Humans talk to their babies in a very particular way—and so do dolphins.
Across human cultures and languages, adults talk to babies in a very particular way. They raise their pitch and broaden its range, while also shortening and repeating their utterances; the latter features occur even in sign language. Mothers use this exaggerated and musical style of speech (which is sometimes called “motherese”), but so do fathers, older children, and other caregivers. Infants prefer listening to it, which might help them bond with adults and learn language faster.
But to truly understand what baby talk is for, and how it evolved, we need to know which other animals use it, if any. The great apes don’t seem to vocally, but might use a gestural equivalent. Squirrel monkeys and rhesus macaques use special calls when talking to youngsters, but they’re very different from human baby talk, which is a modified version of normal speech. Zebra finches are closer to us: When singing in front of juveniles, adults add longer pauses between musical phrases and repeat introductory notes. Greater sac-winged bat mothers also change their pitch and timbre when signaling to pups, but again, it’s hard to tell if they’re using a distinct call or doing something analogous to baby talk. To make an inarguable case for the latter, you’d need to study a species that talks with both infants and older peers using the same standardized, identifiable call. In other words, you’d need a dolphin.
Every bottlenose dolphin produces its own unique signature whistle, which is the closest thing any animal has to a human name. Dolphins can recognize individuals through these whistles and will sometimes copy one another’s, perhaps as a form of address. They use their whistles frequently, to announce their position when separated from their pod, or as an introduction when meeting up with new groups. Calves develop their own signature whistles based on those they hear around them, and once learned, the whistles can go unchanged for at least 12 years.
Laela Sayigh, a zoologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been studying the signature whistles of bottlenoses in Sarasota Bay, Florida, since 1986 as part of the world’s longest-running study of wild dolphins. She and her colleagues regularly catch these animals, check their health, and record their calls before releasing them. Sometimes, they catch mothers and calves together, and the animals exchange signature whistles throughout the process. By analysing 19 such moments, recorded over 34 years, Sayigh’s student Nicole El Haddad showed that mothers raised and widened the pitch of their signature whistles when calling to their calves, just as humans do when talking to their babies.
“We were just blown away by how consistent the effect was,” Sayigh told me. Between their intelligence and strong personality, dolphins behave unpredictably enough that scientists who study them are used to gleaning faint patterns amid messy data. But in this study, every mom changed its signature whistle around its calf in the same way. “The data are extraordinary and impressive,” Sabine Stoll, who studies language evolution at the University of Zurich, told me.
Dolphin baby talk isn’t exactly the same as ours—dolphin whistles don’t get more repetitive—but it’s certainly “the most convincing case of child-directed communication found in nonhuman animals to date,” Mirjam Knörnschild from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, who led the study on sac-winged bats, told me. And its existence in a species separated from us by more than 90 million years of history is likely a “stunning” example of convergent evolution, Stoll said.
If both species evolved baby talk independently, perhaps they did so for similar reasons. Human parents can better grab their infants’ attention through high-pitched baby talk than through normal speech, and dolphin mothers might do the same. Keeping her signature whistle but raising its pitch “would be a pretty foolproof way for the mom to say ‘This whistle is meant for you’ to the calf, and for the calf to know My mom is talking to me right now and no one else,” Sayigh said. That specificity would allow both of them to keep close contact in a raucous ocean where many dolphins might be sounding off at once.
Human baby talk is also thought to strengthen a baby’s bond with its caregivers, and to help it learn language by exaggerating important features of the spoken word. The same could well apply to dolphins, which also stay with their mother for a long time, and learn calls by listening to their peers. But testing these ideas would be incredibly hard without separating mothers and their calves—an experiment that Sayigh said would cross an ethical line. She showed that dolphin baby talk exists; its exact role “is just one of those things that might have to go unanswered,” she said.
Why do Pennsylvania elk sound different from Colorado elk?
It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.
Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now new research has found that male elks’ bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat, and bird calls have dialects of sorts too, and a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne, in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate.
Hearing elk bugle in Rocky Mountain National Park decades ago inspired Clarke to investigate the sound. “My graduate students and I started delving into the library and could find nothing on elk communication, period,” she says. That surprised her: “Thousands of people go to national parks to hear them bugle, and we don’t know what we’re listening to.”
Her research, published earlier this year in the Journal of Mammalogy, dug into the unique symphony created by different elk herds. Although most people can detect human dialects and accents—a honey-thick southern drawl versus nasal New England speech—differences in regional elk bugles are almost imperceptible to human ears. But by using spectrograms to visually represent sound frequencies, researchers can see the details of each region’s signature bugles. “It’s like handwriting,” Clarke says. “You can recognize Bill’s handwriting from George’s handwriting.”
Pennsylvania’s elk herds were translocated from the West in the early 1900s, and today, they have longer tonal whistles and quieter bugles than elk in Colorado. Meanwhile, bugles change frequency from low to high tones more sharply in Wyoming than they do in Pennsylvania or Colorado.
Clarke isn’t sure why the dialects vary. She initially hypothesized that calls would differ based on the way sound travels in Pennsylvania’s dense forests compared with the more open landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming, but her data didn’t support that theory. Clarke hopes to find out whether genetic variation—which is more limited in Pennsylvania’s herd—might explain differences in bugles, and whether those differences are learned by young males listening to older bulls.
Clarke’s research adds a small piece to the larger puzzle of animal communication, says Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study. “It’s not as though a song or vocal learning is ‘all environmental’ or ‘all genetic,’” he says. “It’s an interplay between both.” Blumstein, a marmot-communication researcher, adds that the mechanisms behind these vocal variations deserve more study.
These unanswered questions are part of the larger field of bioacoustics, which blends biology and acoustics to deepen our understanding of the noises that surround us in nature. Bioacoustics can sometimes be used as a conservation tool to monitor animal behavior, and other studies are shedding light on how it affects animal evolution, disease transfer, and cognition.
Elk are not the only species with regional dialects. In North America, eastern and western hermit thrushes sing different song structures, and the white-crowned sparrow’s song can help ornithologists identify where it was born. Campbell’s monkeys also have localized dialects in their songs and calls, as does the rock hyrax, a mammal that looks like a rodent but is actually related to elephants.
Similar differences exist underwater, where whale songs have unique phrases that vary by location. Sperm whales in the Caribbean have clicking patterns in their calls that differ from those of their Pacific Ocean counterparts. Orcas in Puget Sound use distinctive clicks and whistles within their own pods.
Clarke also studies the vocalizations of ptarmigan, flying foxes, and Tasmanian devils. Her next research project will shed light on how bison mothers lead their herds and communicate with their calves. “They’re the heart of the herd,” she says. “What are they talking about?”
Starting in the 1600s, however, a growing demand tempted many ship captains to make the longer voyage to the British colonies in North America. Roughly one of every four slaves imported to work the cotton and tobacco plantations of the American South began his or her journey across the Atlantic from equatorial Africa, including the Kongo kingdom. The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River's mouth, is one of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah dialect spoken by black Americans today on the Coastal Islands of South Carolina and Georgia.
An informal, online network is translating publicly available articles and social-media posts. That has been enough to rile Beijing.
Yang is part of a larger informal, online network called the Great Translation Movement that has sprung up since Russia’s invasion, translating Chinese-language news items, popular social-media comments, speeches, and statements from academics and pundits into English, and posting them to Western platforms, primarily Twitter. Most translations are focused on the war, though the Chinese government’s coronavirus lockdown of Shanghai, which has dragged on for weeks, has recently become another topic of interest. An anonymous Twitter account has taken on the moniker The Great Translation Movement and picked up more than 150,000 followers since it launched in March, making it the center of this diffuse and ad hoc effort that has used the platform as a battleground to push back on Chinese-state-dominated narratives that have proliferated on the site despite it being blocked within China.
Though all these volunteers have done is simply translate posts that have already cleared China’s internet-censorship regime, they have nevertheless managed to enrage Beijing. China’s Great Firewall strives to keep those behind it from seeing an online world free from censorship, barring major Western news outlets (including The Atlantic) and social media, while heavily curtailing what can and cannot be said online by domestic users. It does not, however, throw up similar barriers for those interested in peeking in. In fact, one of the only significant hurdles to accessing the Chinese internet is language skills. Those involved in the Great Translation Movement, such as Yang, hope to show an audience unfamiliar with the Chinese language some of the narratives that are officially sanctioned or gaining popular support.
Many of these narratives are very much at odds with the diplomatically projected neutrality regarding the war that comes from Beijing’s more staid official statements and speeches. After seemingly struggling to explain its position early on, China now largely focuses its narrative—pushed by state-backed outlets, pundits, and officials—on blaming the war on the United States as well as apparent efforts by NATO to encircle Russia. Additionally, translations posted by volunteers show that a belief has emerged that as Ukrainians suffer, American companies and business tycoons profit handsomely off the war at a safe distance. The longer and more drawn-out the conflict, the logic goes, the better for them.
The translation efforts have clearly perturbed Beijing. Numerous articles in state media have targeted the Great Translation Movement Twitter account, Yang, and others for attacking China by allegedly choosing the most extreme sentiments for translation. Maria Repnikova, an associate global-communications professor at Georgia State University who studies censorship and propaganda in China and Russia, told me it was notable how much attention the effort had attracted, among both casual internet users and Chinese officials. “It’s as if this group has triggered the most sensitive spots for different participants in the conversation about China and especially about China in relation to the Ukraine war,” Repnikova said. “For some Western observers, these translated statements reinforce their preexisting opinions about China’s stance. For Chinese nationalistic media, it reasserts the idea that the ‘West’ is out to get China.”
Yang’s original thread, despite his relatively low follower count on Twitter, were quickly noticed, for example. The Global Times, a jingoistic state-backed newspaper, called him out by name in a late-March report about the Great Translation Movement. The article called his posts a “smear campaign” that cherry-picked examples, and it linked the movement to racist incidents against Asians living in the United States. (Despite one expert dismissing the movement as “just a farce,” the GT article was more than 1,500 words long.) A few days later, the newspaper again slammed the efforts. Less than a month later, it ran another lengthy—albeit more nuanced—commentary entitled “How China Can Counter Translation Bias,” written by Tang Jingtai, a journalism professor at Fudan University, in Shanghai. (Tang declined to comment.)
Tang’s article was in turn quoted in yet another GT story, a broader one accusing The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and Google Translate of intentionally mistranslating Chinese into English. “Behind these superficial mistranslation incidents, however, lurk the long-term hostility and prejudice of the West toward China, remarked Chinese scholars,” the newspaper said. People’s Daily and other Chinese state media have also weighed in. Late last month, Cong Peiying, an assistant professor at China Youth University of Political Studies, in Beijing, compared the movement to a virus that was mutating and needed to be halted. The expansion from blaming individual actors to pointing the finger at Western media writ large made sense, Repnikova said, because it “taps into the larger narrative in state media about Western discourse hegemony and deliberate effort to curtail China’s discourse power. It also fits into the larger narrative about the West ‘misunderstanding’ China.”
Beijing’s unhappiness over perceived bias in translation—whether or not it is merited—is not at all new, James St. André, an assistant translation professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told me. “The issue with China feeling it is misrepresented in English is something that goes back to the Opium Wars and issues in the 19th century with the early contact with Western nations,” he said. Over the decades, the Chinese government has “deliberately nursed a grievance in this area.” The idea of a truly neutral translation is, St. André said, a “polite myth.” Translators are always drawn into their work and that, in turn, colors the outcome. In short, he told me, “there is no Switzerland” in the world of translation, and those who are now upset “are complaining about something that they themselves are doing as well.”
Indeed, the volunteers who compose the broader movement are open about the fact that they are not analyzing a random selection of commentary in Chinese. Instead, the individuals running the Great Translation Movement Twitter account told me they were trying to rectify a major misunderstanding about China that they believe is pervasive in the West. Two competing visions of China are pushed by Beijing, they say, and one of them might not be visible to people who do not read Chinese. “The image that the Chinese government tries to cultivate overseas is that of a big, cuddly panda bear who spreads traditional Chinese culture in a friendly way and takes the initiative to befriend the whole world,” they told me. (The account is run by a group of volunteers who wished to remain anonymous to protect themselves from possible retaliation.) “Conversely, the discourse promoted within China is increasingly nationalistic,” they said, citing pro-Russian sentiments, saber-rattling about the reunification of Taiwan, and co-opting of the anti-Asian-hate movement—what they called “the real face of China.”
The account began as a Reddit page and migrated to Twitter after the subreddit was closed over issues with doxxing. The Twitter account’s administrator told me that they and others in the Great Translation Movement had read and been influenced by Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic, a 2004 book by the Calvin University professor Randall Bytwerk whose contents were “terrifyingly familiar.” Still, although the Twitter account and others like it are open about the apparent bias they are attempting to correct, the administrator dismissed complaints that the account selects comments from the fringes of the Chinese internet. The group chooses content to translate that is from state media, and thus approved by the government, and other articles that garner huge support, enough to argue, the administrator said, that they represent “popular views that many in Chinese society strongly believe in.”
There is little doubt about the official veracity of the speeches and papers translated by Tuvia Gering, a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a think tank. Gering has focused his translation efforts on a range of Chinese academics, pundits, and policy makers, posting threads to Twitter showing the official embrace of conspiracy theories and the movement of disinformation from Russian state media to China. During our conversation, Gering mentioned a new Russian falsehood he had noticed about bioweapons labs being run by Americans in Mongolia. He told me he was almost certain that the theory would at some point be picked up in China. A few hours after we spoke, my phone buzzed with a message from Gering. “Called it!” he wrote, with a link to his latest Twitter thread showing the lie being parroted by Chinese officials.
Gering told me he started posting translations from the Chinese internet to Twitter more than a year ago. As the war in Ukraine has unfolded, there has been increased interest in his work. In every country, he acknowledged, “you are going to have bigots and racists and people saying terrible things.” There were two main differences with China. “The information space in China is highly regulated—that’s one,” he said. “Second, the people I document saying these horrible, terrible things are tenured professors; they are party members; some of them are policy makers; some of them are top strategists.”
The WeChat group that Yang had originally begun posting about dissolved in April. By then, Yang was translating new material, sometimes sending dozens of tweets a day. He told me he spent three years working at the Chinese consulate in Sydney in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and that some of his former colleagues had blocked him on Twitter. He has taken the criticism in stride. “I wear it as a badge of honor,” he told me. Claims from Chinese media that he might be trying to overthrow the Chinese government or foment a revolution made Yang laugh. “This is extremely flattering,” he said. “I’m just a nobody in Sydney, Australia, typing on my phone.”
Rumi is often called a mystic, a saint, an enlightened man. He is less frequently described as a Muslim.
The erasure of Islam from Rumi’s poetry started long before Coldplay got involved. Omid Safi, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Duke University, says that it was in the Victorian period that readers in the West began to uncouple mystical poetry from its Islamic roots. Translators and theologians of the time could not reconcile their ideas about a “desert religion,” with its unusual moral and legal codes, and the work of poets like Rumi and Hafez. The explanation they settled on, Safi told me, was “that these people are mystical not because of Islam but in spite of it.” This was a time when Muslims were singled out for legal discrimination—a law from 1790 curtailed the number of Muslims who could come into the United States, and a century later the U.S. Supreme Court described the “intense hostility of the people of Moslem faith to all other sects, and particularly to Christians.” In 1898, in the introduction to his translation of the “Masnavi,” Sir James Redhouse wrote, “The Masnavi addresses those who leave the world, try to know and be with God, efface their selves and devote themselves to spiritual contemplation.” For those in the West, Rumi and Islam were separated.
In the twentieth century, a succession of prominent translators—among them R. A. Nicholson, A. J. Arberry, and Annemarie Schimmel—strengthened Rumi’s presence in the English-language canon. But it’s Barks who vastly expanded Rumi’s readership. He is not a translator so much as an interpreter: he does not read or write Persian. Instead, he transforms nineteenth-century translations into American verse.
It’s verse of a very particular kind. Barks was born in 1937 and grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. in English literature and published his first book of poetry, “The Juice,” in 1971. The first time he heard of Rumi was later that decade, when another poet, Robert Bly, handed him a copy of translations by Arberry and told him that they had to be “released from their cages”—that is, put into American free verse. (Bly, who has published poetry in The New Yorker for more than thirty years—and whose book “Iron John: A Book About Men,” from 1990, greatly informed the modern men’s movement—later translated some of Rumi’s poems himself.) Barks had never studied Islamic literature. But soon afterward, he told me recently, over the phone from his home in Georgia, he had a dream. In the dream, he was sleeping on a cliff near a river. A stranger appeared in a circle of light and said, “I love you.” Barks had not seen this man before, but he met him the following year, at a Sufi order near Philadelphia. The man was the order’s leader. Barks began spending his afternoons studying and rephrasing the Victorian translations that Bly had given him. Since then, he has published more than a dozen Rumi books.
In our conversation, Barks described Rumi’s poetry as “the mystery of opening the heart,” a thing that, he told me, “you can’t say in language.” In order to get at that inexpressible thing, he has taken some liberties with Rumi’s work. For one thing, he has minimized references to Islam. Consider the famous poem “Like This.” Arberry translates one of its lines, rather faithfully, as “Whoever asks you about the Houris, show (your) face (and say) ‘Like this.’ ” Houris are virgins promised in Paradise in Islam. Barks avoids even the literal translation of that word; in his version, the line becomes, “If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, Like this.” The religious context is gone. And yet, elsewhere in the same poem, Barks keeps references to Jesus and Joseph. When I asked him about this, he told me that he couldn’t recall if he had made a deliberate choice to remove Islamic references. “I was brought up Presbyterian,” he said. “I used to memorize Bible verses, and I know the New Testament more than I know the Koran.” He added, “The Koran is hard to read.”
Language isn’t just a means of communication, it’s a reservoir of memory, tradition and heritage. Sooner or later those who are embracing a foreign language at the expense of their mother tongue will find themselves alienated.
Term resonates with people feeling ‘overwhelmed’ with having to present their best selves
“Goblin mode” has been chosen by the public as the 2022 Oxford word of the year. The term, which refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”, has become the first word of the year to have been decided by public vote.
Given a choice of three words (or phrases/hashtags – “word” is defined fairly loosely), narrowed down by lexicographers from Oxford University Press (OUP), more than 340,000 English speakers around the world cast their vote.
“Metaverse” was the second choice, followed by “#IStandWith”. Goblin mode was a landslide victory: it was selected by 318,956 people, making up 93%of the overall vote.
The president of Oxford Languages, Casper Grathwohl, said that while he and his colleagues were “hoping the public would enjoy being brought into the process”, the level of engagement had caught them “totally by surprise”.
“Given the year we’ve just experienced, ‘goblin mode’ resonates with all of us who are feeling a little overwhelmed at this point”, he added. “It’s a relief to acknowledge that we’re not always the idealised, curated selves that we’re encouraged to present on our Instagram and TikTok feeds. This has been demonstrated by the dramatic rise of platforms like BeReal where users share images of their unedited selves, often capturing self-indulgent moments in goblin mode.”
The winning term was first seen on Twitter in 2009, but went viral on social media in February 2022 after being tweeted in a mocked-up headline.
Goblin mode “embraces the comforts of depravity”, wrote the Guardian technology reporter Kari Paul in March, who attributed the rise in the phrase’s usage to “the pandemic’s third year and the feared launch of World War Three”.
The hashtag #goblinmode on TikTok is often used as a rebuff of the “that girl” trend, which is all about being the “best version of yourself”, ie getting up early to exercise, performing elaborate skincare routines and drinking organic green smoothies – and, of course, posting about all of this on social media.
The OUP noted that the usage of goblin mode rose in the first half of 2022, when Covid restrictions were being eased in many countries. “Seemingly, it captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life’, or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media.”
The American linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer said: “Goblin mode really does speak to the times and the zeitgeist, and it is certainly a 2022 expression. People are looking at social norms in new ways. It gives people the licence to ditch social norms and embrace new ones.”
Goblin mode joins previous Oxford words of the year “vax” (2021), “climate emergency” (2019), and “selfie” (2013). Other dictionaries have also selected 2022 words of the year: Collins chose “permacrisis”, while Cambridge Dictionaries went for “homer,” which went viral in May thanks to the game Wordle.
Vocabulary is different from other areas of language, such as grammar and spelling, in that it offers us a direct insight into the social milieu, ways of thinking and cultural innovations of a period of history.
— The Story of English in 100 Words (David Crystal)
While I was living in Tsengel, I was commissioned to write a series of 'Letters from Mongolia' for the New Internationalist magazine. In spite of my appalling handwriting, and our once-a-week postal service to and from Tsengel, my letters always arrived at the New Internationalist office on time, and were legible. After several months, the commissioning editor wrote me a letter from Oxford, saying how fascinating she found the names of people in Tsengel, and suggested I write a letter about them.
I was unenthusiastic at first, mainly because I hardly knew what any of the names meant, and so it was more work for me and I had quite enough to do as it was. But as I slowly unravelled the translations, with Gansukh's help, I realised how right she was. The local names told their own stories in decadent, mighty and tragic prose.
To start at the beginning, Gansukh's name translates as Steel Axe. She told me it was given to her to strengthen and protect her. Sansar-Huu means Son of the Cosmos, which is a splendid name heralding the arrival of a first-born son. Their two children have equally vivid names: Yalta means Victory and Opia is the name of a healing plant.
So I delved further, and found out that my students at the school had some brilliant names. In one of my classes Odgerel (Starlight) sat between Buuta-Kooz (Camel-Eyes) and Amer-Huu (Boy of Great Strength), who was a girl. Chudruk (Fist) and Zolbin (Stray) sat behind them. Meanwhile Sasug (Smelly) sat near the back of the class. I am not making any of these names up, I assure you. Two of my students, a boy and a girl, were both called Enkhjargal (Great Happiness). And finally there was young Neer-Gui, whose name literally manes No Name.
I asked Gansukh why anyone would call their daughter Camel Eyes.
“Have you never seen a camel's eyes?” she retorted. “Go and look – they're beautiful!”
It was true. Tsengel was home to many a camel with deep, sexy brown eyes, framed by the kind of thick gorgeous lashes that models can only dream of. This name was a true compliment.
“So what about Chudruk?” I asked her, oblivious as to why you would name your child after a body part.
Gansukh smiled and clenched her fist at me. “That name is also given to protect him from harm, like mine. And you know the boy down the street, the one called Bunga (Bull)? His name is the same, it was also given to him to protect him and keep him strong.”
So far the theory was fairly simple. But Sasug was a bit more difficult to fathom, though Gansukh explained that it's an antonym, and actually implies he smells nice. She also insisted that, in spite of his name, Zolbin the stray was a very loved child. “You know, these names all mean the opposite of what you think they say. They are good names. Zolbin's little brother, now he has an interesting name! Zerleg. It means...” She flicked through her dictionary, and we both howled with laughter when we found the translation. Zerleg means Savage or Barbarian. “It's because...” Gansukh tried to stop laughing. “Louisa, listen! He is a bit crazy, that child, but his parents believe his name will make him peaceful when he gets older. Honestly!”
We laughed and bantered about local names until I asked about Neer-Gui, the girl with no name. Then she suddenly frowned and her voice dropped to a lower, more serious pitch. “That girl, Neer-Gui, her parents had four or five children before her, you know, and they all died very young. So when she was born they took her to the Olgii Lama and asked what name could they give her that would not anger our gods. He told them to call her Neer-Gui to please the gods so they would spare her.” In other words, it's a very passive name that cannot give divine offense.
Enbisch (Not This) is the male equivalent of Neer-Gui, and is given to a sickly or frail son for the same reason. There are many children and adults with both these names.
I never found out very much about the origins of Kazakh names, so I don't know if they apply the same principles. But the Tuvans often give their children classic Mongol names, with their predominantly revolutionary or religious origins. Baatar means Hero. Huu is Son. Baatar-Huu is a very common male name, as is Sukhbaatar (Axe Hero) or Enkhbaatar (Great Hero). Despite Gansukh's fierce name, many Mongolian women's names are traditionally gentle and reflective, like Narantsetseg (Sunflower), Munkhtsetseg (Silver Flower), or, my own favourite, Altan-Duul (Golden Flame). But, to complicate matters further, ther is also a host of androgynous Mongol names. You cannot predict whether someone called Odgerel, Enkhjargal, Jargal-Saikhan (Beautiful Happiness) or indeed Gansukh is male or female before you speak to her, or him. In a society as conservative as Mongolia, it's also interesting that traditional male names are sometimes given to girls. This is another parental method of petitioning the gods for their next born to be a son. That explains how my friend Gerel-Huu (Son of Light) got her name and why Amer-Huu (Son of Great Strength) might be a daughter.
Mongols have two names: their own given names, and their father's, which they use as an initial before their own name in official circumstances, for example, B. Bataar. Recently the government has tried to promote European-style surnames, but the Mongols have continued to use just one name. The initial is applied for identity purposes only.
— Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia (Louisa Waugh)
I'm trying to practice other languages by reading children's books, but apparently this is really outdated because when I sent this pic to Micheal they said this in response
I don't want "native-like fluency." That's a miserable language goal. I think it's profoundly fucking bleak to learn a second language with the intent to eliminate one's "accent" in it.
That being said. I want to stop sounding like I'm about to hock a loogie when I speak German
