21 January 2016
A Car Which Speaks For Itself
By Chin Chin
The Right Honourable Lord Todd of Trumpington became a consummate linguist largely, it is said, so that he could read the work of other scientists in their own languages. But then of course he had little else to do, unless you include the work necessary to win a Nobel Prize as a chemist, to lay down the groundwork for Crick and Watson, to serve as the master of a Cambridge College, to occupy chairs in chemistry at Manchester and Cambridge, to become Chancellor of the university of Strathclyde, to chair the Nuffield foundation and to hold international offices and amass academic distinctions too numerous to recite. My reason for needing foreign languages is different. I need them so that I can understand the warnings given me by hire cars.
Today’s car is a Nissan. A marvel of a Japanese technology, it was, quite understandably, manufactured in Japan, and every now and again it issues warnings to the driver in the Japanese language. When I first discovered this, I contacted the hire car company but they didn’t know how to switch it to English and indeed maybe it is not possible to do so. We all know that Japan is trying to reassert its position in the world and perhaps part of their strategy is to use Japanese-speaking cars. Teaching cars to speak Japanese may, in their eyes, be a sensible way of spreading civilisation. Make the car a fifth columnist, the ideal apostle of Japanese culture!
This is by no means a new technique. Traditionally, a certain type of Englishman refused to learn foreign languages in the belief that if he spoke louder and louder in English the foreigners would understand in the end and would be improved by it. Perhaps Japanese car manufacturers take the same approach but, although I have tried turning up the volume so that the car positively rocks to melodious Japanese, I am still unable to understand it. That can be a bit of a worry. As I pull away from the curb with the car shouting at me in Japanese, I am left wondering. Did it say “the brakes are about to fail” or “I am about to run out of petrol” or “we should have won the war, you stinking British hypocrite”? It could be any of them but, then again, perhaps it just said “good morning”. Still, accelerating away down the motorway knowing that your car wishes to address you on some topic but cannot make itself understood is a nerve-wracking experience.
There is only one answer to this and that is to learn Japanese. Not all Japanese of course. The technical scientific terms which Lord Todd would have mastered are probably unnecessary for motoring. However, there are basic expressions like “stop now”, “your brakes have failed”, “beware learner driver – bandit at 3 o’clock,” which would clearly be useful. The trouble is that learning Japanese is not enough. Suppose that the next car I hire is Chinese. That is a difficult language to learn because the intonation changes depending upon the part of China in question. That means you would need to know in which part of China the car was manufactured. Then suppose the next car is German. Well, at least I have the rudiments of that, “Heil”, “Achtung”, and “Donner und Blitzen” were staples of an English education in the 50s and 60s and no doubt one could extrapolate. But supposing, oh supposing, that the car only spoke in French. That would be more difficult than all the other languages put together.
The trouble is, you see, that we all think we know a bit of French and you would have thought so too bearing in mind the expense incurred, whether by parents or by the state, on giving us the respectable type of French lessons. However, when we do try to use French the whole French nation combines in its efforts to prevent us from doing so successfully. Sometimes, of course, misunderstandings are down to us, a question of accent perhaps, and I vividly remember confessing to a French landlady that I had “cassé une verre” to find that instead of bringing a dustpan and brush she brought coffee for two. Sometimes, too, confusion arises because of the French temperament.
I was once driven into Paris during rush-hour in one of those large Rover cars in which cabinet ministers used to ride in the 70s. Behind us there was our caravan, a large one with a prominent “GB” sticker. There seemed to be some rule about not pulling a caravan through Paris in the rush-hour and we decided to ask a policeman about it. There one stood on one of those small bandstand-like creations at a major road intersection. He was directing traffic to make sure that it flowed without impediment past one of the gates of Paris. A window was wound down, car and caravan blocking all traffic on the four intersecting roads. “Monsieur” we began. He turned red, perhaps because he was charmed and slightly embarrassed that an Englishman should address him in his own language more politely than a Frenchman would have done. “Ou ce trouve…?” we began. Now “ou ce trouve?” is highly idiomatic French. Literally it means “where finds itself?” so that to say “ou ce trouve la gare?” is to ask where the station finds itself, an aristocratic rendering of the simple “where is?” We began in this polite manner and were proposing to ask the whereabouts of the boundary beyond which caravans could not go. The other cars, which now formed eight substantial queues, began to hoot rudely and the policeman went redder still. As his blood pressure rose so his ability to speak in French deserted him. Instead he pulled out his gun and pointed it at us. “Go away!” he exclaimed in English. It is bad manners to change language midway through a conversation and I was just trying to find the right words to point this out politely when the driver lost his nerve and put his foot down. We swept on round the roundabout, side swiping a small bollard and grinding it into dust. That showed what we thought of French manners.
Normally, however, the French use a different technique to undermine English linguistic skills. They deliberately speak a little faster than an Englishman can understand. Perhaps their cars do the same. Perhaps German, Chinese and Japanese ones do so too. Does that mean that all those languages have to be learnt in an artificially accelerated form? My Goodness, even the great Lord Todd didn’t have to do that.
