Elizabeth Little

Excerpts From Biting the Wax Tadpole

I’m often at a loss when explaining Biting the Wax Tadpole. Sometimes I'm not even sure how to categorize it. Is it reference? Non-fiction? Humor? If it were up to me, I’d shelve it with those books about things like cod and dead bodies, books that manage to take unappealing subjects (say, fish or corpses or language learning) and explore them in a new and exciting way.

But it's not up to me. And thank god, because I'm terrible at the whole book-description thing. Here's what my publisher has to say about Biting the Wax Tadpole:

In this decidedly unstuffy look at the staid world of languages, Elizabeth Little uses her favorite examples from languages dead, difficult, and just plain made-up to reveal how language study is the ticket to traveling the world—without leaving the comforts of home.

In case you're still not sold, here are some representative examples of what you'll find in this book. And yes, it has pictures.

A particularly unusual feature of Guaraní is its use of tense—but not with relation to verbs, with relation to nouns. Guaraní nouns can be marked with two different endings, –kue or –ra. Kue is a past-tense marker (similar to the English prefix ex-), and ra is a future-tense marker. So if you consider the word for “president,” mburuvicha, then Bill Clinton is a mburuvichakue, and Barack Obama is a possible mburuvichara. You can also combine the endings: mburuvicharangue means “what we thought was going to be a future president but then turned out not to be.” In other words: Al Gore.

(Note: this was written in the spring of 2007; Barack Obama is, of course, now a full-fledged mburuvicha.)

Common nouns aren’t the only nouns subject to considerations of case. Proper names, too, get the grammatical treatment. Which is all well and good until parents decide that they want their kids to be special. And then all of a sudden, schoolteachers around the country have to struggle to figure out the genitive of Suri, Shiloh, Kal-El. Iceland, for one, is having none of it. If you want to use a nontraditional baby name in Iceland, you must first pass it by the Icelandic Naming Committee. New names can’t contain any non-Icelandic letters, and they have to be amenable to Icelandic declension patterns. And if the Committee turns down your request, you’re shit out of luck. If you’re a celebrity interested in emigrating to Iceland, consider yourself forewarned.

The single most widely cited example of a foreign-language marketing foul-up comes at the expense of Chevrolet, which introduced the Chevy Nova in Mexico in 1972. As the story goes, sales of the new model were anemic due to the fact that Nova sounds a great deal like the Spanish no va, or “doesn’t go.” It would be a cute story—if it were true. In reality, “Nova” was no more mistaken for no va than “noble” is for “no bull,” and sales were just fine. That’s not to say that General Motors has a perfect record when it comes to translation. In 2003, GM was forced to rename the Buick La Crosse in Canada when it was discovered that the name also happened to be Quebecois slang—for masturbation.

(Illustrations by Ayumi Piland)