Vorfreude

(La gioia che deriva dall’immaginare piaceri futuri. Tedesco). Vorfreude è «il sabato del villaggio», il piacere di pregustare la festa. Rivela allegria e una sottile apprensione. «Le parole possono essere polivalenti — spiega Lomas —. Il gusto di assaporare il futuro è combinato con la paura che non possa arrivare. Come nell’italiano magari, che significa “forse”, “nei miei desideri” o “se solo”, tenendo così insieme un augurio speranzoso e un pensieroso rammarico»

Wabi-Sabi

(Bellezza imperfetta e consumata. Giapponese). «È la capacità di apprezzare la bellezza di fenomeni vecchi o degli oggetti rotti — spiega Lomas —. Siamo costantemente incoraggiati alla ricerca del nuovo, parole come wabi-sabici permettono di percepire il mondo da un’altra prospettiva. È un termine esteticamente rilevante ma può essere utile anche per considerare la propria vita, per accettare il personale processo di invecchiamento e capire che anche lì c’è un valore».

Xibipiio

(Esperienza di un fenomeno ai limiti della percezione o della coscienza. Pirahã dell’Amazzonia). Qualcosa di simile allo Xibipiio? Il bu-bu-settete dei bambini. Lo spiega Daniel Everett, linguista, nel libro Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: «La parola si riferisce a quella che chiamo l’esperienza della transizione, l’atto di cominciare o terminare qualcosa, di trovarsi al limite di un fenomeno. Come una fiamma tremolante, che entra e esce dalla nostra percezione».

Yuán fèn

(Relazione determinata dal destino. Cinese). La fatidica coincidenza delle relazioni: non avvengono per caso, ma dipendono dalle azioni commesse nella vita precedente. Chi si incontra, insomma, lo fa grazie a una innata connessione universale. Lo yuán fèn, scrive Kwang-Kuo Hwang della National Taiwan University, offre una prospettiva in cui inserire i sentimenti negativi, come incidenti nelle relazioni, rendendo così più facile il loro superamento.

Załatwíc

(Risolvere una situazione e sistemare le cose arrangiandosi. Polacco). Nel 1986 l’antropologa Janine Wedel in The Private Poland ha intervistato sociologi ed economisti per descrivere la società polacca, di cui, spiega, załatwíc è una delle parole chiave. E lo è stata soprattutto in passato quando, per ottenere documenti e beni si ricorreva all’aiuto di amici e parenti. Che mettevano a frutto quello che avevano: competenza, relazioni o anche solo fantasia.

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