There's A Word for That???

Best friends are awesome.  They get you sometimes when you don't get yourself.  They cheer you up, they encourage your pursuits, they make you laugh, they show up just when you need them.  And they bring you presents that are so perfectly you that it's eerie.  Like the book that showed up from my best friend, Colleen, this past Saturday.

This brand new book, What A Wonderful Word by Nicola Edwards and illustrated by Luisa Uribe is self-described as "a collection of untranslatable words from around the world."  The book explains that some words are common between languages and easily translatable - think that "Blue" in English easily becomes "Azul" in Spanish or "Mavi" in Turkish.  But what about a word or a phrase that is more tied to a way of life for a specific culture that may be unfamiliar to another so there's no direct word that translates?  This book is full of examples!

Since I got it, I have had so much fun pouring through these pages.  Do you know what a "Poronkusema" is?  Well, in Finnish it means the distance a reindeer can walk before needing to use the bathroom, which is no more than 4.7 miles. What about a "Pochemuchka"'?  That's Russian for a child who asks "why?" all the time; a person who asks too many questions.  I'm sure this is an idea that parents around the world can relate to but the Russian language has one specific word to represent the concept.  Both of these ideas are important to the culture, so much so that they have their own specific word.  The book goes on to detail that reindeer are so important in northern Finland, the language has around 400 words about the food, tools, and products created from the animal and that the phrase "I don't know" has been banned in a Serbian town to keep officials from making excuses,.  These specifics show WHY those languages have created a singular word to fit just that situation.  How amazing is language??

From Sanskrit to Hopi to Wagiman, there are plenty of examples of similar word to explanatory phrases.  I may start borrowing "gluggavendur" to describe Michigan winter as it is what they say in Iceland when the weather looks beautiful while you're inside but is much too cold when you step outside or perhaps remember to be so thankful that Colleen is my "nakama" what the Japenese refer to as friends who are like family. 

I'm enamored with the text and I think it is a wonderful representation of the power of language.  As the author writes in the introduction "It tells us what an interesting mix human beings are, and it reassures us that we are understood, that we're all the same on some level.  It's nice, isn't it, to know that someone else has had the same feeling or experience as you and given it, at long last, a name of its own?"   I highly suggest checking this book out!

A cultural connection or growing pains?

So I just couldn't stay away from blogging after I stumbled across this article the other day by based on a study out of the University of California Riverside, examining how lessons vary from culture to culture in picture books. The results were recently published in Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology examing a list of "learning-related" values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you're born with.

The researchers then studied picture books from the United States, China and Mexico to see how the lessons varied and how frequently each appeared in books from the different cultures. Researchers found that a heavy theme of these values appeared twice as frequently in the books from China as those from the United States. Further, books from the United States more prevalently had a theme or message about happiness.

You can read further into the study yourself, but I can't say, based on the books that I read and my own findings that I'm much surprised by the fact that there is a notable difference between the themes and messages in the books from place to place. I found that MANY times in all my reading.  I think that goes back to the idea of children and what role they play in each of those societies.

Another thought did strike me, though, based on what I found about the Children's book industry in China, back from when we talked about My Grandmother Lives In A Perfume Village. It was there that I learned that the children’s book market in China is a rapidly expanding industry, largely unrecognized until about the past fifteen years.  I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the content of the books being created and then researched in this study.  If you consider the texts that were first produced for children in England and America, they were extremely didactic in nature and leaned heavily on morals and teaching a specific lesson via the story.  I am curious if this is similar to the growth period for the industry in China.  As it is still evolving, is it experiencing similar growing pains as it attempts to define what children's literature means to the culture there?  I think as the study suggests, the culture itself plays a large part, but I'm wondering if as more and more books are produced in China if the strong moral bent to their literature for children will start to shift over time.  Definitely something to consider for a future rabbit hole ;-)