Text author: Yoko
There are some people around me who have a strange talent for language mastery, such as living in the local area for a while, they can more or less speak some spoken language, local Mile, and even some accents will be infected.
For example, studying in Japan, while speaking Japanese, speaking English will also have a bit of Japanese flavor, and you will bow at every turn.
For example, working in Thailand, marrying a Thai daughter-in-law, and then naturally knowing some Thai, you can also chat with roadside vendors freely.
The most common phenomenon is that when you have a close-knit Northeasterner around you, you can't help but have a big ballast flavor when you speak.
But I am a language black hole, as a southerner who originally had an accent, I began to study and work in a different place since I was 17 years old, and I have been to the north and south, but when people around me evaluate my accent, I have no characteristics except to say that I can't hear where it is. I've never learned any dialect in any city.
My English is also very bad, memorizing words is my eternal pain, during the school period is stumbling and fooling around, to the parenting stage, only began to follow the child from the beginning to learn seriously.
At this point, I felt as if I had discovered the underlying logic of language. For example, a 3-year-old child begins to learn English, she listens to the pronunciation bus, and then shows her the bus physical object, she will understand, bus and BUS, are this kind of car, just different pronunciations, at this time, you tell her バス is also this kind of car, she can also remember. Nothing was difficult.
We start with this word mapping and insist on reading and listening to stories, regardless of grammar and sentence patterns, and by the age of 5/6 she can speak simple English sentences, although tenses and word order are often wrong, and all prepositions are used as they please. But she did communicate in English.
So, when I watched "Persian", my friend felt very incredible, and even asked me if I felt that I could not stand the thought, I said firmly, there is no problem, I believe this is a real event.
Of course, the plot creation is definitely composed of creative components, some plots are unrealistic, and the protagonist's aura is relatively heavy, but I believe that a language can be created out of thin air! Tolkien created several languages for The Lord of the Rings.
This story is during World War II, related to the Nazi concentration camps, the whole film tone, that is, the color of World War II, dark and obscure and depressed cool tone!
This film has no stars, no famous directors, and has not won awards. There are no famous events in the plot, and there are no national heroes, but about some ordinary people who are very mediocre in a very small environment.
The ordinary Nazi administrators of the concentration camps, the ordinary Jews who were locked up, did not even have particularly murderous and bloody shots and anti-human punishments. The most desperate thing is to go up and make up the gun after being shot.
Such an unpopular film, relying on good word of mouth, at last year's Beijing Film Festival, a ticket is difficult to find. It also entered the theater on March 19. Then there must be something!
The story line is very simple, a group of Jews who were suddenly captured, someone used a Book in Persian, and exchanged half a bread with a young man. It's just that the life is gone, what can this book do? But it was this book that saved the young man's life by mistake. At the time of being shot en masse, the young man defends himself not as a Jew, but as a Persian, and the evidence is this book.
Of course, the Nazi soldiers didn't let him go because of this, because their officers just needed a Persian-speaking person to teach themselves Persian! So the guys can be brought back to the concentration camp alive!
The story behind is simple, the whole process to see how this young man made up a fake Persian language, won the trust of the officer, taught the officer, and they also used a fake language to dialogue and write poetry! In the end, the officer was still in love and let go of the boy! The plot is simple to say, but how to make up a language without revealing the stuffing, this is really worth our study, maybe, you can also get to learn a foreign language skills!
First of all, boy, well, he has a name, his name is Reza, the name in the Persian book, and he basically used the method of lexicals to create this language, and learning the language with a 3-year-old child is a method. It is to give the actual noun object a new pronunciation!
Because his father was a Teacher of Judaism, Reza had some language background, and he survived the first night by making up a few Persian words.
But he was making up these words purely randomly, so he had to spend a lot of energy memorizing the pronunciations he made up on the first day to prevent the next day from leaking out! So when he was working in the kitchen, he could only memorize and silently recite the pronunciations he had made!
However, Koch, who was suspicious, threatened to change the goal of learning 4 words a day to 40.
Just when the audience was worrying about how to make up this lie, he found a good way! The officer Koch arranged an errand for him to write a record of the Jews sent to the camp.
He found that he could make up words according to the names on the list! By taking apart the surnames and first names of the Jews in the camps as a pronunciation of his own Persian words, and phonetically transliterating them in German, koch was taught. These Jewish surnames and names became "trees", "meat", "spoons", "tables"... In this way, the physical object represented by the word corresponds to the Jewish first or last name, that is, the linguistic combination of signifier and signifier, forming semantics.
The film also maintains a sense of tension in the creation of the atmosphere. The camera follows Reza's eyes, vigilantly observing the surroundings, and the audience also stands on this perspective, and the heart tightens, nervously afraid that Reza will not say a wrong word if he does not say the wrong word, and his life will not be guaranteed.
Anyone who has experience in learning foreign languages will find that the pseudo-Persian language in the film does not stand up to scrutiny at all, and this pseudo-Persian language, grammar and tense are incomplete, and only spoken language, can not be written. The opening chapter also explains in advance that this is only oral communication between their family and cannot be written.
But the director created this atmosphere, he let the lieutenant officer deeply immersed in this language, learn how to say "I love you" in "Persian" and write poetry in "Persian", even if the language is fictional, the beautiful content and beautiful pronunciation of the expression make the audience even fully believe that this language can communicate!
By this time, the officer's feelings for Reza are becoming more and more complicated, he is not the absolute ruthless Nazi in other films, although he is harsh and cruel, and he is reckless, but he will not lose his humanity!
He was sober, and while the other SS were still fantasizing about the Ability of the Third Reich to turn the tide, he had seen the end of Nazi Germany. And get ready to retreat early! He learned Persian and went to Tehran, where he joined his brother and opened a restaurant in Persia.
He hated the liars, and at first he didn't believe reza very much, repeatedly wondering if reza was pretending to be a Persian, and once Reza was beaten by Koch and sent to the quarry for not paying attention to say a repetitive word, and almost died.
But after Reza gained his trust, he was able to say something soft with apologies and give some compensation for eating and putting on, and before running, the officer even used his last position of office to take Reza away, regardless of the risk.
Koch can represent some Nazi war criminals, who are not so extreme and evil themselves, but still do evil under the impetus of the general environment, such people should not go unpunished.
So, at the end of the film, his fake Persian language makes her suspicious and caught when she enters the customs!
Compared with other concentration camp movies such as "Schindler's List", this film does not have too much emotional rendering, does not show too much of the suffering of Jews, and even in the first half, you can't feel that the story takes place in the concentration camp...
However, in the second half of learning the language, after the waves of people die, Reza no longer only pays attention to his own survival, his state of mind changes, and the film begins to gradually appear those cruel details, awakening the audience again and telling everyone that this is indeed a tragedy that has happened in history.
These names are not only the roots of a made-up language, but also the accusations and trials of criminals by victims!
(Image from the Internet, copyright belongs to the original author)