One endangered language, Piegan (spoken by one of the nations of the Blackfoot), is making a comeback according to an article in The Smithsonian.
"Some people think our language is dead, but it's not," says DesRosier, a lanky teenager with a ready grin and dark, narrow braids that reach the middle of his back. "We still have our language and we're bringing it back."
What's at stake is more than words. Filled with nuance and references to Blackfeet history and traditions, the language embodies a culture. "The language allows kids to unravel the mysteries of their heritage," says Darrell Kipp, director of the school and one of its founders.
Darrell Kipp is one of the co-founders of the Piegan Institute whose mission is to research, promote, and preserve Native languages. Sounds good to me.
Geoffrey Pullum, over at the collective linguistics blog Language Log, has an entry pondering the fact that you can write computer programs in one language (say Perl) that quote other programs written in a different language (say csh scripting) and run them. He even gives an example of a shell script that writes out a quoted C program to a file and then calls the C compiler to translate it into an executable program. He moves on to macaronic sentences in natural languages:
What I say is sauve qui peut, mon vieux!
It seems to me what you have in code switching examples like the sentence above is two grammars at work. One of the reasons that this sort of thing works so well with computer languages is that not only are the languages syntactically specified, but also their semantics. I'm not so sure that natural languages are based on rules in the formal language sense, but rather pattern recognition. And if you're interested in programming languages that lend themselves to meta-programming, you can spend some quality time looking at Lisp. Oh, and the #! at the beginning of a Unix script is called a shebang.
George Lakoff, one of my linguistics professors at UC Berkeley, was recently interviewed about the state of conservative politics we find ourselves in today. Besides providing an interesting view of how conservatives have honed their language over the past couple of decades so that they control the very language of political debate, he also mentions the Rockridge Institute of which he is a cofounder. This is "one of the only progressive think tanks in existence in the US". I guess he couldn't bring himself to use the L-word. (Actually, he does use it.) [via rc3 dot org]
Out of nowhere this morning I thought of Scott Kim and his inversions, or as Douglas Hofstadter called 'em, ambigrams. An inversion is a word that reads differently according to its orientation. Usually, one word is placed on top of its upside down version along a horizontal line. Kim draws the letters in such a way that they can stand for two different letters just by flipping them. There's lots of folks making ambigrams as a quick googling soon proves. Somehow, it all seems to tie in with the jumbled letters thread.
[Addendum 10/30/03: Typographica had an entry on ambigrams a week before this one, but I swear I hadn't seen it. Oh, well. Via mirabilis dot ca.]
Languagehat has an entry about a New Yorker article on Quentin Tarantino that sparked off some strong commentary. Reminded me of something Jean-Luc Godard once said:
I have no "style," I just want to make films. If I have influenced young filmmakers, who are a little bit like my children or my brothers or who may have been my parents before I started, the only influence that I cared for was to show them that to make a film was a possible thing. It is not true that only if you have a great deal of money can you make a film. If you have a lot of money it is just a different kind of film that you will make. If you have no money, you can still make a film.
[My position as a filmmaker] is a position in the margin. But that is normal. No book can exist without a margin, and whether I watch a tennis or a football match, I am always in the margin, in relation to the players, that is, I am in the place of the public, of the onlookers. In fact, to be in the margin, that is the real position of the public. It is a necessary position. That which is seen cannot be seen without those who see it.
["The Carrots Are Cooked: A Conversation With Jean-Luc Godard" in Film Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3, 1984; reprinted in David Sterritt (ed.) 1998 Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, p.135.]
Me, I always figured that Tarantino's incredible luck at writing his first scripts with Roger Avary had worn off.
Alexandre at Mnemosyne saw my linguist hero entry and wrote an entry (in French) about the art historian as movie hero. He's asking for more movie titles in the comments and is starting to get them. He's even got an acronym for an organization that will try to promote positive images of art historians in films: HARESSA (historiens de l'art pour une représentation valorisée et équitable de leurs semblables dans le septième art).
This set off some free association on a couple of my favorite films that touch on art: Peter Greenaway plays the invisible art historian as director in some of his films, especially A Zed & Two Noughts with the subplot concerning the Vermeer forger van Meegeren. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) and the allegedly dead painter Derwatt (Nicholas Ray) in Der Amerikanische Freund (1977) by Wim Wenders.
There was also one director in the Alexandre's list that had crossed over from the linguist qua hero list: Raoul Ruiz. Way to go.
Mark Liberman over at Language Log has observed a couple of latecomer pieces in The Guardian about the whole jumbled letter flapdoodle.
I know that it's churlish and pedantic to complain about an inadequately-researched joke, and in this case the truth would have made the joke harder to frame. Still, I feel that Johnson should have gotten his facts in order, especially because he complains about the decline in educational standards. His complaints are ironic, and thus ambiguous, but are irony and ambiguity an excuse for ignorance?
For some reason, I am reminded of the concert pianist in Heinrich Böll's deligthfully hilarious novel, Gruppenbild mit Dame, who is forced to play "Lili Marleen" over and over again.
Well, the folks behind pornographic blog comment spamming have figured out a new one. This morning during my vanity check at Technorati I noticed that top of the list was a strangely named blog with zero links. Clicking on through, as is the way of the web surely, I found a pseudo blog hanging off the URL of some porn site. About half the front page was consumed by a odd listing of blogs, some familiar, some not. All I can figure is that the proprietors are hoping for some automatic blog rolling and link back (which is why their URL remains anonymous here) to raise their ranking in Google and the like.
[Addendum 10/28/03: I see the offending link has disappeared. I guess Technorati took care of it.]
Geoffrey Nunberg had a good segment on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday about the shifting semes of the term fascist. Left to right, political party to spandex specter.
[Addendum 10/24/03: Just saw what Miladus posted a while back: La langue est-elle fasciste? A nice example of the usage in French.]
The Discouraging Word had an interesting entry on 20 October [no permalinks] called "Ruts, bumps, and thank-you-ma'ams," (there's a goodly followup on Languagehat plus commentary), tracing the origin of the phrase, meaning a bump in the road, and the intersection of it with the newer phrase wham, bam, thank you ma'am. Made me dig out my four volumes of Charles Earle Funk (of Funk and Wagnells fame) etymological series. In Horsefeathers & Other Curious Words (1958), he writes about thank-ye-ma'am [on p. 218]:
This, gratefully appreciated in rural American courtship in grandfather's day, is now rapidly disappearing, replaced by humdrum metal or concrete culverts on hilly roads everywhere. On early roads in such country. an earthen diagonal ridge served to carry rain water or melting snow from high side to low side, thus preventing excessive wash. But, passing over it in a carriage or wagon, the passenger on the side first hitting this ridge would sway involuntarily towards the other. The rural swain, needless to say, chose roads accordingly. With the head of the fair one thus within kissing distance, the greatful murmur, "Thank ye, ma'am," was of course passed along to the humble cause.
Sounds a bit like a small berm or maybe a speed bump.
It's official: English has lost the battle and the war.
[via Taccuino di traduzione]
There are so many threats to the survival of good, plain English that it is not easy to be optimistic. Email has a great deal to answer for. Punctuation is no longer required and verbs are abandoned with the speed of a striptease artiste late for her next performance. Text messaging is worse - much worse. Yet I have seen it suggested that students be allowed to use "texting" abbreviations in examinations. Ultimately, no doubt, we shall communicate with a series of grunts - and the evolutionary wheel will have turned full circle.
[John Humpries. "Not I. It's me." A review of James Cochrane's new book Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English in the Guardian.]
Sigh. All the arguments, all the churn, all in vain. Sometimes I feel like I'm in that Gary Larson cartoon: "Bla bla bla, language changes, bla bla bla." Oh, well, dammit! Grunt!
[Addendum 10/23/03: Good old Des has proposed a solution to this vexing problem:
My suggestion that we inaugurate a discipline called "folk linguistics" (parallel to "folk psychology") to study the random nonsense persons are apt to believe about language have so fallen on stony ground, but it would surely be more interesting than the usual counterdenunciations—and what better way to thwart Language Mavens than to stop trying to counter their "arguments" and start classifying them instead? It would drive them apoplectic with rage, I promise you!
We could start an organization called, say, the International Association of Folk Linguistics, but the all important acronym IAFL has been taken. Well, maybe we can come up with a good acronym at our first meeting. I'll put out the Call later this week. I think we could even get the Canoodle Princessor to be an honorary royal member if we ask real nice and all in Scandawegian.]
An entry over at Languagehat's and its associated commentary got me to thinking about movies with linguist heroes or heroines. Off the top of my head I'd say:
I always thought that the life and death of the Russian linguist prince, Nikolai Trubetskoy, would make a good subject for a film. Of course, linguistics and science fiction novels seem to go together more easily.
I ran across this statement on biological aspects of race by the AAPA (American Association of Physical Anthropologists) the other day, and I found it so reasonable, commonsensical, and counter to the general drift of things today. The statements eleven points are offered "as revisions of the 1964 UNESCO statement on race." I know it's not political correct, in the old sense of the term, to suggest that concepts like race, gender, and class are social constructs, but they are. Perhaps I'm just a bit old fashioned.
Well, enough unemployed slacking! Last week I finalized a long-term contract down on the edge of Silicon Valley, and today I start. So, the blog entries will probably drop to a trickle in the following days, weeks, and months, but who knows, maybe I'll be inspired by my return to work. The nice things are: the commute is fairly benign, what I'm documenting is interesting, and the location of the campus is on the edge of the bay near to some tidal marshlands similar to where I grew up on the ranch in the North Bay, up Sonoma way.
It's totally out of hand. The automatic posting of unsolicited and unpaid for links into blog comments is now too much of a problem to handle by hand. So, it is with pleasure that I announce that Jay Allen over at the Daily Journey has been working on an MT plug-in that will help to block comment spam (and as he hypothesized the not yet seen beast of trackback spam). I started using his MT template hack [now deprecated] a couple of days ago and it works, so I am looking forward to his promised Monday release of the new and improved plug-in. It all works with an blacklist of known comment spammer sites and stops the posting and previewing of comments which mention those sites in text or links. I plan to download and start using it immediately upon its promised release tomorrow.
[Addendum 10/14/03: Jay Allen has released the MT-Blacklist plug-in, and the comments look fabulous. I'm going to install it today.]
[Addendum 10/19/2003: Just installed MT-Blacklist plug-in this morning, tested it, and dropped my banned websites list into it. A breeze to install and use.]
An entry over at Desbladet on Baudrillard's justly famous Disneyland observations shook loose a memory or two of a couple of strange days in Billund, Jutland. First a Danish business dinner in a Kro. (After the proper quantities of øl and akvavit, I swear I witnessed an argument between Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Hansen about what constituted a lie.) The next day I visited Legoland. It was a bright and hot day, and at first I thought I was in Anaheim, but no I wasn't. The Danes not being satisfied with their ersatz beachhead in Solvang have since then built a Legoland in California, as well as ones in Germany and the UK. Of course, Americans shouldn't complain as we blithely go about turning the world into an imperfect simulacrum of our own air-conditioned nightmare.
I found a couple of nice sites with Hmong lessons. The former one has digitized pronunciations, while the latter is mainly a vocabulary and sundry sentences. The interesting thing about the romanization scheme [RPA] is that it uses letters at the end of syllables to indicate one of its seven tones.
| Tone | Character | Example |
|---|---|---|
| high | -b | pob 'ball, lump' |
| high falling | -j | poj 'female' |
| mid rising | -v | pov 'throw' |
| mid | -- | po 'spleen' |
| breathy mid low | -g | pog 'grandmother' |
| low | -s | pos 'thorn' |
| low falling (creaky) | -m | pom 'see' |
I found these sites linked off of Jennifer's Language Page which has a medley of language resources, including some links to Iu Mien. And the title of this entry means: "I would like to learn Hmong."
Erling Wold sent me an email this morning about him and his music being blogged by Kyle Gann at his Arts Journal site blog PostClassic. It's a nice even-tempered entry written by the music critic who once called Dr Wold "the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-artrock" in the Village Voice. (That pull-quote, where have I read it before?) He's been enjoying printing out scores and listening to MP3s of Erling's music, and has a nice word to say about Sub Pontio Pilato, though nary a word about your humble librettist.
Well, my fellow citizens have gone and done it: they've dumped Gray "Mister Warmth" Davis and elected Arnold "the Gubernator" Schwarzenegger in his place. I guess all that mattered is that Arnold wasn't a professional politician, which translated means that his handlers will all be hand-picked political professionals. I don't know, governor of California seems like a step down from Mr Universe.
All this lather about orthographies got me to thinking about a book I read a couple of years ago called Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script. It's the story about Shong Lue Yang who claimed to be of divine origin and who invented the first true alphabetic script for Hmong. The book was written in part by William Smalley, a missionary, who in the '50s had also collaborated on developing the RPA (romanized popular alphabet). The RPA is one of a couple of other writing systems besides the messianic script (Phahawh Hmong) and RPA: Pollard script and Chinese romanized Hmong. This memory lead (via Google) to an article in the Hmong Studies Journal, "Literacy and L'Armée Clandestine: The Writings of the Hmong Military Scribes" by John Duffy. This story has got everthing: the CIA, the illegal US intervention in Laos, Christian missionaries, illiterate peasants who devise writing systems, etc. I ran across the book when I researching Iu Mien the language spoken by a high school student who I was tutoring in Latin.
[Addendum 10/09/03: I found a page with more Hmong information and that includes the Pahawh font at the University of Melbourne linguistics department.]
It all started with an entry over at Languagehat's blog. Judging by the churn in the commentary, you'd think there was more at stake than a writing system. I don't think anybody believes that the han4zi4 (漢字 the Chinese writing system) is going to be replaced anytime soon. Just like I find it hard to believe that the current English orthography will either. Eric Lien also has some cogent cons against any proposed romanization schemes. Setting aside the vast cultural importance that Chinese characters have, I still don't see why Chinese couldn't be written well in an alphabetic script. The Koreans and the Vietnamese have both made the leap from logographs to alphabets and syllabaries.
[Addendum 10/07/03: Hanji na thak e-bat chhui-chhiu to phah si-kat (You cannot understand all the Han characters even if you studied until you could tie your beard into a knot.) Old Taiwanese saying courtesy of Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung's paper that Kerim linked to in the commentary.]
[Addendum 10/09/03: Eric Lien has a new entry on Chinese romanization with an interesting link to a Chinese braille page. Upshot is it doesn't usually indicate tone.]
There's nothing quite like an English spelling reform. The sentimentalists and conservatives don't want anything linguistic to change, but the radicals can't really agree on something aesthetically pleasing.
Another linguist, Sarah Thomason, has climbed on board the Language Log. And Mark Liberman has written an entry about a paper by Fernando Pereira that refutes one of Chomsky's many unproven linguistic edicts—this one about the infamous grammaticality of the sentence containing colorless green ideas. More than anything else this helped to close off an entire field of linguistic inquiry, i.e., information theoretical views of language. More than anything this is what I found most annoying about the master and his band of merry generativists.
For our president on the occasion of his invasion of Iraq and the awarding of the Nobel Prize to J. M. Coetzee, MMIII.
I carry my papers and photographs about with me in one of those oldfashioned briefcases which the Essen auto-workers nowadays use as lunch pails. If I do not keep this bulky, fatuous load with me Marilyn pores through my manuscript trying to find out what I am up to. Marilyn is a disturbed and unhappy woman. I let her see nothing because I know that she discusses me with other people and because she is in my estimation not equipped to understand correctly the insights into man's soul that I have evolved since I began to think about Vietnam. Marilyn is eager, but for her own sake only, that I should have a prosperous career. She is alarmed to see me leave the high road of orthodox S-R propaganda and strike out on a path of my own. She is a conformist who hoped to marry in me her conformist twin. But I have never in my heart been a conformist. I have always just been biding my time. Marilyn's great fear is that I will drag her out of the suburbs into the wilderness. She thinks that every deviation leads into the wilderness. This is because she has a false conception of America. She cannot believe that America is big enough to contain its deviants. But America is bigger than all of us; I acknowledged that long before I began to say my say to Coetzee—America will swallow me, digest me, dissolve me in the tides of its blood. Marilyn will have no fear: she will always have a home. Nor, in the true myth of America, is it I who am the deviant but the cynic Coetzee together with all those who no longer feel the authentic American destiny crackling within them and stiffening their marrow. Only the strong can hold course through history's doldrums. It is possible that Coetzee may survive the 1970's; but simple natures like Marilyn's will rot without a core of belief.
[J. M. Coetzee. 1974. Dusklands, pp.8f.]
"Two linguists walk into an x-bar and exit a bunkhouse on a certain Bar-X ranch." Linguistics blogging is reaching some kind of critical mass or maybe the hundredth Nim Chimpsky. Languagehat has pointed us towards the new blog yclept the X-Bar. The entry that caught his eye discussed the possible ambiguity of the sentence: "The man killed the boy mercilessly with the knife." Viz., is it the man or the boy who's doing the knifing? My Sonoman idiolect admits only the meaning that the man killed the boy. (Now, who was it—Jim McCawley perhaps?—who mocked the violence of the typical (in this case Edward Sapir) linguist's sample sentence, "the farmer killed the duckling"?) And, why don't linguists say bar-x instead of x-bar? (We'll leave aside that they quickly replaced the macron with a prime sign in the interests of pre-DTP typographical constraints. Me, I always wanted to pronounce it not-x theory.
[Addendum 10/02/03: Rosanne (at the X-Bar) has modified her entry. The ambiguity is whether the man or the boy has the knife.]
How balloons are made. And what they're for. "Professor Twist could not but smile." Translating W.'s Tractatus into Basic English. And the Gricean meaning? Crocodilians untie. Juxtaposing hucksters.