Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος is back! Nick has already posted several times, so before he races too far ahead, I want to quote from his post from a few days ago, Phanariot: an apology for Schleicherian bias. It describes a problem that has long afflicted linguistics, and frankly confesses that he has had to struggle with it himself:
Modern Greek historical linguistics has had some blind spots it’s needed to get past. That you need to understand Kartvelian languages to work out Pontic, for example. Or that Greek borrowed words from other languages even when it isn’t obvious where they did. Or that there is a lot more Puristic in Modern Standard Greek than the ostensive victors of the diglossia wars would like to think.
And a more pervasive bias than that, one I’ve shared, is a Herderian and Schleicherian view of language change, as tied up with the expression of ethnicity, and as paralleling the evolution of lifeforms. There are sophisticated takes on those views which are still current: historical linguistics continues to have a lot to learn from evolutionary biology, and much of sociolinguistics is about the nexus between language and identity.
There are also unsophisticated takes on those views. Not just Herder’s Blood and Soil nationalist romanticism, or Schleicher’s original notion that there are primitive languages for primitive peoples (or even his subtle variation, that there are overcomplicated languages for primitive peoples). Those have been rejected in polite company; but there are lingering romantic notions in thinking about language change that have outlived them. For example, that rural and oral language is the only true object of study of the historical linguist, and that urban and written language is subject to contaminating, artificial influences, and of secondary interest, if of any interest at all. It’s a naturalistic bias, and it’s a puristic bias. You can see how easily it can turn to cultural purism, with the untutored village folk seen as the only true teachers of the language, and with the learnèd influence on the language derogated, if not disavowed; something that gets in the way of forming an accurate picture of how Standard Modern Greek works to this day. […]
Any non-Greek linguists sneering at this point would do well to examine their own conscience. The dismissal of written language as not the proper domain of linguistics is a reaction to generations of prescriptivist dunderheads; but it is a biased reaction all the same, and it does not admit the fact that spoken language in literate societies is profoundly influenced by whatever neogrammatically incorrect nonsense takes place in written language. (Nor will fleeing to the Rousseauvian paradise of preliterate societies give you back your pristine language organism: preliterate societies are just as subject to changes in register and genre, and contamination between them.)
There is artifice in human language. There is a lot of artifice. And that is nothing to be ashamed of.
He applies this to Phanariot Greek and why Greek historical linguists have avoided dealing with it:
So, the bias against looking at Phanariot is a deep one. It’s informed by comic-book tribal politics: the Phanariots were aristocrats and intriguers, they were the bad guys. It’s informed by nationalism and purism: the Phanariots were collaborators and Turcophiles, they did not speak pure Greek […]. It’s informed by Herderian Romanticism: the proper object of historical linguistics is to be found among shepherds and peasants, not among dragomans and patriarchs. But it’s also informed by Schleicherian Romanticism: the proper object of historical linguistics is the “natural” evolution of language, and what the Phanariots were doing was anything but natural.
I recognize that prejudice in myself and I’m sure it’s widespread; I’m glad Nick is calling attention to it and urging us all to fight it.
Very interesting in itself; the issues overlap a fair bit (by morphic resonance) with some of those in The Importance of Data, regarding speakers’ judgments of acceptability, too. I was struck especially by
Nor will fleeing to the Rousseauvian paradise of preliterate societies give you back your pristine language organism: preliterate societies are just as subject to changes in register and genre, and contamination between them.
I hadn’t really thought very much about how register and genre affect acceptability, but it’s obviously a major issue. I’m just imagining my response to some Martian linguist enquiring of me whether “To whom are such questions of any great import?” is acceptable or not.
Come to think of it, it’s not difficult to come up with examples where what are by normal criteria quite different languages correspond to what in English are merely different registers (like Arabic, and Greek, of course, in its time), and many others where the linguistic differences between registers are at least much greater than in English.
Is there an accepted generativist position on diglossia and suchlike issues? (Norvin?)
Re genre, I can’t resist the observation (which does not originate with me) that
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
would be perfectly unexceptionable in the context of some fine modernist poem, and that declaring it semantically ill-formed simply betrays a lack of poetic imagination.
It seems to me that what Nick is describing involves nationalistic bias more than anything else, something which is a problem wherever the history of a living language is explored: in an alternate universe where the Ottoman Empire never fell and where (a majority of) Greeks are proud of their contribution thereto, I do not doubt that Phanariot Greek would be a very important object of scholarly study, and the mutual influences of Greek upon Turkish and vice-versa would be an important component of diachronic Greek linguistics. Indeed, if in this alternate universe Greeks’ religious identity (orthodoxy) had gone on playing the importance it had had in the Middle Ages, we could imagine this “Modern Ottoman Greek” scholarly establishment downplaying the continuity between Ancient (=pre-Christian, and therefore undesirable) and Modern Greek.
And perhaps in this alternate universe Nick would also write a blog post (?Book? Journal article?) on the topic, stressing that just because Homer was neither a Christian nor an loyal Ottoman subject does not mean that scholars of Greek should ignore the language of the Iliad and the Odyssey…
It’s probably hard enough to get whoever you’re eliciting acceptability/well-formedness judgments from to be pre-primed to naturally go beyond yes/no answers to answers like “yes, but only in informal contexts and not otherwise” or “yes, but only in super-formal contexts and not otherwise.” Getting into specialized varieties or registers of language used for certain stylized genres (whether that be poems or mathematical proofs) is likely even harder. Maybe every elicitation question should be structured something like “does this sound ‘natural’ to you; if so, in all contexts or only some; if not, can you think of any possible context where it would”?
There is some anecdote about some 19th century schoolboy-who-became-famous (probably Churchill or some such like magnet for misattributions …) learning Latin declensions and objecting to the notion that one had to learn the vocative for every single noun (or at least every single second-declension noun where it was distinct from the nominative), on the grounds that quite a lot of these nouns were for inanimate objects that no non-crazy person would ever have occasion to speak to in direct address. And it is probably true that one could find some such nouns for which the vocative is never actually attested in the surviving corpus of ancient Latin texts. And probably equally true that one might find some vocatives attested only in poetry where the conceit of speaking directly to such-and-such inanimate object was not squelched by the constraints of pragmatics.
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und grün des Lebens gold’ner Baum.
“Grey, dear friend, is all theory / And green life’s golden tree.” Goethe, the Number One Poet And Playwright of the German language, back in the 18th century.
To Etienne’s point, Byzantine culture had long made its peace with (certain) pagan authors as worthy of reading by Christian students and as worthy of emulation as stylistic models, so the rejection of the pagan past by the Eastern Christian Rhomaioi never extended to the neglect of e.g. Homer. Indeed, more or less by definition the overwhelming majority of ancient Greek texts we actually have access to were those with enough of a Christian fanbase to keep getting transmitted from one manuscript to the next throughout the entirety of the Byzantine period.
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und grün des Lebens gold’ner Baum.
IIRC, Mephistopheles is at that point trying to get some hapless undergraduate to forfeit his soul. He is evidently leading him away from the True Path towards an approach which advocates extensive fieldwork without sufficient attention to conceptual rigour.
one had to learn the vocative for every single noun
“A mouse — of a mouse — to a mouse — a mouse — O mouse!”
In this case the attribution to Churchill is actually correct:
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-2/winston-churchills-school-days
“A mouse — of a mouse — to a mouse — a mouse — O mouse!”
I especially liked how the Ukrainian translation of this scene (…well, the one I’ve read) did put “O mouse!” in the relevant vocative case (О мишо!), but still kept the initial “O”.
(The newer Ukrainian translation provided a full Ukrainian case table, complete with the O-less vocative, but kept the O in the actual greeting, which consequently lost its explanation.)
I actually checked a while back what the Latin translation did with this scene, but
I forgot the answerit turned out that “mouse” is one of the nouns where the vocative wasn’t distinct from the nominative.And Pushkin famously recycled Horatio’s “O rus, quando ego te aspiciam” 🙂
I am indebted to David E. for the link, although who knows if Churchill was a reliable narrator of his own childhood. I had had “mensa” vaguely in my memory as the Latin noun from the anecdote, but that seemed wrong because it *wasn’t* a noun where the vocative is actually a differently-declined form from the nominative. Although I guess since it’s first declension it might have been at the very beginning of a textbook, which sort of fits the narrative context.
quite a lot of these nouns were for inanimate objects that no non-crazy person would ever have occasion to speak to in direct address.
Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands
And shaped these pleasant walks by Emont’s side…
(A justly forgotten Wordsworth effort)
Isn’t “O tempora, o mores!” in vocative case?
One could hardly find more inanimate objects to address
Isn’t “O tempora, o mores!” in vocative case?
Or maybe Cicero was just groaning and saying something in, I don’t know, the accusative, like “Me miserum!”?
I was considering that too – but on the other hand, I think o is specifically a vocative particle.
Nope. O fortunatam natam me consule Romam!
This is such an interesting post because it delves behind some of the unspoken assumptions and prejudices that lie behind people’s judgements.
If I might reveal one of mine (I think I’ve mentioned it before): I’ve never quite felt that Tagalog (Filipino) was a language worth studying because of the code-switching that is endemic in the Philippines. It’s based on the prejudice that a fully-fledged national language should be an instrument capable of use in every sphere of life, from everyday conversation to particle physics. Of course this is a concept that developed under the influence of nationalist ideologies in Europe, where every nation-state tried to build up a comprehensive national linguistic medium that could stand on the same footing as English, German, or French (models to which other languages aspired). This thinking lies behind the immense efforts that East Asian countries took to develop native lexical equivalents to European words, again ranging from the social sciences, economics, and law to, well, particle physics. So a language like Tagalog, which is just as happy to insert an English word as it is to create its own vocabulary, seems less interesting than more ‘self-contained’ languages. (I did at one stage make a very basic attempt at picking up some Tagalog but didn’t get very far.)
As it turns out, Tagalog and other languages of the Philippines are fascinating for what is known as “Austronesian alignment”, which stands apart from either ergative or nominative-accusative languages. Plus they are verb-initial languages, which are in a minority worldwide. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if my aging brain could wrap itself around yet another foreign language.
It’s based on the prejudice that a fully-fledged national language should be an instrument capable of use in every sphere of life, from everyday conversation to particle physics.
I wouldn’t call that a prejudice. Indeed, I’d go further and say that every native language that isn’t on the fast path to complete loss should be able to be such an instrument in every sphere. All such languages already have all the resources they need except vocabulary, and they can gain that not only by calquing but just as well by borrowing (as English has) or by etymological nativization.
But perhas you mean it’s a prejudice that such languages should be able to have a purely native (if calqued) vocabulary, in which case I agree (although such a thing has its advantages, as in modern Turkish or German up to the 20C).
Tagalog (Filipino) was a language worth studying because
If every Tagalog speaker is also fluent in English (close enough to situation in the Philippines), then you wouldn’t need to study that language to communicate with the natives and this removes one of the main traditional incentives for language-learning.
It’s funny that particle physics should be mentioned, since the English terminology that has developed for the field seems to consist entirely of English coinages, Greco-Roman ones, and German. Some German words, like bremsstrahlung, have even led to productive paradigms, with new words like higgsstrahlung. Whether terms like that should be italicized as foreign or not. Some other languages have calques of bremsstrahlung, but I think every language uses zitterbewegung (now, maybe not in the 1930s, when it was a hot topic though).
For zitterbewegung Chinese uses 颤动. In Japanese it appears to be ツィッターベベーグング.
Indeed, I’d go further and say that every native language that isn’t on the fast path to complete loss should be able to be such an instrument in every sphere.
Perhaps. But I think that your view fails to reflect reality. There are plenty of languages that are the language of the home, perhaps even the language of public life, that still exist despite lacking vocabulary to discuss specialised topics. I think it’s quite normal for there to be a ‘division of labour’ among languages.
Since most education in sub-Saharan Africa, especially at a higher level, is presumably in English or French, I’m not sure whether they have developed the vocabulary to cover all aspects of academic discourse. Does that mean they are going to die out?
Hundreds of languages exist in Papua New Guinea without the means to discuss nuclear physics. Perhaps in this world of nation-states these languages are on the long-term path to extinction, but it’s also quite possible that they’ll continue to exist for many generations — until something else comes along to disturb the equlibrium.
I seem to remember a thread here discussing the translation of English works into Hindi, where a significant proportion of people thought that English shouldn’t be translated into Hindi at all. This is tantamount to fencing off certain areas of discourse as ‘belonging to English’. I do find such an attitude dismaying (why would you want to study a language where people think like that?) but it certainly doesn’t seem to be terribly outlandish, given the many attitudes that people are capable of holding about language. And it doesn’t stop either Tagalog or Hindi from being, well, ‘languages’.
perhas you mean it’s a prejudice that such languages should be able to have a purely native (if calqued) vocabulary
No, I meant having the vocabulary at all. If you read any Tagalog on the Internet, you can’t help but notice that it uses English words. These don’t seem to be borrowings; they appear instead to represent code-switching — switching into a foreign language. It happens all the time in daily conversation in Tagalog for whole stretches of speech.
Incidentally, look up the Wikipedia article on ‘particle physics’. In the list of articles in other languages, you will find 10 for the Middle East, 5 for Africa, 25 for Asia, 5 for the Americas, 2 for the Pacific, and 47 for Europe! Many of those for the Americas, the Middle East, the Pacific, and even Asia, are European languages. Of course this is probably symptomatic of many things (less contributors in places like Africa), but it underlines how strongly the idea is rooted in Europe that every little language (and some of the languages listed are very minor) should be able to express everything. In the rest of the world, not so much.
you wouldn’t need to study [Tagalog] to communicate with the natives
You don’t need Dutch to communicate with the natives either (English and a humble attitude go a very long way), but you certainly do if you are going to become a resident of the Netherlands and integrate yourself with the population.
I’m not sure whether they have developed the vocabulary to cover all aspects of academic discourse. Does that mean they are going to die out?
No, what I was saying is the other way about. There is not much point in trying to develop vocabulary for Aleut (150 speakers), or any Uto-Aztecan language except perhaps some varieties of Nahuatl: they are all on the chopping block waiting for the axe to drop. But there are plenty of perfectly stable languages that have not developed in this fashion, either for reasons of external oppression, or where that has ceased, its internalized equivalent. I think this is a great wrong done to (and by) people who cannot discuss modernity in their own language, even if there is no getting away from writing in English (or French or Spanish or what not) for publication.
As for Tagalog, I well believe that plenty of code-switching goes on, but whether single words in Tagalog represent switches or borrowings is a very subtle matter: see “French in all its purity”.
Aleut (150 speakers), or any Uto-Aztecan language except perhaps some varieties of Nahuatl: they are all on the chopping block waiting for the axe to drop.
It’s very likely that at some point in 19th century, entire Alaskan Aleut population spoke Russian as their main language and intermarried with Russians to such extent that current genetic studies show all Aleuts today are of partial Russian descent on male side.
Russian continued to be spoken by many Aleuts well into 20th century, but they appear to have adopted a policy of deliberately hiding this knowledge from American authorities.
Bizarre and unexplainable internment of Aleuts during WWII (for some bewildering reason the American government appeared to believe that the Aleuts would have sympathies for the Japanese) didn’t help and then the Cold War started and Russia became America’s main enemy.
They certainly felt safer to forget both languages and speak only English.
whether single words in Tagalog represent switches or borrowings is a very subtle matter
Agree.
Try Harry Potter in Tagalog (just some photos of a couple of pages but enough to give you an idea): Harry Potter: The Filipino / Tagalog edition. Even the book title is left in English.
As Tagalog Wikipedia says:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Reyno Unido/Gran Britanya/Nagkakaisang Kaharian)
(Literal ngunit hindi tumpak na salinwika sa Filipino: Si Harry Potter at ang Bato ng Pilosopo)
Bizarre and unexplainable internment of Aleuts during WWII (for some bewildering reason the American government appeared to believe that the Aleuts would have sympathies for the Japanese)
Not at all. The Aleuts were removed and their villages burned as a scorched-earth tactic to deny the Japanese the use of the houses in those villages. It was handled extremely badly (the evacuation was done with great haste and the Aleuts were permitted only the most minimal personal property) and the camps to which the Aleuts were sent were not only alien to them (trees all around must have been terrifying) but also unsanitary to the Nth degree. Nevertheless, the internment was entirely unrelated to the internment of Japanese Americans.
There is not much point in trying to develop vocabulary for Aleut (150 speakers), or any Uto-Aztecan language except perhaps some varieties of Nahuatl
Many of these languages have revitalization efforts going, and new vocabularies are developed for them even as we speak, including, without a doubt, for Unangam Tunuu (aka Aleut).
they are all on the chopping block waiting for the axe to drop.
Huichol, Cora, Yaqui, Mayo, and the Tepehuan languages have all been steadily increasing their number of speakers as of the 2005 census.
I think this is a great wrong done to (and by) people who cannot discuss modernity in their own language
While my immediate impulse is to strongly agree, on reflection, I wonder.
Polyglot Africans have always been used to the idea that one person may well use different languages in different aspects of his/her life without any language necessarily being threatened in its own domain; (say) Kusaal at home and in all social and leisure activities, Hausa in working as a lorry driver or going to the market, English when working at the local hospital. It seems to me that the idea that this sort of linguistic compartmentalisation is regrettable may risk selling the pass to the dire modern notion that the only valid basis for a modern state is a linguistically homogeneous People, made of neatly interchangeable linguistic cogs who can conveniently be slotted into any of the State’s factories or armies.
It’s never going to make sense for Ghana (say) to have a medical school where Kusaal is the medium of instruction – or even Twi. The robustness of these languages turns on the speakers holding fast to their use in the particular domains they feel they belong to. Who cares if nobody studies quantum chromodynamics in Hausa? Is it a problem if your local market is so flourishing that people come to it from all over and need to use an interlanguage with each other? The sinister developments come when people start imagining that a language is only a “real” language if you discuss postmodernism in it. Or artillery tactics. Or if its limits coincide with your state boundaries. Conceding this is to give the game away.
To put it another way, if you’re going to say that it’s vital to able to discuss modernity in your language, you need to watch out that your concept of modernity is not one that covertly smuggles in preconceptions which are liable in themselves to lead to hostility to linguistic variety.
Thanks for showing up, David. It was exactly the comment I was hoping for! I don’t think that the European concept of a ‘national language for everything’ has completely taken over the world quite yet.
Re: revitalisation efforts:
Please forgive my failing memory, but I seem to remember mentions on this blog of efforts to develop advanced vocabulary for an indigenous American language . As part of revival efforts children were taught things like algebra (IIRC) in said language. It’s wonderful, but could only lead anywhere if 1) indigenous-language books were published on these subjects (writing is of extreme importance in preserving minor languages) and 2) there was some use for the language in discussing algebra beyond children’s classrooms.
Of course, creating the vocabulary is one thing; getting it into actual use is quite another. There have been attempts to create advanced vocabulary for Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, but because the language is totally cramped by Chinese I’m not sure much of it will ever leave the dictionary. In addition to which, most of the proposed vocabulary is calqued directly from Chinese and studiously avoids the vocabulary used in Mongolia.
I wondered if anyone studies quantum chromodynamics in Mongolian.
It turns they certainly do:
Lambda barion (L) ni tsakhilgaan tseneggüi bögööd 3 kvarkaas (u, d, s) bütne. 1950 ond Myeliburny ikh surguuliin fizikchdiin khiisen ug neeltiin achaar matyeriin kvark zagvar, barion bolon myezon dakhi kvarkuudyg kholbodog khüchtei khariltsan üilchleliin tukhai onol bolokh kvant khromodinamik (KKhD)-g ulam bolovsrongui bolgoson.
> If you read any Tagalog on the Internet, you can’t help but notice that it uses English words. These don’t seem to be borrowings; they appear instead to represent code-switching
Could you elaborate on what you consider code-switching? Most of the English I see is what I consider borrowings, and don’t seem very different from the situation in Japanese (except, of course, the English orthography being used). I don’t see many if any English function words, for example. English titles are often left untranslated in Japan, too (although articles are sometimes thrown away: Pirates of the Caribbean > /paire:tsu obu karibian/, but not /karibukai no kaizoku/).
I did notice, admittedly, that some of the meta-data of the Harry Potter book, like “translated by” and “chapter one”, was in English, which I don’t think would be common in Japanese translations.
Film titles are often left untranslated in German, but book titles hardly ever.
quantum chromodynamics in Mongolian
Bolgoson would be an excellent name for an elementary particle.
@David Eddyshaw: That was my immediate thought as well.
I made an attempt to translate this sentence, I hope it makes sense to somebody, it certainly doesn’t to me:
Lambda baryons (L) have electric charge and consist of 3 quarks (u,d,s). As a result of this discovery made by physicists of the Melbourne University in 1950, quark matter model and quantum chromodynamics – a theory of strong interactions connecting quarks – were perfected.
Come to that, I bag Quantum Chromodynamics in Mongolian for the title of my forthcoming bestselling novel. There will be yurts. There will be bolgosons.
Could you elaborate on what you consider code-switching?
This is the second time I’ve been challenged on this. JC linked to a good example of why the difference is not hard and fast.
So let me just say that it’s an impressionistic feeling on my part. When many, especially older, Japanese use a foreign word, they’ve all too often picked it up from some kind of reading. They can’t necessarily speak English with any great degree of fluency and their pronunciation is often quite poor, but they will throw in English words seemingly as a badge of learning or prestige. Needless to say not all Japanese are like this; many are quite good at English and their use of English shows a good level of familiarity. Nevertheless, my overall impression is that when Japanese use English words they are not necessarily ‘switching to a second language’; they are simply peppering their speech with English words.
Filipinos seem to be different. They are used to switching between two languages (Tagalog and English, or their own native language and English) as part of their linguistic culture. They don’t simply throw in words; they switch between speaking English and Tagalog on the level of sub-sentences, sentences, and sometimes whole stretches of speech. If it’s easier to use an English word they will use the English word, spoken as an English word (though obviously with a Philippine accent). Their speech can often become an intermingling of two different languages. That’s why it’s called “code-switching”, not “throwing in a foreign word or two”.
As JC pointed out, the borderline may be hard to define, especially when only a word or two is involved, but there seems to me to be a fairly fundamental difference between the two. I’ve code-switched with some Japanese people I know in China — Japanese being their native language and their Chinese being very good — and it’s certainly not the same as throwing in a Chinese word or two.
The following news article from a Tagalog-language newspaper is fairly typical of what happens with code-switching, even in writing. There are individual words as well as whole sentences in English. The main concession that this newspaper makes, which I suspect does not happen in more highbrow papers, is that English quotes are translated into Tagalog.
MANILA, Philippines — Itinanggi ni Public Attorney’s Office chief Persida Rueda-Acosta na kasalanan niya ang measles outbreak na itinuturo ng mga Health officials sa takot na nilikha ng pagkakaso niya kaugnay ng Dengvaxia.
Sa pagkakataong ito, itinuro naman ni Acosta ang Department of Health para sa diumano’y kabiguan nilang ikampanya ang measles immunization.
“How can we be responsible for the measles problem today? It is the mandate of the DOH to campaign for proven immunization. We’re not against any tested vaccination. Our only concern here is Dengvaxia,” sabi ni Acosta sa PAO National Convention sa Manila Hotel.
(Paano kami magiging responsable para sa problema sa tigdas ngayon? Mandato ng DOH na ikampanya yung mga napatunayan nang bakuna. Hindi kami tutol sa mabisang vaccination. Ang problema lang namin ay Dengvaxia.)
Ito ang naging tugon ni Acosta sa mga ulat na lumikha ng vaccine scare ang PAO, dahilan para ‘di kumuha ng mga bakuna ang publiko.
Sinabi ng ilang doktor napababa ni Acosta ang tiwala ng taumbayan sa mga bakuna dahil sa mga ‘di pa napatutunayang salaysalay tungkol sa Dengvaxia.
Mula sa dating 93 porsyento noong 2015, bumulusok daw ang vaccine confidence patungo sa 32 noong 2018.
Ayon naman kay DOH Undersecretary Eric Domingo, bagama’t may kinalaman ang Dengvaxia sa pagbaba ng immunization rate, may mga iba pa raw na mga factors kung bakit bumagsak ang mga numero.
Umapela naman si Health Secretary Francisco Duque III na ipaghiwalay ang isyu ng Dengvaxia sa gamot sa tigdas.
Dati nang sinabi ni Duque na humingi sila ng tulong noon sa PAO kaugnay ng Dengvaxia controversy ngunit tumagi raw ito.
Giit ni Acosta, ‘di tamanang isisi ito sa PAO dahil hindi naman trabao ng kanilang tanggapan ang pag-eendoso at pagbibigay ng gamot.
“We did not cause that. We are not the ones who administered the mass vaccination,” sabi ng abogada.
(Hindi kami ang may gawa niyan. Hindi kami ang nagbibigay ng malakihang pagpapabakuna.)
“Those getting measles now should have been vaccinated in 2015, 2016 or 2017. Why wasn’t there a better campaign by the DOH for it and why didn’t they go house-to-house?”
(Yung mga nakakuha ng tigas dapat nabakunahan na noong 201, 2016, o 2017 pa lang. Bakit hindi mas maayos ang kampanya ng DOH para rito at bakit hindi sila nagbahay-bahay?)
Nanindigan si Acosta na walang kinalaman ang tigdas sa pagkakaso niya sa mga diumano’y namatay sa tukok ng Dengvaxia.
“We did not create the scare. It was Sanofi who organized a press conference on Nov. 29, 2017, saying that Dengvaxia cannot be administered to those without history of the disease. The vaccine was already given. So did PAO create the scare?”
(Hindi kami ang lumikha ng takot. Sanofi ang nag-organisa ng press conference noong ika-29 ng Nobyembre 2017 nang aminin nilang hindi pwedeng ibigay ang Dengvaxia sa mga hindi pa nakakukuha ng dengue. Ibinigay na ang bakuna. So sino ang tinakot ng PAO?)
Dagdag ng PAO chief, hindi sila naglunsad ng kampanya laban sa measles immunization.
DOJ kinampihan si Acosta
Sinang-ayunan naman ni Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra si Acosta at sinabing hindi siya ang dapat sisihin ukol dito.
Nanindigan si Guevara na ginagawa lang ng PAO ang kanilang trabaho. Inatasan daw kasi sila ng departamento na maglunsad ng fact-finding investigation at asikasuhin ang mga kaso sa Dengvaxia controversy.
“PAO chief Acosta is just doing her job and certainly does not intend to scare the public about the possible negative effects of vaccination in general,” wika ni Guevarra sa text.
(Ginagawa lang ni PAO chief Acosta ang tungkulin niya at ‘di niya layong takutin ang publiko sa posibleng masamang epekto ng bakuna sa pangkalahatan.)
Pagbabahagi niya, masosolusyunan ito ng mas agresibong information drive tungkol sa mga bakuna.
Siniguro naman ni Guevarra na malapit nang maresolba ang mga kasong isinampa kakabit ng unang batch ng Dengvaxia cases na inihain sa DOJ.
“I have directed the Dengvaxia investigating panel to resolve the cases this month,” wika ni Guevarra.
(Inutusan ko na ang Dengvaxia investigating panel na resolbahin ang mga kaso ngayong buwan.)
t’s never going to make sense for Ghana (say) to have a medical school where Kusaal is the medium of instruction – or even Twi.
I grant that. But does it make sense for people who are not doctors to have to learn an entirely different language in order to so much as discuss their own diseases (as seen in modern scientific perspective)? Modernity isn’t confined to islands in a sea of premodern culture any more.
I don’t actually know any Tagalog, so it was hard for me to follow the article, but my favorite part is that the Tagalog for “concern” is apparently problema.
(From Spanish, presumably. There are a few other words that looks Spanish, but in most of those cases I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t English.)
But does it make sense for people who are not doctors to have to learn an entirely different language in order to so much as discuss their own diseases (as seen in modern scientific perspective)?
We kind of already have to in English – most of the disease names are Latin and/or Greek…
Speaking of Spanish influence, I find it interesting that “responsible for” is “responsable para.” Is the preposition borrowed as part of the whole phrase?
Well, it seems sa alone is too vague:
https://www.tagaloglang.com/sa/
South American Indian languages also borrow Spanish prepositions.
But does it make sense for people who are not doctors to have to learn an entirely different language in order to so much as discuss their own diseases (as seen in modern scientific perspective)?
I think to an extent this happens with English speakers. “Pseudohypoparathyroidism” (for example) is really only an English word by courtesy. Sort of a linguistic Gastarbeiter. Admittedly it’s embedded in English syntax, though.
I once made the error of volunteering to translate a Japanese medical article for a colleague. It was a highly educational experience (to which I am indebted for the discovery that the Japanese word for “eosinophil” is literally “love acid ball”, which made it all worthwhile), but it took me ages, because I hadn’t appreciated what a linguistic gulf there is between technical Japanese of the sort considered appropriate for medicalese and even quite arty modern literary style. It trails clouds of Kanbun. I would guess for Japanese speakers it’s no trivial language-learning exercise. Hatters will know.
Similar things are true of Arabic, and indeed of Welsh, even.
A relative of mine had hyponatremia. I only learnt this from the nurses.
Everyone else thought she had low sodium.
I had to look up eosinophil, too.
Wikipedia tells us that “eosinophilic” (Greek suffix -phil-, meaning loves eosin) refers to the staining of certain tissues, cells, or organelles after they have been washed with eosin, a dye. Eosin is an acidic dye; thus, the structure being stained is basic and as a corollary, is acidophilic.
The thing with Japanese, of course, is that much of the terminology is calqued from Western languages. 好酸球 kōsankyū means literally ‘like acid ball’, and is the Japanese name for “Eosinophil granulocyte”. I didn’t bother looking that one up, but I assume that a granulocyte is a “grain-like cell”…
Don’t ask me why, but the name Eosin comes from Eos, the Ancient Greek word for ‘dawn’ and the name of the Ancient Greek goddess of the dawn. We are lucky that the Japanese didn’t go one further and call the eosonophil 好曙球 kōshokyū ‘love dawn balls’.
The Chinese, by the way, is 嗜酸性粒细胞 shìsuān-xìng lì-xìbāo ‘fondness-for-acid-type grain-cell’.
While this is obviously pretty confusing for the ordinary patient, it is not particularly confusing once you know the origin of the naming, which you will if you know anything about the subject (to wit, why they are named eosonophils in the first place).
In fact this overlaps with something I was spouting about in another thread: what in the English or French linguistic ecosystems are simply different registers are in other ecologies actually separate languages by any normal criterion. I don’t think that is ipso facto necessarily a bad thing, and it seems to me that an untroubled assumption that it inevitably must be is part of the very concept of modernity I was objecting too: the sort that leads French government ministers to say pour l’unité linguistique de la France, la langue bretonne doit disparaître.
(Now that I think of it, the matter also touches on the debate about AAVE in education.)
The only sentences in English I can see are the quotes.
There are two other occurrences of para, and the explanation of sa shows it’s often doubled up with sa.
Because Eosin Y is beautifully orange (especially when dissolved in water, which isn’t shown there). Eosin B is brownish-green, though.
According to WP, Eos was the nickname of a female childhood friend of the “inventor.” But it links to the Greek Goddess, giving a source that I haven’t checked, so maybe that is actually the ultimate source.
I don’t actually know any Tagalog, so it was hard for me to follow the article, but my favorite part is that the Tagalog for “concern” is apparently problema.
In the high-tone German writings on philosophy, sociology etc that I read, problematisieren is often used in a related way, with the meaning “treat as a non-trivial topic worth investigation” as opposed to “act as if you already know all about it”. Die Frage des … is another way to say that.
The French do that too, see Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive (Überlegungen zur Judenfrage).
I think that in English we tend to say “subject/topic”, but also “question” as in “vexed question”. And “more research is needed going forward”.
From Luhmann, Die Knappheit der Zeit und die Vordringlichkeit des Befristeten:
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…
Der Appell an die Wissenschaft nimmt den Umweg des Denkens in Anspruch. Dabei läßt es sich häufig nicht vermeiden, daß über einfache, vorliegende Erfahrungen auf umständliche Weise gesprochen wird, und daß Tatbestände, die als selbstverständlich, zwangsläufig und gewiß erscheinen, zunächst verunsichert werden müssen. Die Wissenschaft verwandelt Evidenzen in Probleme. Das mag hin und wieder mutwillig geschehen. Bei gewissen Themen, und dazu zählen Fragen, die das Verhältnis der Zeit zu anderen Dimensionen menschlichen Erlebens berühren, wird jene Verfremdung notwendig, weil hier Prämissen des natürlich-lebensweltlichen Erlebens aufgehoben werden müssen. Von solcher Kritik der Prämissen des tägichen Erlebens werden wir ausgehen.
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That expression Prämissen aufheben is not that fancy Hegelian Aufhebung. Here aufheben has the normal meaning of “cancel, discontinue”.
aufheben is also “save / put aside (for a rainy day)”. In this particular case, I think Hegel merely made a mountain out of already existing molehills (I’m not an expert on the everyday meanings of aufheben around 1800). Heidegger did the same.
They took street German and ran up Mount Everest with it. Some of their followers incurred brain damage in the rarefied atmosphere up there.
This is how I learn that Evidenz 1) existed before it was used as a desperate translation of evidence and 2) meant the same as in French: l’évidence, c’est ce qui est évident.
In the sentence “Paano kami magiging responsable para sa problema sa tigdas ngayon?” the words responsable and problema are indeed borrowings from Spanish.
Para is a bit more complicated: that word too comes from Spanish but its appearance here is due to the influence of English, where the word responsible takes the preposition for (in Spanish, responsable takes the preposition de, as in ¿Quién es el responsable de esta situación? ‘Who is responsible for this situation?’).
@Stu: The OED dates “problematize” to 1910 and problematisieren only to “1935 or earlier”. I imagined that we got it from French or German, but did we invent it?
“1910
Hamlet himself is capable of being problematised to the nth.
G. Saintsbury in Cambridge Hist. English Literature vol. V. 200
And why has “the Jewish question” appeared here twice lately? I’m OFFICIALLY OFFENDED by the dog-whistle connection to C++.
All these are in any case merely cheap knockoffs of y cwestiwn Cymreig.
@JF: when I first read your link, I was suspecting a joke or a hoax. But no, it’s real. People are crazy.
(The elephant joke, for example. was told by Jews, about Jews, with no antisemites in mind.)
I’d have taken it for a deliberate ironic shoutout kind of thing; not in any way offensive (or, at least, not any more than the “…Considered Harmful” alternative proposed in the Slashdot comments would have been). I’m surprised that this title actually offended anyone.
I wonder how much the author’s insistence that 1) it was all a huge coincidence, and 2) changing the name would pervert the intention of the paper, was actually a detriment to the result. From the first-person report [linked by Y] I had the impression that he was also offended by the apparently-accidental shoutout but was unable to find an alternative phrasing that he didn’t think was even worse.
[As a side-note, TIL that Slashdot still exists in 2024. I don’t think I’ve thought of it in ages.]
The Race Problem
Perfect. Don’t forget to click on the red button to see the aftercomic.
Not to be outdone, the Scots have the West Lothian question.
I fondly remember West Lothian as a great place for recessively-inherited eye conditions.* I don’t think that is what was exercising oor Tam, though.
* Myself, I benefit from hybrid vigour. And I took a wife from distant Aberdeen, so that my children have as genetically diverse a makeup as can well be imagined.
Westlothiana.
(Currently being redescribed; lots of surprises have been presented or hinted at in recent conference presentations.)
Sadly, since those pioneering days, evolution has fallen somewhat behind in West Lothian.
lots of surprises
You mean (gasp!) even this claim might come under question
@Jerry: the dog-whistle connection to C++
A commenter there claims the scandalmonger is whistling Dixie:
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I know being an idiot is very popular here, but that did not happen.
I doubt you will wind your neck in, but fun fact, WG21 doesn’t have any power to expel someone from the committee, because that’s how ISO rules work. This means that something else must have happened, but whatever you want to rag on SJW and people want to chime in and keep bleating “SJW SJW” in response.
Fact is it cannot have happened the way a lot of people clearly think it happened.
Also he was being an edgelord and dickhead who fucked around a lot (the stupidly titled paper was AI generated crap, this was apparently not the first time) and [was] finally found out. I kind of doubt people in WG21 were sad to see him go.
#
I learn there that now “whitelists” must be called “allowlists”.
And that the old IT terminology “master/slave” must be replaced by something else. I didn’t know there were so many dicktatorial devots infesting the realms of discourse.
How has it come to pass that a few reasonable criticisms of word use have turned into stormy seas of outrage ? It’s not just Slashdot.
Has righteousness become the crack of the people ?
must be = has been: In June of 2020, the organization behind GitHub (an interface to a version control system) chose to change the default name of the initial ‘branch’ in a new repository to main. It used to be master. I don’t often create new repositories myself, but seemingly there are organizations out there that had to expend non-trivial effort to adapt their automatic processes to the change. (People on the sidelines will claim that it would only be a problem if they didn’t program by copy-paste — there should only be one file in the system with the commands to create a repository. They could also read the fine manual to set the default back. Don’t @ me. Also
github.comchose to feed all the public repositories they host to an AI, so they are not universally seen as being good guys any more).When will they go for Invictus ?
I am the main of my fate:
I am the leader of my soul.
I tremble lest Binary Citizen Life replace Madam Life.
Anyway Github is owned by Microsoft, and that’s opprobrious enough for many people.
Binary Citizen Life
Actually, I think that has possibilities …
An impeccably left-wing colleague of mine (whose wife is Sudanese, incidentally) with the responsibility of arranging the training for undergraduates at the medical school was under some pressure (from the students, not the administration) to schedule teaching on “microaggressions.” He opined that an aspiring doctor who couldn’t cope with microaggressions might find some of the other stresses attendant on medical practice overwhelming, and suggested that they might have made an inappropriate career choice. (He also proposed that I might give the troops a lecture on my experiences in West Africa, but, probably fortunately, this never came to pass.I don’t think that he was floating the idea as a deliberate provocation …)
I don’t think that he was floating the idea as a deliberate provocation …
Thus brushing that microaggression aside.
I find it difficult to remain calm when confronted with impertinence, even of the microaggressive kind. I figure I have to set people straight before they get the idea, if I don’t take the bait, that I am a pushover.
Now if I were a duke, I could rely on my status. As things are, I have only myself to rely on. Thd best I usually can do is to respond with a microaggression- which is difficult since I am a macro kind of guy.
ETA: I see PP appears to share my sentiments.
@de
As you may have observed, I favour the macroaggressions. Keeps everything out in the open. Was the teaching intended to show medical students how best to express microaggressions? How to make such expression more effective? How to avoid or promote the escalation to macroaggression? How to kill without leaving a trace?
How to kill without leaving a trace?
Nah, that one is already on the core curriculum.
I perhaps ought to clarify that what our students were exercised about was “microaggressions” from colleagues rather than mere patients (whose opinions are naturally of little account to any sensible doctor.)
I’m not totally unsympathetic: just as you don’t know if your society is antisemitic unless you ask a Jew, most aboriginal-looking Brits have little idea of the constant wearing drizzle of discourtesy faced by people who don’t look so pasty. Unfortunately, “microaggression” is one of those regrettable words that takes a real thing and gives it a misleadingly loaded name for ideological reasons. Everyone loses …
When I was departmental head, I quite often had to calm staff who had faced actual racist abuse from patients. (Nurses get it much worse than we do; even the most ignorant Faragist generally feels it’s a bad idea to piss off the doctor during an actual consultation.)
Interestingly, it was mostly staff who “looked Muslim” rather than staff who looked African who were the commonest targets. Same as how Americans have progressed from regarding Catholics as depraved racially inferior overbreeding fifth-columnists to attributing the same characteristics to Muslims.
What are even the genetics of the pasty dough-people I saw at my local ASDA? Some sort of picts living under rocks for the last 3k years? Coal miners? They didn’t shop at Waitrose, that’s for sure, those people looked like they actually saw the sun on occasion. (Probably when playing tennis).
(Our local chapter of Xenophobes International opined a few years ago that it would be hard to trust your treatment plan if your consultant had a full beard. To which they assumed their constituents would instinctively add a turban and a subcontinental accent).
Indeed. My own full beard is meant as a statement of solidarity with my Ottoman and Mogul colleagues. (Just as my rhotic speech is intended as a provocation to all true Englishmen.) This is all standard for us Extreme Radical Socialists. Bwahahaha!
I got good enough at playing Xenophobe that I could continue essentially forever. It’s too bad it was released not quite finished.
@Stu: I didn’t accept Andrew Tomazos’s account as the absolute truth, and I don’t accept everything in that comment as the absolute truth either, though the only thing in it I disagree with is that the paper was stupidly titled. All that interested me in this story was the statement that some people considered the title offensive, and in my brief time looking at this flap, I haven’t seen anyone deny that.
By the way, I found out about this from a post at alt.usage.english titled “The question Question”, but I think it should be “the ‘the question’ question”. One might go on to “The ‘the FOO question’ question”, but that would be almost pedantic.
too bad it was released not quite finished
There’s a lot of funding going into development though, so we may well see Xenophobe 2.0 quite soon now.
I don’t think “was” was intended; it looks like an instance of FAFO, i.e. fuck around and find out “actions have consequences”.
I agree.
it looks like an instance of FAFO, i.e. fuck around and find out “actions have consequences”.
TIL FAFO. You guys are so with-it it makes me quite giddy.
By his own admission, this man has taught C++. Surely nothing more needs to be said?
The notion of “looked Muslim” is … perhaps not incoherent, but contextual. In the U.S. context this would mean looks Arab-or-possibly-Iranian* but I take it in the U.K. context it’s more likely to mean “looks Pakistani-or-possibly-Bangladeshi.” That Muslims are a decided numerical minority among the last sixty years of South-Asian-origin immigrants to the U.S. but the ratios may be otherwise in the U.K. is presumably relevant here.
*I once represented an Albanian-American fellow who thought that the NYC public school system had behaved badly toward his children because of bigotry, and one problem we had was that the alleged instances of bigotry had an anti-Islamic flavor and indeed most Albanian-Americans in NYC (not all)** are Muslim as this fellow and his family were, but under the specific federal statute that he was suing under, discrimination on the basis of ethnicity (“national origin”) was banned but religious discrimination wasn’t.***
**There’s a lovely Albanian Orthodox church I’ve visited that’s out in Queens a few blocks away from Donald Trump’s childhood home, although the parish did not relocate there until Trump was grown and out of the neighborhood as their prior location in what was becoming one of the sleaziest parts of Manhattan grew untenable.
***It is entirely sensible not to ban religious discrimination by private schools operating under religious auspices but as far as I can tell it was something of a glitch or Congressional oversight that public schools (for purposes of one specific federal statute that lets students-or-their-adult-guardians sue them in federal court, which is not the only law they should of course be concerned about complying with) are likewise not barred from religious discrimination.
In the mind of a Faragist (they tend not to be the sharpest knives in the box) anybody brownish but not too dark, and with straight hair, is a Muslim. My scare quotes were in honour of the intellectual impairment characteristic of Faragerotes.
In practice it was my Egyptian colleagues and our Libyan who got most of the abuse, and to a lesser extent Indians (none of whom were in fact Muslims; one, in fact, being Christian.) On the other hand, the Zimbabwean-descended colleague (who grew up in Scotland, and sounds like it) and the Sudanese (who is in fact Muslim, but doesn’t look like “an Arab” to these people) got less tsuris.
To be fair to the bigoted moron community, the UK public in general tend to be unclear on the finer dustinctions among Foreigners.
My impression is that the prejudice against “blacks” characteristic of Enoch Powell’s day is going the way of bigotry against the Irish and becoming old hat in UK bigoted-moron circles. Other targets have been found.
I’m agin religiously-segregated schools myself, for a whole lot of reasons both theoretical-religious and practical, but reluctantly agree that they should be legal. (My own school in Glasgow was in practice Presbyterian, though you could be Jewish as a special treat. I knew no Catholics at all. That was not a result of any settled policy, though. It reflected the divided demographics of the city.)
When speaking of foreigners, you may consider referring to one as an outlandisher; an obsolete word, yet (Wiktionary taught me) an anagram of Etaoin Shrdlu (q.v.)
anybody brownish but not too dark, and with straight hair, is a Muslim. So does the Duchess of Sussex break their little minds? (A guy is allowed to hope innit).
Sure does. Unfortunately, breaking their minds makes no difference to their observable behaviour, which raises interesting philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness. Are Faragists philosophical zombies?
The Daily Vile, as part of its campaign to get its pithecanthropine readers* to hate the Duchess, was very keen on informing her that she was not, in fact, experiencing racism. Fascists are very into False Consciousness these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
Seems to me that they ought to be making up their own political fables, rather than stealing them from good honest Marxists.
* They have bicameral minds; one of the camerae is what, I believe, Americans call the “restroom.”
In the U.S. context the sort of state-sponsored-and-funded sectarian schools that are reasonably common in certain parts of the former British Empire do not exist and are outside the pale conceptually, because of different histories etc. But one common thing a wide variety of religious communities do in the U.S. is to operate their own private schools. Such schools take a very wide variety of approaches (driven by both theological factors and pragmatic factors) toward how open or not-open they are to children outside the religious community that runs the school. There are lots of things that are legally discriminatory other than absolute exclusion. For example, my older kids attended a nursery school run by the Presbyterian church that’s more or less around the block from our house. It gives (or at least gave back then) preference in admissions to children of families belonging to the congregation, so if you’re not a member of the congregation (as we were not) you need to see if they’ve got enough room left over in the year you are applying to take your child, although even then there are priorities like a preference for younger siblings of non-Presbyterian children already enrolled. That may seem perfectly sensible-to-benign but it is discriminatory but not (under current U.S. federal law) illegally so.
So if I’m consciously taking advantage of the system, does that make my consciousness less false? Or just make me bourgeois/a running dog? (*bark*)
Looking back to the actual post:
that urban and written language is subject to contaminating, artificial influences, and of secondary interest, if of any interest at al
I don’t think the idea that rural speech is authentic and Cityspeak is debased is exclusively from Herder and Schleicher by any means.
The supposed purity of Bedouin speech is a trope that goes way back in Arabic, for example.
And speakers of Toende Kusaal regard their own dialect as purer than the Agolle speech of the great metropolis of Bawku, actually stating that this impurity is due to the influence of all that Bisa and Mooré and Hausa they speak around there. (They’re not wrong about Mooré and Hausa influence on Agolle Kusaal: what they are wrong about is supposing that this hasn’t affected their own speech to pretty much the exact same degree, though not always in the case of the same words or constructions.)
The Big Bad City where people don’t even talk proper on account of all them furriners is a very old theme; the more durable as it’s not totally unfounded.
The discovery that how languages mutually interact and influence one another is itself interesting and can be studied systematically long postdates Herder and Schleicher, and it’s hardly their fault that they didn’t know about it. Moreover, the Neogrammarian approach is actually a logical prerequisite to studying language contact scientifically: you need it for alerting you to the fact that a word or construction may not have been simply inherited and calls for a different explanation.
Doing it properly is even more challenging than doing historical linguistics properly, too. You need to have knowledge of more languages, and all kinds of new complex methodological issues arise. You are also less likely to be able to arrive at reasonably certain conclusions, even after you’ve put all that work in.
“I’d never let my kid study in Ur — he’d pick up all kinds of Akkadian words. Let him stay on the farm and learn pure Sumerian!”
False consciousness
The article quotes part of an 1870 letter from Marx to two people in New York:
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This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.
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But as far as I can find out, the first “comic” in an American newspaper appeared around 1890. So what was Marx referring to with “comic papers” ? I get the impression that the letter was originally in German. I found this German version in the Marxists Internet Archive:
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Dieser Antagonismus wird künstlich wachgehalten und gesteigert durch die Presse, die Kanzel, die Witzblätter, kurz, alle den herrschenden Klassen zu Gebot stehenden Mittel.
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So I had assumed, for no good reason, that Marx (or a translator) was referring to American “comic papers”. But what could he have been referring to in Europe as Witzblätter ? Simplicissimus, say, started life only in 1896.
There were lots of satirical publications around since the mid 1800s (and even the 1600s, as I vaguely recall) in England (1841 Punch), France (from the 1850s Doré) and (maybe?) Germany. It’s a bit strange to call them “comic papers” in translation, as if they were in the same league with Our Boarding House (1921) and Major Hoople.
The Big Bad City where people don’t even talk proper on account of all them furriners is a very old theme
Cicero (Brutus 258, here, Englished here) complained about that very thing.
I bet Witzblatt just meant “comically bad newspaper”, the same as Revolverblatt and Käseblatt.
After all, Witz means specifically “joke” at least nowadays; it does not encompass satire/parody.
Maybe, maybe not. Witzblatt in that sense doesn’t fit in the sequence die Presse, die Kanzel, die Witzblätter. I don’t see how a “comically bad newspaper” could be ein den herrschenden Klassen zu Gebot stehendes Mittel in those days – not in the same way as die Presse, die Kanzel. I take Marx as being serious here, not suddenly snarky for the duration of a single word.
In today’s post-modern whirligig, everything can be turned on its head: any newspaper, even a comically bad one, can be demonstrated to be a tool of the ruling classes. The ruling classes have gotten smarter and more devious than they used to be. Just as have those who interpret their behavior. All of this courtesy of diamat, which works on the goodies and the baddies.
“Bild ist CDU.” Austria’s Kronen Zeitung (with its preorthographic space in the middle) used to be all in for the FPÖ almost all the time.
And Faux Noise…
By mentioning them separately, he may just be emphasizing they aren’t worthy of being classified as newspapers.
By mentioning them separately, he may just be emphasizing they aren’t worthy of being classified as newspapers
Right, they’re not covered under “the press” in his view – the “serious” press. But satire can have serious effects.
1908 poster: Der Simplicissimus ist das einzige in Preussen bahnpolizeilich verbotene große Witzblatt
Hermann Hesse und das «Witzblatt»:
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«Es sind Deppen», schreibt Hermann Hesse im Jahr 1926. Mit diesem Ausdruck bedenkt der spätere Nobelpreisträger für Literatur die Redaktion der Münchner Satirezeitschrift «Simplicissimus» , deren Name ja nichts anderes als einen Deppen im Superlativ nahelegt.
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I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
« Je suis maître de moi comme de l’univers », Cinna, V, 3.
Oh, interesting.
gro[ss]e Witzblatt
The poster is from 1908 with “ss”. In the print-letter caption I copied from the link, somebody has replaced “ss” by “ß”. A luta continua!
Does that mean that you couldn’t read it on the train? Or sell it at the stations?
Probably both.
Or neither. It might be a Witzplakat about a Witzblatt.
Y’s question made me ask myself: what justifies my assumption that it applied only to the sale of the paper ? That is what I had assumed. No other possibility had occurred to me – but then I hadn’t tried hard to think of another.
Trying harder this time, it occurred to me that a formally legit answer to “which of these interpretations are true” is “none of them”, since the whole thing may be satire.
If not a joke, it might also be something like sending it by railway packet, which would fall in the purview of the Bahnpolizei. More efficient to impound 1000 copies at a time, and they don’t talk back.
Why a joke? Simplicissimus at the time was notorious for getting banned in Prussia.
Do you know something concrete about it being banned by the Bahnpolizei in particular ? This may be the humorous aspect, having the effect of “banned in Bottrop”. That Simpl was seen as a problem by the Prussian authorities is well-known.
At any rate, I linked to the poster only because Witzblatt appears in it. I offer it as evidence against the idea that at that time (only 40 years after the Marx letter) the word had “comically bad newspaper” as primary meaning.
Of course Witz- can provide that meaning in various degrees, as in Witzfigur, Witzbold.
AFAIK (I am not a lawyer, and early 20th century German law could be very weird) a ban would be issued by a Staatsanwalt, and it would have been the task of the police (including the Bahnpolizei) to implement it. The Bahnpolizei would have been responsible for implementing it in their jurisdiction: confiscating all copies of the issue in question sold by newsagents in train stations, and confiscating all copies being imported by train. The number of copies imported to Prussia by other means than trains was probably negligible; that’s probably why the Bahnpolizei played an important part in implementing the ban of an issue of Simplizissimus.
As for Witzblatt as used by Marx, for me it means nothing else than “a newspaper/journal that cannot be taken serious”, i.e. one that disagreed with Marx’s views (even fellow radical socialists like Bakunin complained about Marx’s intolerance).
Then what did die Presse refer to? Were there papers that could be taken seriously because they agreed with his views or came close?
Ah, I didn’t know that. So by definition it’s not common knowledge any more. Stu wasn’t sure either…
even fellow radical socialists like Bakunin complained about Marx’s intolerance
See Bakunin’s remarks on the subject edited by TJ Kenafick under the title “Marx, the Bismarck of Socialism.”
I think any fair-minded observer would note a much wider latitude of tolerated-in-practice political-etc. opinions in actually-existing Bismarckian states when compared to actually-existing Marxist states, although neither was hospitable to not-very-radical purported democratic socialists.
Marx, the Bismarck Squared of Socialism.