Club of Tongues (tag Tatya) on Library

Dorian

October 25, 2017 7:12 AM

Club of Tongues (tag Tatya) by Dorian

Dorian finished transliterating what Tatya had just said and dotted a neat fullstop at the end of the phrase ‘schastlivogo Rozhdestva.’ Above it, the sentence was written in Tatya’s neat Cyrillic. He would compare this to his alphabet chart later, practising recognising the letters and sounding them out.

“For French, is simply mean Merry Christmas,” he explained, as he added ‘Joyeux Noël’ to everyone’s books, “But for Chinese, be happy for the birth of the saint,” he explained, writing out ‘Shèngdàn jié kuàilè’ along with the proper Chinese characters, pointing out the parts that were made up of characters they might recognise from other contexts, especially the radicals - the building block characters which occurred again and again.

“Do Russian celebrate the New Year at this time as well?” he asked Tatya. Culturally, Russia seemed quite Western (although he would never dare voice this thought to Tatya), and he suspected that her part of it most definitely was. But it was so big, and had borders with China. Perhaps they had different new years in different parts of the country. “Chinese have phrase for this Happy New Year, but it is very literal. At our own new year, we wish congratulation and prosperity. But you must wait until February for me to tell you how,” he added with a smile. Once the Christmas greetings were exchanged, he pondered what else he would like to learn at this meeting of the Club of Tongues.

“Tatya?” he asked, as something else he might need for the holidays occurred to him. “Can you teach me some ways to make insult in Russian? It does not have to be the rude words,” he added hastily, not sure what her feelings on cursing were, “It can be silly thing, like ‘you have the monkey face.’ Meathead will always be more strong than me, but I am smarter. I can learn to insult him in every language of the world.” His friends were, by now, familiar with Dorian’s nickname for his brother, and the fact that said brother was broadly an unpleasant person. He had painted it in slightly different ways to different people. Jehan knew the most, in that he knew the reasons why Matthieu picked on Dorian. He had felt safe disclosing these to Jehan, because they were elements that were reflected in Jehan’s own personality and interests too. He had also mentioned how Matthieu could be a bit rough, and played Beater for his house - euphemisms which he suspected Jehan had seen through with ease. With Tatya, he had been less keen to draw attention to his perceived failings, and had presented it more along the line of simple sibling scraps, and them just not getting on, the way brothers don’t sometimes.

OOC - godmodding permission acquired from Tatya. Although this is addressed to her, it can be assumed that Jehan is also present.

13 Dorian Club of Tongues (tag Tatya) 1401 Dorian 1 5

Tatiana

October 25, 2017 9:25 PM

Better than a club over the head, anyway. by Tatiana

Be happy for the birth of the saint. Tatiana paused a moment over the last word, which she had rarely heard in English, before associating it with svyatoi and remembering another very important occasion which she needed to tell them about, as it partially honored them at home and very much honored her. That, however, would have to wait, as right now, she was squinting at the Chinese and wondering if it was really possible that she should someday read them. Compared to Chinese, learning the Roman alphabet had been the work of a day – though in fact she had learned it over the course of a week and a half, some years ago, with a lot of tedious copying until it was beaten into her head.

It was obvious from Dorian’s appearance that some of his ancestors were from Asia, but it had not occurred to Tatiana when she proposed their little alliance that she and Jehan might get to learn some Chinese, too. She thought Papa was going to be astonished and pleased with her – he had expected her English to improve as she lived among the English, but she was sure he had not even expected her to improve her French, never mind pick up a smidgen of Chinese. China was a neighbor of sorts, and Papa went there sometimes, but Tatiana didn’t think Papa even spoke Chinese, so he wouldn’t expect that, and would probably laugh and call her umnaya doch’ - ‘clever daughter.’ She liked that, as she knew it wasn’t just teasing – Papa really did approve of her most of the time.

“Eh – is – not quite,” she said, not showing off her best English skills as she tried to think of two things at once when Dorian asked about New Year’s at home. “We - day-number is different. For us, Rozhdestvo - Noël, you say; it means…like ‘birth,’ more,” she added; they might have recognized the sound from ‘happy day of birth,’ the first Russian she had ever taught Dorian, but best, it seemed, to clarify “– but for us, Rozhdestvo in your January. But before that, we have - the new year that new style,” said Tatiana, constructing her sentence awkwardly in an attempt to make it comprehensible. “That is your New Year. Then our New Year after Rozhdestvo., and we have Tatiana Day.” She smiled as she assumed they thought she was perhaps the vainest person in the world for a moment. “Anton Petrovich said you do not know Tatiana Day. It – the – honor of Tat'yana Rimskaya, the first Svyataya Tat’yana.. Honor of all students on Tatiana Day, and my nameday. You say twelve – we say twenty-five, January. I have cake then, and share with brothers and sisters – this year, share with you,” she added generously. It did not occur to her that as the kitchens probably did not expect to produce a cake for Tatiana Day; every other kitchen she had ever been near when the occasion rolled around had produced cake, so she expected cake as a matter of course.

“New Year very important. S novym godom – happy new year,” she concluded more laconically.

Tatiana was initially puzzled by Dorian’s desire to learn to be impolite in Russian, though his explanation did help a bit. “You said ‘u vas est' litso obez'yany,” she commented. “That is monkey-face. Meathead - myasnaya golova.. Eh….” The problem was not that Tatiana was unversed in the art of the insult in Russian – Mama said she was too sharp-tongued for her own good sometimes - but rather that she wasn’t sure how to translate some insults into English at all. “Others - durak, dryan’…though I am in trouble if I name Katya durak. Means…not smart. Oh - gadkyi, or urodlivyi, there you go. I do not know them in English, but I say to Nastasia when we argued.” In fairness, Anastasiya had called Tatiana stupid before that, knowing perfectly well that Tatiana was not, so Tatiana had felt perfectly comfortable throwing back that Anastasiya was monstrously ugly and beastly, though Mama had scolded her anyway. Tatiana knew, after all, that she was not stupid – and she also knew that while her cousin was not hideous, she was not as pretty as Tatiana. These were also things that Nastya knew, and Tatiana knew she knew them, and so it had, according to Mama, been very unkind of her, no matter what or who had started it, and she ought to try to do better and be better than others when they insulted her. Tatiana, for her part, preferred Dorian’s idea of how to handle an obnoxious situation.

“I would say how insult in French,” she sighed, “but Mama knows the French. Better to learn more insulty in English. Anton Petrovich wouldn’t teach me that,” she added crossly, still annoyed with her tutor months later for that. It was an essential communications skill!

16 Tatiana Better than a club over the head, anyway. 1396 Tatiana 0 5

Dorian

November 01, 2017 5:53 AM

Which I might get for using these by Dorian

“Perhaps for Christmas, I get the calendar. And then, when we come back, you can add the Russian calendars too,” Dorian smiled. He couldn’t quite picture when all the festivities Tatiana mentioned would be, but he well understood the idea of different calendars. “To show me how the date is different, and for when we celebrate Tatiana Day.” Their twelfth of January, he thought she had said. And he would need to make sure that there was a cake for her. He would have to ask Professor Xavier about whether they were allowed to ask the elves for such things for special occasions. Or perhaps he could arrange a cake-by-owl delivery….

He began to write down Tatiana’s stream of abuse, occasionally asking her for repetitions and clarifications. He wasn’t sure that literally translating ‘meat head’ would make much sense, but as he planned to insult someone who didn’t speak a word of Russian, it didn’t really matter. Where French was not an option, Dorian usually had a back up option, but on this occasion, he found himself limited.

“Hmm, I cannot really help with give you Chinese insult…. I not know so many because only my mother to ask at home and she does not tell us these. When Émilie is not get up or not study the best, mother is call her lǎn dàn. Is mean ‘lazy egg,’ but it is not the very bad one - it is the… the loving insult? I see some cousin when we go to China, and they tell me I can call Matthieu èr bǎi wŭ for meaning that he stupid, but I don’t know if this is for real or they make a joke on me instead. It mean literal ‘two hundred and fifty,’ which does not sound like the insult, but Chinese can be very…” he searched in vain for the word ‘abstract’ and communicated instead with a twirl of his hand. “Matthieu learn a word from them and call me, and won’t tell me the meaning. When I ask my mother, she go very pale and then shout at him for a long time. So probably that one is really bad. At least for English, now you know the new one ‘Meat Head.’ Though I think none of your sibling are this bad. None of them behave like caveman.”

13 Dorian Which I might get for using these 1401 Dorian 0 5

Tatiana

November 01, 2017 11:37 AM

Have you considered taking up sprinting? by Tatiana

“Will I,” said Tatiana to the suggestion of putting together calendars, though she suspected the Russian calendar was going to be easier to understand than the Chinese one for reasons other than partiality. The months, after all, were the same, just in different languages – the only thing was that the west had for some reason decided to mark when things began and ended on a different day than was traditional, and as a result, they just got to party for nearly a solid month as people accommodated multiple dates.

Tatiana had heard people talk about ‘the west’ and ‘the east,’ and those were concepts she understood well enough. She did not include her own land and culture in either of those areas. They were Russian – that was all. As Russia alone was a sixth of the planet, she was not entirely sure why they should not be their own part of the world – the North, perhaps. Russia was north of China, and Alaska north of America, and once, she was told, they had owned most of Scandinavia too, and even in the Muggle city she had had to visit with Papa to try to sort out the business about names and registrations, there had been things that were familiar: the shape of a roof here, someone who didn’t bat an eye at their names there. They had even found an old priest who spoke Russian and had helped them figure out where, exactly, they were and how it related to where they were supposed to go. Russia was itself, not quite anything else, she thought, and she didn’t see why it ought to be.

The East, though, apparently could top them for odd insults, at least if Dorya’s cousins were not pulling a joke on him. Two hundred and fifty? Why would that be an insult? The twirling hand gesture made her smile, as she often felt like describing some concept the same way, and she nodded to show she comprehended – if only that he couldn’t quite describe what he meant.

“Na,” she agreed when he said none of her siblings were so bad as this Matthieu character. “Good brothers, good sisters. I….” She didn’t know the word for to miss, or couldn’t remember it offhand. “I want brothers and sisters with me,” said Tatiana instead, figuring that would express the same sentiment. “Most timy – ah, times!” She made a face, annoyed with the letter ‘s’ all over again for reasons other than its redundancy. She could not quite shake the habit of pluralizing things with ‘-y’ instead of ‘-s’ even when otherwise using the English word. “You have – letters that you need not in French, Chinese?” she asked, unconsciously assuming Dorian had both picked up on the fact that she asked questions by inflection rather than adding extra words when she wasn’t concentrating and that he remembered the times she had complained about how the letter ‘s’ and the multiple functions of the English letter ‘c’ were pointless when explaining Cyrillic.

16 Tatiana Have you considered taking up sprinting? 1396 Tatiana 0 5