Scottish Gaelic
Carrell, Severin. (2020, July 5).
Scottish politicians call for urgent action to stop Gaelic dying out,
The Guardian. Online. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/05/scottish-politicians-call-for-urgent-action-to-stop-gaelic-dying-out. Accessed 7-2020.
I plan on answering this call for several reasons.
One is that I have some Scottish heritage but I am barely in touch with it. About eight or nine generations ago, a couple of Scottish boys crossed over to Northern Ireland, and from there to Pennsylvania, and so, to make a long story short, my mother was a Wallace. Like most Scots in the US, they lost touch with their heritage. But when I hear Scottish music, I always feel like it's there for me. It is partly in respect to my mother's side and her family that I would pursue it.
Nationwide, there are millions of Scots like me, millions in Texas and New Mexico alone. I could start a kilt store, or sell bagpipes, but who would buy them? People are not aware of their heritage really, and I don't think I can make them that way.
I have always wanted to learn Scottish Gaelic, though, and it's a new day. It's a day when I don't have to go to those western hills and islands in order to use the language. Someday, I will get there, yes, and it will be good to hear it being used just in the course of one's daily life. But I live my life, and will have to keep living it, without meaningful chance to actually go and experience that. I can do it on zoom, and that will have to do.
So here's my plan: a weekly zoom meeting to encourage people to learn and keep and use Scottish Gaelic. It will be a one-room schoolhouse in the sense that some weeks it may have high-level learning going on, and beginners will have to just sit and listen. I haven't quite resolved that problem, but obviously, one way would be to keep the beginners' meeting separate. I will say that the purpose of the meeting should probably be more social than practical, in the sense that our first job will be to simply welcome everyone and encourage their study and use of the language. If they hear and understand but a few words each week, that's still better than nothing. And there's nothing stopping people from starting companion meetings that get more in depth.
I have a zoom account. I know that it's doable. My plan is to think it out, and then spring. Right now I'm thinking Saturday mornings (afternoon in UK).
Labels: languages, personal, scottish gaelic
Keres part I
I have moved to New Mexico and become a substitute teacher in the high schools and middle schools in the Alamogordo/Cloudcroft area; I love New Mexico history best although I am far from an expert on it. I have not entirely given up on all of my ESL goals, my life, my research, my passions, but for the moment, I've had to do this for personal reasons, and my path is leading me to being a high school history/social studies teacher. New Mexico needs teachers, so it is making it easier for me to do it. I also needed a break, but needed to keep working, since my wife's experience as Chair led to what can be best described as a healing recovery period in the mountains.
So, I was subbing in a New Mexico History class on Monday, and opened up an old textbook (2005?) by Joe Sando called "Nuevo Mexico." It was slightly more comprehensive than your average textbook, and when it came to the part about the nineteen Pueblos up by Albuquerque, the author claimed that those nineteen fell into three camps based on origin of their language: the Zuni were in a camp of their own (possibly having come from Mexico), the Tiwa/Tewa/Towa were in the biggest camp, accounting for most of the Pueblos, and then there were the Keres, or Keresan, or Queres - these accounted for seven of the Pueblos, including the Zia Pueblo (who gave us that cool Zia symbol on our license plate). Then, he claimed that he believed the Keresan people started in the Caribbean, based on similarities in the languages, and that they had come to New Mexico via Florida, where they had learned about putting shells on the leader's house and calling it the "white house." He also said that they had stopped at Chaco Canyon for a while, before settling in the Pueblos that we recognize today as the Keresan Pueblos around Albuquerque.
I was stunned, but I hastily jotted down some of the information that he claimed. When I asked the students, I found out that it was generally known that there were 19 Pueblos; it was generally known that the Pueblos at one point had rebelled against Spanish rule; nobody knew anything about the Caribbean. I came home and researched links between Keres language/culture and the Caribbean. No mention of Sando's claim. No nothing tying these people to the Caribbean whatsoever.
Joe Sando was actually from the Tiwa/Tewa/Towa side of the Pueblos, a place called Jemez Pueblo, but he was a respected scholar of all the Pueblos, and wrote many books. He was best known for not sharing details of the Pueblo religions with the outside world, though he was a prolific teacher of other things related to the people of the Pueblos. He died recently. I have found no other reference to this book or to his claims. Did people ignore them? Hate him for making them? Dislike the inference that ancient people (1300?) could travel from the Caribbean to New Mexico?
The heck of it is, in graduate school, I studied ancient Caribbean languages, or at least Arawak, which was spoken in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived. I still have those notes somewhere. I had found this worn out book that translated what was left of Arawak into French, and made my Historical Linguistics paper on it. It was the crowning achievement of my graduate school career, though that had some low points too. Those Arawak people were generally thought to have related people deep in the Amazon, and the Garifuna of Honduras had a related language too. I considered it my job to find out whether the languages were indeed related, based on the principles of language change that we had used. I got an A on that paper, I believe.
I have a new theory, which is that the ancient peoples traveled more than we give them credit for. They knew the stars and planets far better than we do. The mound people of the Cahokia area traveled the rivers, from present-day East St. Louis to Canada, Idaho, the Appalachians, the Gulf. There is proof that they did thousands of miles on the rivers, but no proof that they ever saw the Aztecs or Incas. But this was all before 1200, when they disappeared from the East Saint Louis area. If they could do that, then the Keres people could go from the Caribbean to New Mexico. They would have had to have taken the Rio Grande (most likely) - through Big Bend, El Paso, Las Cruces, etc. They would have had to have had a reason. I'm still stewing on that.
Joe Sando said in his book that they'd stopped in Florida; also, that they stopped in Chaco Canyon for years before they settled in their Pueblos. Hmm. He also said that they have an expression in their language, "When we were in the east..." that indicates that they are about to tell a story from the old times. He was convinced that this referred to the days of the Caribbean. He gave linguistic evidence, which I have copied poorly but will retrieve at the first opportunity. It's all on p. 28 of "Nuevo Mexico."
In the Wikipedia entry for the Keres language, it says that there is some disagreement about what the Keres languages could have been related to; there were no known languages that were close to it. Sapir studied them but couldn't get the hang of the tones; one of his assistants stayed behind and got a better idea. Greenburg thought they might be related to Caddoan, which is interesting because the Caddoan people claim the Cahokian sun god as their own, and all three (Caddoan, Mound people of Cahokia, and Keres) had elements of sun worship in their culture. Remember, Cahokia was empty after 1200, though it had been the biggest city in the Americas for over a thousand years. Archaeologists have placed the arrival of the Keres in the 1300's though I haven't seen the Caribbean mentioned
anywhere. My guess is that if they knew the stars as well as they did, they also knew the land. They didn't have Wikipedia, but they knew how to make boats and use them. They weren't necessarily afraid of the Gulf of Mexico.
They didn't even discover Cahokia, really, until they were building the interstates, in about the 1950's. They had to build a bunch of cloverleafs in E. St. Louis and they kept running into the bases of what came to be known as "Woodhenge." Eventually they realized that this was the capital of the Americas for a thousand years and that much of it, across the river in particular, had already been destroyed. But what they saved was still quite intense. And some of it is still there.
These days I drive past a place with ancient caves. It has the feeling of ancient, canyon, river, mountains and elk, all that stuff, on the border of the vast Tularosa basin and the Sacramento Mountains, where the ancient people would have had access to everything they needed - meat, plants, water, shelter, security. I know one could find stuff by digging. But instead I shoot down that road at 45, going from 9000 ft. to 3500 feet every day, paying close attention to staying on the road and not craning my neck to look for rock drawings on the walls of the cliffs. These too were ancient people, before the Apache and Comanche came around with their horses, before everyone. We're in the habit of calling them "primitive." That's because they didn't have laptops. But hey, I have an idea. That is, every time a huge rock falls from the cliff and lands in the road, that's because the ancient people are watching us, and saying, basically, wake up. You think you're so great. You'll be lucky if you have descendants in this world, because you have no respect. And if you scorn travel, you're an idiot.
Labels: endangered languages, languages, linguistics, personal, wikipedia
Cultural Flexibility
I've written a little about this before, but I'm about to begin a serious inquiry and have lots of preliminary thoughts to put down before I start.
First, I was heavily influenced by a book on motivation that I reviewed for TESL-EJ. To me the essence of the book, my walk-away tip, was that motivation, or pure desire to learn a language, wasn't worth anything until it could be translated into measurable outcomes. For example, you would
like your language class more if you were motivated to learn a language, and this could be measured, simply by asking you if you liked to go to that class. You would
do more studying of that language, because your motivation had been converted, so to speak, into the juice that ran the engine, and that juice was measurable, in the sense that if you
did more than you used to, or more than the next guy, you were clearly more motivated. Your motivation had converted successfully into useful, measurable units of juice.
Now I didn't quite buy this at the time, and I still have trouble with it, a little, because in fact I believe you can really want something and still be unable to convert it, and then, in that case, what do you call the desire? You can be crying inside to learn a language and still be unable to sit in a class, for example, or learn your vocabulary words. Ah, but skip that argument. When it comes to cultural flexibility, the problem is the same, but it's much more fun to worry about. For example, some things about a language are more unpalatable than others. And, that unpalatable-ness (unpalatability?) can be measured, right? So, you learn to use
a, an, or
the, but you never quite bought into the idea that you should have to be bothered with such a thing. This would be unpalatable, and your cultural ability to bite the bullet, or just say to yourself, look, this is something I have to learn for cultural reasons, is going to determine your success. If you are stubborn in the sense that your feeling about the unpalatability of that characteristic of language is stronger than your cultural need to fit in, get along, do as everyone is doing, you will have more trouble with getting your articles right, and this will be one of the last features that you master.
Now, in the world of features, first, there are several kinds. There are unpalatable sounds, (like
th) which can be distinguished from sounds that are merely difficult to make (
zh as in
measure).
AE as in
bat or
hat is another example; it may sound unpleasant, or you may know that people in England don't have to bother with it, or are able to make it in a slightly less offensive way. Sometimes the grammar, as in
a/an/the/0, is routine, and you'll bump into it twice per sentence; other times it's a little more rare. Sometimes you can get away with errors a lot longer in certain areas, than in others, because certain mistakes are more repairable on the part of the listener (or the reader as the case may be). So errors or features have characteristics of their own: frequency, importance, etc. that influence the necessity of learning them first, later, or not at all.
In Korean you actually speak a different language to people who are older than you, people who are the same age or level as you, people who are below you, and children; this fundamental division of the human race before one opens one's mouth is unpalatable to democratic Americans who basically use the same language for everyone, and are proud of it, although sometimes they're fooling themselves. Nevertheless one would have to admit that this is a
fundamental characteristic of the Korean language; you won't go far if you don't master it. You'll be corrected in a
fundamental kind of way, and that's because you have violated a very important rule. That's not to say this can't be done; English speakers eliminated the
thee/you distinction at one time, but it could be called a social revolution and was no small deal. What I'm saying is that features of a language can be foundational, or more of whatever the opposite of foundational would be.
Now I'm inclined to say that one of the primary considerations here is that often what we are watching here is subconscious. People detest the
a/an/the situation because it seems so trivial, yet they know it causes problems, and they have trouble integrating the awareness into their systems so as to correct the problem. When it is subconscious, I like to bring it to the front and ask them about it. For example, I have high-level students who
never make a
th correctly and I
know they can do it, so I'm in the habit of asking them if it's just too embarrassing to stick their tongue out in public, and are they really unable to do that just because they are stubbornly cultural about doing something that, back in their home culture, one would never do. By the way, I feel this way about walking around someone's house in my socks; I really don't want to do it. I kind of feel like feet stink, especially when they're in socks, and it's better just to keep one's shoes on, as dirty and muddy as they might be. But the question of cultural flexibility is simple: how much are you willing to give up, just because you know that it's what is done, it's what this culture has decided is necessary, it's what you do to become "fluent"?
What I am trying to prove is that, first, the sense of discomfort you feel with customs (like leaving one's shoes at the threshold, or sticking one's tongue out to make a
th) can be measured. Your cultural flexibility, therefore, can also be measured. We should be able to predict how well you will do with learning a language by measuring your cultural flexibility, in the same way that if we could measure the size of your memory, or your ability in retrieving what you want out of it, we could measure your success in mastering vocabulary. These are characteristics that make good language learners. Pure intelligence, I am convinced, is not really one of them, because we are not really talking about rocket science, as puzzling as another language's grammar may seem.
It is not made to be too complex for the average person to figure out...on the contrary, languages must be accessible, or they would be virtually useless. That doesn't mean they're easy, though. Geniuses have trouble with them. And I intend to get to the bottom of
what is most difficult in mastery of them.
Here are some research questions that I would like to explore, refine, and/or answer:
1. Language features clearly can come in different kinds: grammatical or phonological, to start with. But what about semantic? Are there more? What am I missing?
2. So we test you, and determine that you are quite stubborn, unwilling to stick your tongue out, so to speak, so you are doomed to years of trouble mastering any given language that requires this or that cultural concession. Are you doomed to failure because of your basic nature, or can you actually teach yourself to be more flexible? I suspect the latter. I suspect that it is difficult, but it is the key to language learning.
3. OK, so we set about making subconscious problems conscious; for example, I point out that the reason you are having such trouble with
a/an/the/0 is that deep down, you feel that it's a pile of horse pucky and you shouldn't have to be bothered with such triviality. You readily agree, and now realize why you've had such trouble for so many years mastering such a trivial feature. Does your awareness of your own feelings help you master the problem? Is this a useful teaching tool? I can ask everyone about the relative unpalatability of various features of English or the language that they are embarking upon learning, but will that matter?
Labels: language, languages, learning theory
keep calm y'all
I have a couple of grad. assistants working for me who teach often. Today I said to them, I have a bone to pick with y'all. As I watch you, I've noticed that you use "y'all" sometimes to address the class. But other times you use "you guys". And you NEVER use "you" to refer to the class. What's up with that?
They admitted, they were avoiding "you". You grow up in Texas schools, they said, if a teacher addresses the class as "y'all", everything's fine. If the principal addresses the class as "y'all", everything is fine. If anyone uses "you" everything is NOT FINE.
So they are avoiding it at all costs. It sounds rude, short, uncaring, harsh.
Now they are well aware of the problems of "y'all" sounding hick, sounding southern, being too informal, etc. They are also well aware of the problem I told them, that even we northerners were beginning to give up on "you guys" because it only referred to half the class at any given time, and the other half was bound to be offended.
But in the north, "you" as plural is not really marked one way or the other. It's not rude, it's not formal, it's not really a problem, using it with a class, using it with friends, using it with anyone. The only problem with it is that it isn't really
clear; it can refer to one person or many.
They have many ways to refer to one or many down here. "Y'all" can be used for one or many, but is used for one mostly when you don't know that one, or it is an older person, or you have to assume that the person has family or people around that you don't know about. Waitresses use "y'all" for singular; they're allowed. They have to be polite to everyone. They don't have time to sit and decide whether you are one or many. "Y'all" in that context generally refers to "you and yours" and is remarkably similar to some other languages that essentially use you-plural in polite situations. So in fact "y'all" can and does act as both singular and plural in all
kinds of situations, making it as ambiguous, in number (sometimes), as "you" is up north.
But one teacher pointed out something else. There is actually a "clipped y'all" which sounds more like "yaw" or "yuh". It's singular "y'all". Even though there is a
plural y'all, all-a-y'all, it's actually a quite complicated situation, and it has more to do with politeness, which always matters, than true number, which is a fluid concept (since not knowing whether someone has family, is the same as assuming that they do, and you just don't know it). We northerners shake our heads at the concept that "it's not about number."
About this "yaw" or "yuh" - I
have heard it. I'll keep my ears out for it again. There aren't so many people you can even
ask, as they aren't always all that aware of how they speak or why; they misreport, or give questionable data. Doesn't matter. If you live here a while, I figure, you get the hang of it. People are friendly. They like to talk.
So I told them, well, there's always "you folks" or "you lot" - I doubt they're going to go with the Pittsburgh "you'ns" or the bronx "youse" which I once, by the way, heard in Alton, IL. These are similarly marked. There's a whole lot of us who have trouble with all the options. Now that I'm Texan, I'll start having trouble with "you", because I'll begin to hear it the way they hear it - too formal, too rude. One doesn't want people thinking one doesn't care.
Labels: grammar, languages, ttu, y'all
book report - The Self-Organizing Economy
Krugman, Paul (1996). The Self-Organizing Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
I'm just finishing a term here, and I just taught American students from two very interesting books which I will review soon. One reason I review them is to remind
myself of the interesting ideas I encountered, that I might want to build upon in my own writing.
But before I write my final (which I should give on Mon.), I have this book (above), which I took out of the library in maybe February, and which I really should get going on, since it was, at that time, my goal to tackle the nature of self-organizing systems and apply that to language.
My first insight from the book is that the term
self-organizing is by nature better than
self-organized, since the latter implies that it's finished, done, it made itself and it's over. It's never over. As long as we're using it, it's changing. But Krugman's book is not about language; it's about economies.
There are two very inspirational characteristics of the book. The first is that it's all written in a very conversational style, as if he's sitting there at your kitchen table explaining his work. The reason this is inspirational is that it's probably the best I can do as I go about trying to explain language.
The second is that he actually does the math that is involved to determine and predict why the modern city would spread out in the way that it invariably does. Now once you start in with those sigmas and the function signs, I'm over my head, not because I can't do it, but because I generally won't. I would probably need a math textbook to really get into, and master, what he's done with his mathematical models of how businesses spread out over an area like what you have in LA, or say Lubbock. And in fact this has a lot in common with the way we do the math in order to keep producing language. My book is basically about the model we use in our heads to determine which form of a word, for example, is the "standard" or "unmarked" one. It's all in the math, I'd like to say, except that I myself can't or won't do the math. Others will have to follow upon my work and do the math themselves. I must say, however, that I am impressed that Mr. Krugman, who is essentially a journalist (I read the book because I had liked his newspaper columns), could go so far out of his way to figure this stuff out.
Here are some other interesting tidbits from the book:
He defines features of self-organizing systems as, first, order from instability, and order from random growth. In the first case, order spontaneously emerges because the system orders itself naturally, given the forces from both directions that influence it. In the second case he shows that even when the rate of growth is random, or independent of the size of the city or they system itself, the system will adapt to that growth or change in a direction toward order.
He mentions percolation theory, which is a part of self-organizing systems that has caught the fancy of researchers, perhaps because they drink a lot of coffee. This essentially seeks to answer the question: How far will water penetrate into porous rock? by showing that this theory and its derivations can be used to predict the distance that any chain reaction spreads, since the likelihood of the holes in the rock being connected, increases the likelihood of the water spreading from one side of the rock to the other.
In language this becomes a complex equation, but it might be worth looking into. Let's say you have a language innovation, so that young girls are now saying "think you" instead of "thank you" as is favored by my older generation. Let's assume that the likelihood of language change increases with the increased amount that any young girl hears the newer form. She is therefore more likely to change her speech, regardless of what her parents say or do, if the majority of people she hears has changed their speech. There's an element of "porosity" here that is crucial to language change. The parents have much less contact with the forces of change, and are left behind saying "thank you," the old fools.
But back to Krugman, who said nothing about language, by the way, but concentrated on percolation and its effects on businesses. He credited Per Bak, by the way, with coming up with the idea that "many physical and social phenomena are percolation systems that tend toward criticality" (I'll find the page).
Another interesting part had to do with phase locking. This is when two different systems get into the same phase for no other reason than being in touch with each other, or having some, however minimum, relation with each other. For example, he says that since the US and Europe don't really trade that much, it doesn't follow at all that when Europe is down, we should be down as well. If we only do say 1 or 2% of our business with each other, then why should the depression in Europe cause one here? Only this: that we lock phases, and carry on together as if we were in tune with each other.
I see that my research was actually quite poor, and that I have to go back and look up some of this stuff. I may even have to master, at least in my own shallow way, percolation theory, just for my own benefit if nothing else. It is my belief that in looking toward these mathematical models we can better understand a "non-linear" system like language.
Labels: language, languages, self-organized systems
More on self-organization
1. Wikipedia keeps updating:
Wikipedia. (n.d.).
Self-Organization. Online
encyclopedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_systems. Accessed 5-13.
2. I read the Paul Krugman book (more on this later).
3. Got my bibliography organized and in a better spot:
Language as a self-organizing system bibliography
4. Wrote
this one to put with
this book.
Labels: languages, linguistics, self-organized systems, wikipedia
linguistics papers
My undergraduates have just finished writing term papers which were, to me, very interesting. They had three choices: 1) choose an uncommon or endangered language and write about it, 2) take a stand on whether "Spanglish" can be considered a language of its own, 3) investigate linguistic forensics and its application to a court case. About six jumped on #3, and it could be assumed that they are forensics majors; many of my students are. Only one took #2 (so far - in fact I have only received 34 out of about 40 papers); and the rest did endangered or obscure languages.
So let's talk about those. There were Native American languages and their programs to survive and teach their children; similarly, there was an Australian one. There were two on Ainu and some other Asian ones; there was also two papers on European languages, one in Poland and one in Belarus.
One was on Klingon, which was invented by a guy in response to enthusiastic reaction to Star Trek and a group of aliens who appear on it. The guy supposedly was
less concerned about grammar than about other elements of the language, which he spelled out very carefully. Classes have been held in Klingon, and Hamlet was rewritten in Klingon. It has an enthusiastic fan base,
but no group of native speakers. It has a tension between people who believe that
only what the originator specified is valid, versus people who would experiment, change and adapt the language. It raises questions about whether it is a language, partly because interest in it is growing, and even maturing, yet it has restrictions on settling in to being a huge language.
Another paper was on Boontling, a language spoken in the small California town of Boonville. Apparently these rural people, in the late nineteenth century, started systematically making up new words and using them in place of English words, until their Boontling slang was indecipherable by outsiders; ultimately it became like a souvenir, glorified in YouTubes and in tourist literature. But the question is: did it ever have its own grammar, or was it just new words being plugged in systematically in places where English would have content words? My question really is whether it can be called its own language if it has used English grammar and phonology entirely, and simply replaced all the words. In the case of this language, there were generations of people who grew up within it, unclear about what common things (such a phone) were really called; however, these native speakers ended up with a huge vocabulary, more than with two separate languages.
A final question was about saving native languages, and Hawaiian came up as one that has significant attention put to saving it. Hawaiian is an interesting and unique language and attracted this attention partly because of that. The University of Hawaii set about teaching Hawaiian as a second language and soon built up a culture of non-native speakers who were very interested in perpetuating the language. Meanwhile a group of native Hawaiians holed up on one of the islands, where outsiders were prohibited and where they could successfully perpetuate the language and a culture. But the inevitable happened, or is happening: this culture survives only by being isolated. Its elders die; its young generation seek more action in the larger cities. Now, of the two populations who speak Hawaiian, it can be argued that the university one may be more vibrant, or, that due to lack of contact, the variations inevitably split
from each other. And either group is just as likely to change anything in their variant, as we saw in English in colonial days. The set of changes that befall a language invariably create a different language, when and if they don't maintain contact.
I'll read these papers more carefully as soon as I can, and report back. I find it an interesting subject, and want to pursue it more.
Labels: endangered languages, language, languages, ttu
articles
Dreifus, C. (2011, May 30).
The Bilingual Advantage.
New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html?_r=3&hp. Accessed 6-11.
O'Dea, C. (2011, May 31).
No more pencils, no more books: Technology-driven education in NJ schools. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/11/0530/2255/.
NJ Spotlight, accessed 6-11.
Johnson, B. and Maxson McElroy, T. (2011, June).
The changing role of the teacher in the 21st century.
teachers net gazette 8, 6.http://teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/dr-brad-johnson-tammy-maxson-mcelroy/changing-role-of-the-teacher/. Accessed 6-11.
Labels: bib, languages, learning theory
dialects of araby
The world watches Tunisia because people are gathering in front of the presidential palace; the president leaves; it's a revolution, and it appears to have been spawned or at least encouraged by Facebook, Twitter and the social media. But there are some key differences between what's happening in Tunisia and what happened in Iran a summer or two back. One: the government won in Iran, leading everyone to deny that they were ever on Twitter, ever fomented anything, ever had anything to do with the social media. Two: very few of us understood Farsi, so we saw people in the street but had very little idea what they were saying. Of course, we don't understand Tunisian Arabic either, though some know French...well, you get the idea; we're trying to figure out what's going on; we're bystanders.
Now I do know a little about Araby, also known as ASCII Arabic, Chat Arabic, or the Arabic Chat Alphabet (see below). Our Saudi students often write their chat in entirely English letters and numbers (I often called it 3/5/7 chat, though it has more than three numbers in it), regardless of the fact that they would be at computers where everyone had Arabic script on both sides, without question. Long after all computers could switch over to Arabic script, on Facebook, in computer labs and elsewhere, some young Saudis and Arabic speakers
preferred to use Araby....even on Facebook, even in the more permanent media.
So now here comes the interesting part. One watches the Tunisians reply on Facebook and comment about the overthrow of their government. Their Araby is clearly different from Saudi-dialect Araby; it's thoroughly mixed with French, and influenced by French. It's a chat dialect, and it raises a lot of questions to me as I try to interpret chat dialects. I've interviewed students about Araby, but I believe I've misplaced my notes; I'm not sure I can recall them. Here are some of the interesting questions I've been mulling over:
There is an obvious element of choice, when to use it, when to use standard Arabic, or (in the case of Tunisians), when to simply use French or another common language. How is this choice made? Why are so many still choosing Araby?
How different is Tunisian Araby really from other dialects of Araby? Something I read stated that Araby was started really, and was extremely popular, in Lebanon and Jordan. But I'm curious: does it exist in the entire Arabic world? And in what populations is it most popular? Its obvious association with the west would make me believe that, as people have told me: it's the young; it's the westward-leaning; it's hip and modern, and, yes, the older generation doesn't understand it.
Palfreyman says at one point that the Ascii Arabic dialects are considered the best windows into local dialects of Arabic, which are generally written in standard Arabic only, and thus not really represented as they are spoken. Would it be possible that Araby gives the writer a better shot at writing as he/she speaks (given, of course, that both speakers know all letters/numbers, and are willing to use it)?
As I stick my nose in Tunisians' business I'll be watching for these answers and will try to put it in writing. I can say one thing: messages are coming into some Facebook sites rapidly, several a minute. The messages themselves, intended for the widest possible audience, are rarely in Araby; the comments often are. I haven't been on Twitter much; I'll try to report on that too. Stay tuned.
Leverett, T. (2008).
Asciized chat, thomas leverett weblog. http://tomleveretts.blogspot.com/2008/10/asciiized-chat.html.
Palfreyman, D. and al Khalil, M. (2003, Nov.).
"A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use": Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9 (1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/palfreyman.html. Accessed 10-08.
Arabic chat alphabet, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet
3arabi, Arabic chat to English translator. http://3arabi.site.co.il/
Labels: araby, bib, chat, languages, twitter, wikipedia
Linguistics luncheon, 4-28-10
Webster, A. (2010, April 28). Urinating donkeys, abalone shells, and Disney: On unintentional punning and interlingual punning among Navajos. Linguistics Luncheon, Illinois Room, Student Center.
Dr. Webster had come to my class two days earlier to talk about kinship systems, and I was very interested in the Navajo anyway. His talk was about the social roles of interlingual puns, and I realized that I live in a world of interlingual puns, where people, upon learning English, are often finding words that sound similar to words in their own language, thus enjoying a little interlingual ambiguity or the ability to jump back and forth from one mind to another.
Though he admitted that the title was mostly to draw an audience, and that he had unexpectedly drawn more than at a conference where his title was perhaps duller, he did give an explanation for the urinating donkeys, abalone shells, and Disney. The donkey was related to television:
telii alizhgo in Navajo is "urinating donkey." This was often related to the drinking of beer, he pointed out, though I missed the specific reference or how they were related. A priest apparently continually addressed children as abalone shells, and the name of Canyon de Chelly (or Chinle) in Navajo often sounds like "Disney" thus causing Navajos to make subtle remarks about what has happened to one of their favorite places.
Both in my class and in the lecture he told the story told by Robert Young, of J.H. Beedle recording "Holahei" as the Navajo word for "God." Apparently when he asked Navajos about God, giving his western view of a single guy who controls everything, the Navajo said, "I don't know" (Hola) and then later added an emphatic (Hei) to say, "I really don't know!" This became recorded as the Navajo word for "God" and stood for twenty years or so, until it was straightened out later. A joke involving the word "Hola" has an anglo linguist explaining that Navajo is such a hard language that it's almost impossible to learn. At one point he asks a Navajo sitting nearby, "What does "Hola" mean?" to which the Navajo responds, "I don't know." The linguist now says, "See? Even the Navajo don't know what these words mean!"
There was much in this lecture that I could repeat but I'm saving things I thought I could use later. One is that the expression
shikaa ch'elinood (with stress accents on the vowels that I cannot replicate) sounds like
Chicago Illinois and means literally "it soared over me (like a snake)". People were known to shout out "Chicago Illinois" at various points of a lecture, apparently; this would be something to keep in mind for later, I'm sure.
He made a point about the endangered nature of Navajo that I thought was very important. It was that it is very hard for older Navajos to get their children to learn Navajo, and part of the reason is that they have much higher expectations of their children, than, say, they would have of an anglo anthropologist. The lecture brought up lots of miscommunications between missionaries, anthropologists, tourists, and the various people who have poked their heads into the Navajo world, but the damage done by putting Navajo children in boarding schools was a crippling blow, not that it untaught anyone the language, but that it forced them to be reminded, every time they hear it, of an unpleasant history. Much the same as Yiddish, a crippling blow is dealt by the mere circumstances of what the language comes to represent; what a tragedy for a rich and wonderful language. The Navajo are a nation of 300,000; their reservation is the size of West Virginia; they are the largest and most prosperous of all First Nations; but they are having trouble keeping their language alive.
Two more stories. One involves the Navajo kids in school, pledging allegiance to the flag, and saying "with liberty,
ajetsin for all (and a leg bone)- reminding us of all the various interpretations given to rote forced chants over the years. Another involves the Navajo poet who says, "Every time I speak Navajo it's an act of resistance"....yes, but resistance to what? To the inevitable decrease of the language, I'm sure. But also to the cruel fate, that the circumstances, more than anything else, have tricked the Navajo into not using it.
Labels: endangered languages, languages, siuc
"Asciiized chat"
It's a busy time of year here; lots of papers to grade, in fact, I fall asleep grading most nights, even on weekends. So, in general, no time for things I love: World Series, fall colors, children's soccer, hallowe'en costurme, professional interests (see TESOL presentations, below on template). But late at night, Friday, I found something
really interesting.
I have long noticed my Saudi and Yemeni students using Arabic chat in English letters, including some numbers such as 3 and 5; the language is definitely Arabic, but because of the large number of English letters it is almost readable at our end. At first I understood this to be because of the lack of Arabic-script functionality at one end or the other, but that is clearly gone now; almost all computers can write the Arabic script. Still, this "3/5" chat continues...why? I was about to aske a former student on Friday before I left, but never got to it; too busy.
Late at night, however, I found this:
Palfreyman, D. and al Khalil, M. (2003, Nov.).
"A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use": Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9 (1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/palfreyman.html. Accessed 10-08.
This article not only makes an interesting linguistic analysis of what's going on- it's based on observations of mostly women in UAE- but it also makes some interesting claims. The most interesting of these, I am unable to find at the moment, but had to do with Gulf Arabic dialect being not heavily recorded in many other places
besides Ascii-ized Arabic.
I had had many questions about this language before going home, but now have a number more; some of the original ones have been answered. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of pure linguistic study of these languages, although what there is, namely this article, is not bad. It's not that linguists are unable or unwilling to analyze what's happening. It's more that it's happening so quickly that busy, underfunded linguists (often fighting for their own departmental survival) may not have time to really analyze it.
I plan to learn a little more about this language- given, first, that I have a lot of sources directly near me- all I have to do is ask them. Its nature has never been a secret.
Labels: cesl, chat, internet, languages, tesol
to read when i get a minute
Eisenberg, A. (2008, Feb. 18).
Learning from a native speaker, without leaving home. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/business/17novel.html?_r=1&em&ex=1203397200&en=dac6bde437b7df8d&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin. Accessed 2-08.
Info World. (2008, Feb).
Crackpot tech: Virtual worlds. http://weblog.infoworld.com/crackpot/archives/2008/02/virtual_worlds.html. Accessed 2-08.
Science Daily. (2008, Feb. 17).
No easy answers in evolution of human language. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080217102131.htm. Accessed 2-08.
Stevens, V. (2008, Feb. 4).
All I know about blogging and microblogging. adVanceducation. http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-i-know-about-blogging-and.html. Accessed 2-08.
Labels: bib, internet, language, languages, linguistics, weblogs, writing
jpcl language files
I've
written before about, and I need to keep on top of my conscious perception- a certain problem, concerning work on small languages that is endangered. I'm not sure if the languages are endangered, but the work is endangered, since it is now available only on the
wayback web archive, which is an incredible and little known service. These files could at least be brought back to the SIUC Linguistics webpages, which I, by default really, am still in charge of, but it would be a time-consuming job. I started the first- a paper on
St. Lucien Creole, and realized that it alone, in order to be finished, would entail bringing half a dozen files back, planting them back on our website, and linking them internally together. I had almost forgotten this project- but mentioned one day to Dennis Oliver, who kindly put in a comment in favor of saving it. Thanks are in order here- as it makes a huge difference when one is not doing this kind of thing unnoticed.
But it also brings up a further question. Dr. Gilbert's classes, and Dr. Gilbert himself, did a huge amount of work on these languages. The small corner of it that was clipped of the web accidentally, a few years back, represents only a tiny percentage of the entire work, and material, that was actually done. What happened to it? Who will keep it in the general record of work done on languages? He is, in fact, here in Carbondale, as far as I know, and it's worth at least finding out. It would also be worth it to get it on the web, where it could do the rest of the world some good!
Labels: endangered languages, jpcl, languages, linguistics, siuc
